Chapter 74 Olivia Sliver
The road finally straightened, stretching long and empty beneath my headlights, and that was when the adrenaline let go of me, it didn’t fade gently, it dropped me.
My hands began to shake on the steering wheel, fingers stiff and aching, the silver burn in my shoulder flaring hotter with every heartbeat. My vision blurred at the edges, the world narrowing until it felt like I was driving through a tunnel made of pain and exhaustion. I hadn’t even realized how far I’d gone, only that the town was gone, the orphanage long swallowed by distance,no car behind me, no scent of pursuit. Just me, the hum of the engine, and the dull throb spreading through my bones.
I pulled over without ceremony, gravel crunching beneath the tires as the car lurched to a stop on the side of a deserted road. Trees loomed on either side, dark silhouettes against a washed-out sky. When I killed the engine, the sudden silence pressed in so hard it made my ears ring. I leaned forward, resting my forehead against the steering wheel.
My breath came shallow, uneven. Every muscle felt wrong, too tight, too loose, as if my body hadn’t quite decided what shape it wanted to be in anymore. The partial shift had taken more out of me than I wanted to admit. My wolf paced restlessly beneath my skin, agitated but quiet, as if it sensed this wasn’t a moment for teeth and claws, this was something else.
With trembling fingers, I reached into my coat and pulled out the file.
The folder looked ordinary enough now, thick, manila, edges slightly worn. No glow. No heat. Just paper. If I hadn’t lived through the last hour, I might’ve convinced myself it was nothing. That the trap, the shutters, the men in the shadows had been a stress-fueled hallucination, but the ache in my shoulder said otherwise, I opened the folder slowly, like it might bite me.
The first page stared back at me in stark black ink.
Name: Olivia Silver (Let her be Known as: Maddie)
The world tilted.
I sucked in a sharp breath, my chest tightening as if the name itself had weight.
Olivia.
It felt strange in my mouth, even unspoken. Foreign. Too smooth. Too… complete. Maddie had always felt like something borrowed, a nickname that fit well enough to wear comfortably. This, this felt like something that had been taken from me before I ever got the chance to choose. Olivia Silver.
I swallowed hard and forced myself to keep reading.
Mother: Amelia Silver (Deceased)
Father: William Silver (Deceased)
There was no flowery language. No explanation. Just that single, brutal word stamped beside both their names, deceased, not missing, not unknown, not presumed dead, gone. My fingers tightened around the paper until it crinkled softly.
I’d imagined this moment before, finding their names, learning who they were. In every version of that fantasy, there was emotion. Anger. Grief. Relief. Something loud and overwhelming that would knock the air from my lungs. Instead, there was nothing.
A hollow spread through my chest, wide and empty, like someone had scooped me out and forgotten to put anything back. I stared at the words until they blurred together, my mind refusing to attach faces to the names.
Amelia Silver and William Silver.
They sounded important. Strong. Like people who should’ve left some kind of mark on the world. My gaze drifted down the page to the final line, written in a different hand, sharper, more deliberate.
“If she shifts before her twenty-fifth year, the heir has been found.”My stomach twisted. Heir, there it was again.
I read the sentence twice. Three times. Each repetition drove the point deeper, even as my mind resisted it. I didn’t know what kind of heir they meant. I didn’t know what I was supposed to inherit. Power, maybe. Responsibility. A target on my back. All I knew was that someone, somewhere, had been watching the clock on my life.
I let the file slide onto the passenger seat and pulled out my phone with unsteady hands. The screen lit up the car’s interior, casting pale light over my skin. For a second, I hesitated, dread curling in my gut about what I could find, then I typed: Amelia Silver, search. Nothing.
No obituary. No social media. No archived articles. No addresses. No blurry photos tucked away in some forgotten corner of the internet. Like she’d never drawn a breath. I tried again: William Silver. Still nothing.
My heart began to pound, not with fear this time, but with a growing, sinking realization. I refined the search. Added locations. Added years. Tried different spellings, different combinations. Silver was a common enough name, but these Silvers? They were ghosts?.
My throat tightened as I leaned back in the seat, staring at the phone as if it had personally betrayed me. “I just wanted to know who you were, and about these powers” I whispered, the words barely audible in the quiet car. That was all.
I had gone looking for answers about power or packs or wars I didn’t understand. I hadn’t asked for secrets or conspiracies or people willing to lock buildings down just to keep me from a truth I didn’t even know how or who to ask for. I just wanted to know my parents and how all this power came about.
To know if they’d loved me. If they’d looked at me once and decided I was worth saving, even if it meant leaving me behind.
I flipped back through the file, heart sinking further with each page. Other names filled the folders behind mine, dates, codes, notes that meant nothing to me. I picked a few at random, searching the parents listed there too.
Nothing, no trails, no records, no proof.
It was like someone had reached into the world and erased them all with careful precision, the realization settled cold and heavy in my chest, this wasn’t just a dead end, it was a wall.
I slumped back against the seat, exhaustion washing over me in waves. The pain in my shoulder throbbed dully now, a constant reminder that I couldn’t afford to just sit here forever. Whatever had been done to me, whatever had been hidden, it wasn’t going to unravel itself on the side of a road. I closed the file gently, almost reverently, and set it aside.
Olivia Silver. Amelia and William Silver, names without faces.
If the internet couldn’t find them, then whatever truth existed wasn’t public. It was buried in paper and locked drawers and places that still believed in ink and signatures more than digital footprints. The orphanage had lied, but adoption records didn’t.
Slowly, purpose began to seep back into the emptiness. Mom had said the documents were still at the house. Birth certificate. Adoption papers. Things I’d never thought twice about because I’d never needed them to explain who I was. Maybe they wouldn’t tell me everything. But they might tell me something.
I started the engine again, the sound grounding me, anchoring me back into my body. The road ahead stretched lonely and uncertain, but for the first time since I’d left the orphanage, I wasn’t driving blindly. As I pulled back onto the road, one thought echoed steadily in my mind, clear and unshakable. If they went to this much trouble to erase, and keep you hidden Then you mattered.