Chapter 22: The Hidden Truth

Sierra

I don’t plan to snoop.

That’s the lie I tell myself as I finish my duties early, my hands still faintly smelling of soap and iron, my pulse ticking too fast for the quiet corridors I slip into. I tell myself I’m just restless. That I need to move. That if I sit alone with my thoughts any longer, I’ll shatter.

But the truth is sharper.

I need answers.

Lena’s warning echoes in my head. Removed. Unacceptable. Liability. Mara’s words echo, too. He’s not his father.

Both can be true. That’s the problem.

I follow a passage I’ve only glimpsed in passing, tucked beyond the wings where we work. The walls are bare, the floor less worn, the air stale with disuse. This part of the estate feels forgotten—not sealed, just ignored.

My footsteps are silent. My heart is not. I pause at a door marked with a faded sigil—Draven. Beneath it, smaller, nearly worn away: Records.

The handle is cool under my fingers.

Inside, the room is dim and narrow, lit by a single high window. Shelves stretch from floor to ceiling, packed with ledgers, scrolls, and bound volumes. The smell hits me all at once—ink, parchment, age. History. I close the door behind me and exhale.

I’m following a feeling I’ve been trying to ignore—an insistence that there’s truth buried somewhere in this place, something tied to my family and the way fear has been shadowing me since the night Kaelen found me in the forest.

I run my fingers along the spines until one catches—a ledger thicker than the rest, its binding cracked, its title faded: Territorial Disputes. Eastern and Peripheral Regions.

My breath catches. I pull the hefty ledger free and carry it to the narrow table beneath the window, lowering myself into the chair. Dust blooms faintly, an indicator of the inattention given to this room.

The first pages are dense with cramped handwriting and unfamiliar names. Dates march down the margins in precise columns: Borders, Disputes, Supply Routes. Everything is recorded with the kind of meticulous attention that makes my skin prickle.

I skim at first, my eyes sliding over terms that don’t yet mean anything to me. Peripheral packs. Contested ground. Resource denial. Words chosen to sound neutral, bloodless, reasonable. The kind of language men use when they want violence to look like policy.

Then I see it: LARK.

My gaze snaps back, my heart lurching hard enough that I have to brace my hand against the table. The word sits there like it belongs, like it was always meant to be part of this ledger. I read the line again, slower this time, and then the one beneath it.

And the one beneath that.

My breathing turns shallow as I follow the entries forward through the years, the pattern slowly revealing itself. Not a single attack. Not a decisive battle. Instead, a long, grinding pressure—territories narrowed, allies cut off, supply lines disrupted under the guise of “border enforcement.”

I turn the page, my fingers clumsy now. There are notes in the margins–observations, assessments. My father’s name appears more than once, always accompanied by words like defiant and uncooperative, words used to describe wolves who refuse to bow.

A folded report slips loose as I turn another page and lands half-open on the table. I recognize the handwriting before I read a single word. My throat tightens as I unfold it fully.

It’s an assessment. It outlines my father’s refusal to comply with Draven demands, his insistence on autonomy, his unwillingness to “integrate under Draven oversight.” It frames his resistance as instability. As risk.

As justification.

I stare at the ink until the words blur, forcing myself to read them again, slower, absorbing every line. This wasn’t retaliation. It wasn’t provoked rage or an ancient feud flaring back to life.

It was strategy.

They isolated us. Waited. Watched as our numbers dwindled, as desperation crept in. They let time do the work for them, tightening the snare year by year until collapse was inevitable.

My chest aches with the weight of it.

At the bottom of the report is a signature, clean and unmistakable.

Darian Draven.

I sit back in the chair, the realization spreading through me like poison. This wasn’t a secret kept from history. It was history—written by the victors, preserved carefully in ink and parchment while my pack scattered and bled and vanished.

My parents didn’t lose everything in one night.

They were dismantled.

And suddenly, so many things make sense it hurts–the fear that never left my father’s eyes, the way my mother flinched at unfamiliar scents, the urgency with which they hid me, even from myself.

They weren’t hiding from the past. They were hiding from the future the Dravens were still shaping.

I close the ledger slowly, my hands trembling now despite my effort to steady them. The room feels colder than it did when I entered, the stone walls less like shelter and more like a tomb. Kaelen’s face rises unbidden in my mind—his quiet restraint, the frustration in his voice when he spoke of duty, the way he looked at me like I mattered in ways he couldn’t explain.

And not for the first time, I don’t know what to do with the bond humming in my blood.

Kaelen didn’t write these pages, but he was raised in their shadow. He is the heir to the man who signed my pack’s death warrant with elegant, measured strokes of a pen. And no matter how different he feels, how sincere his doubts seem, the truth remains etched into these records.

Love doesn’t erase history. And blood remembers.

I leave the records room quietly, slipping back into the estate’s veins before anyone notices my absence. The corridors feel narrower now. The walls closer. Like the mansion itself is watching me recalibrate.

Every Draven sigil I pass feels like a threat. Every memory of Kaelen feels like a lie. By the time I reach my room, my thoughts are a storm.

I sit on the edge of the bed and stare at my hands—hands that once ran through pine needles and fur, hands that belong to a pack that no longer exists.

Or does it?

Remnants. The word surfaces, sharp and insistent.

If they hunted us, some must have escaped. Wolves scatter when they’re wounded; they hide and learn to adapt.

And the Dravens are still watching for them….

They are watching, stalking, hunting for any sign that remnants from my pack survived.

The knowledge and realization of all of this settles heavy in my chest. Everything I’ve known about this place and my role within it doesn’t come close to the reality; I’m not just a servant in their halls, I’m a reminder of unfinished violence–a living thread that could lead them straight back to what they tried to erase.

And Kaelen stands directly in the center of that danger.