Chapter 13 THREE MONTHS
Three months. I sat with that number the way you sit with something that has weight to it. Not rushing past it, not immediately converting it into action and motion and the next thing, just letting it exist in its full specific gravity for long enough that I understood what I was actually dealing with.
Three months before Caden Von filed a formal petition with the Alpha council to erase my bloodline from existence. Not just my father’s legacy, not just the stolen pack leadership and the fabricated disgrace and the eight years of enforced silence. All of it. Every Von who came after me. Every possibility of what the bloodline carried ever surfacing again in the world.
He wasn’t trying to win. He had already won twelve years ago when he filed that report and watched my father’s life dismantle around carefully constructed lies. What he was trying to do now was make the win permanent.
I walked back to room 307 after the landing conversation with Kael and I sat on my bed in the dark for a long time without turning the light on and I let myself feel every part of it before I did anything else. The anger, the grief underneath the anger. The specific particular pain of understanding that the person who had looked at me across breakfast tables for twelve years and called me his responsibility had been calculating my destruction the entire time with the patience of someone who had never doubted the outcome.
Then I turned the light on.
Ivana was already awake. She had been awake the entire time, lying in her bed in the dark with the specific quality of stillness that was not sleep but was giving me the space to have whatever I needed to have before she said anything. When the light came on she sat up and looked at me with those sharp warm eyes and waited.
I told her everything. She listened without interrupting, which for Ivana was a significant act of restraint that I recognized and appreciated. When I finished she was quiet for a moment with the particular focused stillness of someone who had taken everything in and was now organizing it into something actionable.
“Three months,” she said.
“Yes.”
“That’s not a lot of time.”
“No.”
She pulled her knees up to her chest. “What do you need?”
The question was so simple and so direct and so completely characteristic of Ivana that something in my chest tightened in a way that had nothing to do with the ability or the suppression or the fated mate recognition. Just gratitude. Raw and uncomplicated.
“I need to get into the archives,” I said. “Properly. Not the main reading room, the sealed section. The files that aren’t accessible to students.”
Ivana looked at me for a moment. “How?”
“I don’t know yet.” I reached for my notebook on the desk. “But I have three months to figure it out and I intend to use all of them.”
The next morning I went to find Sera Calloway.
She was where she usually was before first period, in the narrow courtyard on the academy’s north side that most students didn’t use because it was exposed and cold and had no particular social cachet. Sera used it precisely because of those qualities, I had come to understand. She was sitting on the low stone wall with a book open in her lap and a cup of something warm between her hands and she looked up when I appeared at the courtyard entrance with the unsurprised expression of someone who had been expecting this conversation for a while.
I sat on the wall a few feet away.
“I need to ask you something,” I said.
“I know.” She turned a page without looking at it. “I’ve been waiting for you to.”
I looked at her. The pale grey eyes with their silver quality, watchful and steady and carrying that perpetual assessment that I had stopped finding unsettling and started finding useful. Sera saw things clearly and without the distortion of wanting something from what she saw, which was rarer than it should have been.
“Your sister was here four years ago,” I said. “She did well. Which means she probably had access to parts of the academy that standard students don’t reach.”
“She was ranked second in her year,” Sera said. “She had full library access including the restricted archive section from her second semester onward.”
“Did she ever mention anything about the Von pack in those records? Anything about a case from twelve years ago?”
Sera was quiet for a moment. The courtyard was cold around us, the thin morning light coming over the academy’s north wall at a low angle that made the stone look silver. She looked at her book, then at the cup in her hands, then at me with those assessing eyes doing their careful work.
“She mentioned a sealed file,” she said finally. “Once. In a letter she sent home during her second year. She didn’t give details, I don’t think she was supposed to have seen it at all. But she said there was a case in the restricted archive that didn’t match its official council record.” A pause. “She said the discrepancy was significant enough that she considered reporting it and then decided not to because of who the names involved belonged to.”
My pulse was steady and deliberate. “What names?”
Sera looked at me for a long moment.
“She didn’t say,” she said carefully. “But she stopped mentioning the archives after that letter. And when she came home at the end of that year she seemed smaller, like something had pressed down on her.” A pause. “I didn’t understand it at the time. I think I’m starting to understand it now.”
I held her gaze. “Are you willing to help me?”
The question sat between us in the cold courtyard air. Sera looked at me with those silver grey eyes and I watched her make the calculation that she always made. Not fast, not impulsive, the careful measured weighing of someone who understood that decisions made quickly were often decisions made wrong.
“What kind of help?” she asked.
“Access,” I said. “Information. Your sister’s contacts here if she has any. And discretion, which I think you’re capable of more than most people in this building.”
Something moved in Sera’s expression. Not the almost approval I had seen on the training ground, something more committed than that.
“My sister trusted the wrong person with what she found,” she said quietly. “I’ve spent four years wondering if that’s why she came home different.” She paused then continued “I’m not interested in making the same mistake.”
“Neither am I,” I said.
She looked at me for another moment. Then she closed her book and tucked it under her arm and stood up from the wall with the decisive movement of someone who had finished weighing and had reached a conclusion.
“I’ll reach out to her tonight,” she said. “She may not respond quickly. But she’ll respond in the meantime. The restricted archive has a rotation of staff monitors. Tuesday and Thursday evenings between eight and ten the monitor is Professor Lind. He taught here for thirty years and retired three years ago and they brought him back part time because they couldn’t find anyone who knew the archive system as well as he did.” She looked at me steadily. “He also taught my sister. She said he was the only person at Ironfang she fully trusted.”
I absorbed this. “You think he’d help.”
“I think he already knows something is wrong with that sealed file,” Sera said. “I think he’s been knowing it for a long time and waiting for someone to come and ask the right questions.” She paused. “I think you might be the right person to ask them.”
She left the courtyard with the same unhurried self possession she brought to everything and I sat on the cold stone wall for a moment after she was gone with the morning light coming over the north wall and the academy beginning to fill with the noise of another day starting around me.
Professor Lind. Tuesday evenings. Eight o’clock.
I opened my notebook and added it to the timeline page underneath everything else. The dates and names and fragments of a story that was slowly, piece by piece, assembling itself into something I could see the shape of even if I couldn’t yet see the end.
Three months. I looked at what I had written, at the careful architecture of evidence and questions and connections building across the pages.
Three months was not nothing.
Three months, handled correctly, was everything.
I saw Kael in the dining hall at lunch.
He was at his usual table with Alvin and Ryan, the gravitational field of their collective presence doing its usual work on the room around them. He looked up when I walked in. Not searching, just the natural sweep of someone tracking a space and his gaze found mine with the directness that I was learning was simply how Kael looked at things he had decided were worth looking at.
He held it for a moment.
I gave him a small nod, barely anything, the kind of acknowledgment that said I’m working on it without saying anything at all to anyone watching.
Something shifted in his expression. The faintest easing of the jaw. The closest thing to reassurance that Kael Ashvorne’s face appeared capable of producing in a public space.
Alvin, sitting beside him, looked between us with those sharp charming eyes and said nothing and smiled the smile of someone who had noticed everything and was filing it away with great personal satisfaction.
Ryan, on Kael’s other side, was looking at his food but his fork had stopped moving.
And he was deliberately not looking up which meant he had seen it too.
I found my table and sat down and Ivana appeared thirty seconds later with two plates and the expression of someone who had also seen it and was exercising what was for her a heroic degree of self restraint in not saying anything about it immediately.
She lasted approximately forty five seconds.
“He nodded back,” she said.
“Eat your lunch Ivana.”
“That was a whole conversation.”
“It was two nods.”
“Between you and Kael Ashvorne.” She leaned forward slightly. “That was not two nods. That was a declaration of intent delivered in the language of people who are both too guarded to use actual words.”
I looked at my food. “You’re dramatic.”
“I’m accurate,” she said serenely, and picked up her fork.
I didn’t argue because she was.