Chapter 148 CHAPTER 149: The Altered Records

Chapter 148 CHAPTER 149: The Altered Records


COLE'S POV

"You need to stop, Cole. You look like a ghost."

Kai was standing in my doorway with a bottle of water in one hand and a look on his face that sat somewhere between concern and frustration. He tossed the water onto my desk. It landed between two stacks of printed documents and almost knocked over my cold cup of coffee.

"I'll stop when I find what I'm looking for," I muttered, not looking up from the screen. My eyes burned from staring at this laptop for six straight hours. The blue light felt like it was carving grooves into my retinas. But every time I thought about closing the lid, something pulled me back in.

The old wolf's words from the diner had been sitting in my brain like a splinter I couldn't reach. Stop searching before somebody notices what you are doing. That warning was supposed to scare me off. Instead, it did the opposite. Because people don't threaten you over nothing. People don't shake and sweat and beg you to walk away unless the thing you're walking toward is real.

"You haven't slept properly in three days," Kai pressed, pulling up a chair and sitting down beside me. "Your eyes are bloodshot. You missed hockey conditioning this morning. Coach is going to rip your head off."

"Coach can wait."

"Cole."

"I said Coach can wait, Kai." I finally looked at him. He must have seen something in my face because he stopped arguing and leaned forward instead, resting his elbows on his knees.

"Alright. Fine. Then show me what you've got. Show me why you're killing yourself over this."

I turned the laptop so he could see the screen. "Every free moment I've had this week, I've spent pulling records. Contacting old pack members through back channels. Comparing registration files from different years, different regions, different archives. I thought I'd eventually hit a wall. Something that would tell me I was wrong, that Aria really is just an omega with no wolf and no special background."

"And?"

"The wall never came. The more I search, the stranger things get. It's becoming impossible to believe the simple version anymore."

Kai rubbed the back of his neck, staring at the glowing screen. "What are you finding?"

I pulled up a digital scan of a birth registry from fifteen years ago and pointed at the middle section. "Look at this page. Tell me what you see."

Kai squinted, leaning closer. "Names. Dates. Standard pack registration stuff."

"Now look at line forty seven."

He scanned down the page. His eyebrows pulled together slowly. "It's blank."

"Exactly. Now look at lines fifty two through fifty eight."

"Also blank. Or no, wait." He tilted his head, reading more carefully. "The formatting is different. The font spacing is off. Like someone removed the original text and reformatted the page to cover the gap."

"Now look at the date stamps in the left margin."

Kai went quiet for a few seconds. Then his jaw tightened. "Some of these dates don't match the header. This section says March, but the margin stamps say June."

"Because someone changed them. Several documents from around the time Aria was born look wrong, Kai. Names missing. Dates altered. Entire sections removed and replaced with blank lines. And it's not just one file. I found the same pattern in four separate registries from different offices."

"You think it's bad record keeping?"

"I thought that at first. One sloppy file, maybe. Two, sure. But the same exact pattern four times? The same months erased? The same family designation codes removed? No. Someone did this on purpose. Someone walked into those archives and systematically cut out every trace of a specific group of people."

"Who would do that? And why? These records are fifteen years old. Nobody cares about old birth registries."

"Somebody does. Somebody cared enough to spend serious time and resources making sure this information disappeared. Whoever did it had high level clearance too. These aren't public files, Kai. You need pack council authorization to even access them. We're talking about someone with real power."

Kai sat back in his chair, crossing his arms. The playful energy he usually carried was completely gone. He looked exactly the way I felt. Heavy. Worried. Angry about things we didn't fully understand yet.

"There's something else," I continued, opening a separate document on my screen. "I started keeping a list of recurring names. Every time I hit a dead end, every time a trail goes cold or a record cuts off mid page, I write down what was there before the gap. And the same name keeps showing up."

"What name?"

"Valerie Vance."

Kai's eyes widened slightly. Recognition flashed across his face. "That name again. Where did it show up this time?"

"Everywhere. Old reports. Forgotten notes buried inside administrative files. Records connected to pack elders who retired or disappeared around the same period. Financial transfers routed through shell accounts that trace back to properties registered under that name. I found it seven times this week alone, Kai. Seven. In documents from three different territories."

"Do you know who she is?"

"No. And that's what's driving me crazy. I can't find a photo. I can't find a current address. I can't find a death record. It's like she exists only in the margins of other people's paperwork. But I'm starting to believe this name is the key to everything. If I can figure out who Valerie Vance is and how she connects to Aria, I think the whole picture opens up."

"What makes you so sure she connects to Aria at all?"

I looked at him. "Because Aria found the same name on a document hidden inside her mother's storage trunk. A document with Aria's own name printed at the top. That's not coincidence, Kai. That's a thread, and it leads somewhere."

Kai let out a heavy breath, running both hands through his dark hair. He stood up and paced across my room, his footsteps slow and deliberate on the hardwood floor. I could see him processing, turning the information over in his mind the way he turned plays over during hockey strategy meetings.

"Okay," he finally spoke, turning back to face me. "So someone altered records. Someone erased a family. And this Valerie Vance is connected to both the erased family and to Aria. What does that tell us?"

"That Aria's past isn't what anyone told her it was. That her mother has been lying to her. That the reason she doesn't have a wolf might not be because she's defective or unlucky, but because someone deliberately hid who she really is."

The words hung between us. Kai stared at me, and I saw something shift behind his eyes. Not surprise. Something closer to fear. The kind of fear that comes from realizing the ground you've been standing on isn't solid.

"Is that all?" Kai asked quietly.

"No." My voice dropped lower. "That's not the worst part."

I clicked on the access log history at the bottom of the archive page. A list of IP addresses appeared, each one stamped with a date and time.

"Look at the timestamp at the bottom."

Kai walked back over and leaned down to read the screen. His body went rigid. "An external IP address accessed these exact files yesterday."

"Yesterday, Kai. While I was sleeping. While we were sitting at dinner pretending everything was fine. Someone else was in these same archives, looking at these same records, searching for the same information."

"Could it be Zane?"

"No. Zane uses a different proxy server. I've verified his digital footprint. This is someone else entirely. Someone with high level clearance who knows exactly which files to look for. They didn't browse. They didn't search randomly. They went straight to the same pages I've been studying, which means they already knew what was there."

The room went silent except for the low hum of my laptop fan. The shadows on the walls seemed deeper than before. Darker. Closer.

"So we're not the only ones looking," Kai whispered.

"We were never the only ones looking. We just didn't know it until now."

Kai pressed his fist against his mouth, his eyes fixed on the floor. I could see the gears turning. The calculations running. The same terrible arithmetic I had been doing all week, adding up threats and subtracting time and coming up with numbers that never looked good.

"What do we do?" he asked.

"We keep digging. Faster. Before whoever else is out there gets to the answer first."

"And Aria?"

"We can't tell her yet. Not until we know what we're telling her."

"She's going to hate us for that."

"I know." My chest ached when I said it. A deep, bruising ache that sat right behind my ribs and wouldn't let go. "But I'd rather she hate me alive than trust me dead."

Kai didn't argue. He just nodded once, slowly, and walked out of my room without another word. The door clicked shut behind him.

I turned back to my laptop. The access log glowed on the screen, that foreign IP address sitting at the bottom like a signature left on purpose.

Whatever secret surrounded Aria, other people were hunting for it as well. And they were close. Closer than I wanted to believe. Closer than I was ready for.

The race was already on. I just hadn't realized I was running it.