Chapter 206 The Last Entry

Chapter 206 The Last Entry
Part One
The house had fallen quiet.
Sage had gone to bed nearly an hour earlier after reminding Piper not to stay up too late. Piper had smiled, promised she wouldn’t, then waited until she heard her mother’s bedroom door close before returning to the living room.
Rain tapped gently against the windows, A single lamp cast a warm pool of light across the coffee table, leaving the rest of the room wrapped in comfortable shadows.
Irene’s journal rested in front of Piper.
She didn’t reach for it immediately.
Instead, she sat motionless on the sofa, her eyes fixed on the worn leather cover as if it might reveal something without being opened. 
If Irene had uncovered something before she disappeared, and now Cecil had suddenly vanished as well, then the journal in front of her might be the only thread connecting them.
Slowly, she reached toward the bookshelf beside the sofa and pulled out a notebook along with a pen. She placed both on the coffee table, opened the notebook to the first blank page, and hesitated for a moment before lowering the pen.
Then she wrote a single line across the top.
Irene’s Investigation
“No more guessing,” she whispered into the quiet room. “If you found something… then start at the beginning.”
Drawing a straight line beneath the title, she opened Irene’s journal again.
This time, she wasn’t reading it the way she had before.
She wasn’t interested in following Irene’s life from one entry to the next.
She was searching for patterns.
Dates.
Repeated names.
Anything that stood out.
She flipped carefully through pages she had already read, slowing whenever something caught her attention. Almost immediately, she began noticing details she had overlooked before.
Certain entries had tiny circles drawn beside them.
Others contained words underlined once, sometimes twice.
Several pages had arrows sketched into the margins, directing attention toward sentences that appeared completely ordinary at first glance.
Irene hadn’t been decorating her journal.
She had been marking clues.
Piper leaned forward, She wasn’t reading someone’s memories anymore.
She was following someone’s trail.
A slow breath escaped her.
“Show me what you found,” she murmured as she turned the page.
The next section of Irene’s journal felt different the instant Piper’s eyes landed on it.
Piper’s fingers tightened around the edge of the journal.
The first line began without introduction.
I stopped treating this as coincidence.
A faint crease formed between Piper’s brows as she leaned closer.
Irene described the moment she stopped investigating individual disappearances and began studying something much larger.
Timing.
Dates.
The gaps between incidents everyone else dismissed as unrelated.
At first, the disappearances seemed random.
Victims came from different packs. They had no known connection to one another. They disappeared from different territories under completely different circumstances.
Nothing linked them.
Until Irene began linking them.
Irene wrote about searching through ageing archives, comparing missing-person reports from neighbouring packs, and uncovering forgotten records that had quietly been filed away without explanation.
Again and again, the same pattern surfaced.
Every few decades.
Always around the same period.
Piper swallowed as she continued reading.
Irene had given the phenomenon a name.
Overlap Cycle.
It wasn’t an official term. It was simply what Irene called the strange period in which disappearances repeatedly clustered before a single event shared by every pack..
Piper paused.
Irene had underlined two sentences.
No one questions traditions that have always existed.
Farther down the page, another line waited beneath it.
But someone must have started it.
Piper’s eyes moved faster.
Irene explained that the disappearances weren’t concentrated in one territory or limited to one pack. They were spread out deliberately, scattered across different regions, different environments, and different circumstances.
Too scattered to attract attention.
Too consistent to be random.
She also described trying to raise the subject indirectly with others.
Every conversation followed the same pattern.
Confusion and dismissal. 
Irene had narrowed her research to one specific period.
A repeating window.
Every thirty-five years.
Piper’s pen stopped moving.
Irene had verified it through old reports, archived notices, and handwritten records that didn’t match the official accounts.
Each cycle followed the same structure.
A buildup.
A tradition.
Then silence.
One sentence had been underlined twice.
The disappearances always happen before the tradition. Not after it.
This time, Irene wasn’t writing around the tradition.
She was writing about it directly.
Every thirty-five years, all packs observe the same tradition.
Piper’s brows drew together.
On its own, the sentence sounded harmless. Almost ordinary. But the paragraphs that followed stripped away any sense of comfort.
Irene explained that no two packs described the tradition’s origin the same way. Some called it a remembrance. 
Others believed it marked renewal. A few didn’t even have a proper name for it anymore. They simply followed the rituals because that was how it had always been done, passing the instructions from one generation to the next without ever asking why.
Yet every version shared one certainty.
The tradition had always existed.m.
Irene didn’t accept that explanation.
She began comparing records from different packs, searching for references to the tradition outside ceremonial accounts. She combed through ageing archives, fragmented histories, and handwritten records that most people had long forgotten.
That was when she noticed the gap.
There was no beginning..
No record explaining who started it or why.
Only repetition, Generation after generation.
They don’t happen during the tradition.
They happen before it.
A chill ran down her spine.
The handwriting looked steadier than ever.
The tradition is four days away.
Piper’s grip tightened around the journal.
She kept reading.
I’ve confirmed four disappearances already.
A small space separated the next sentence, as though Irene had paused before writing it.
If my calculations are correct… there should only be one more.
Piper went completely still.
The rain continued tapping softly against the windows, but she barely heard it.
The room suddenly felt colder.
Quieter.
The words on the page seemed darker beneath the lamp’s glow.
Then her eyes reached the final line.
If I’m right, everything I’ve been searching for begins after the fifth.
Piper stared at the sentence.
Seconds passed.
Maybe longer.
She couldn’t bring herself to look away.
Finally, she turned the page.
Blank.
She turned another.
Blank.
Again.
Nothing.
The journal had ended.