Chapter 90 The Archive
Calix POV
I waited until the campus was completely quiet before I moved.
It was past midnight when I slipped out of my dorm and crossed the grounds toward the pack house. The lower archive room was in the east wing, behind a door most pack members never bothered with.
I had walked past it a hundred times without thinking about it. Tonight was different.
The door was locked but I had my father's spare key from the rack in the hallway outside his office. I had taken it two days ago without knowing exactly why, now I knew why.
I stepped inside and shut the door behind me.
The room smelled like old paper and dust. Shelves ran from floor to ceiling on every wall, packed with binders and folders and rolled documents tied with string. There was no system to it that I could see so I started from the oldest looking shelf and worked my way through.
Most of it was useless. Meeting records, territory agreements, census logs going back generations. I kept moving.
Then I found a binder with no label on the spine.
I pulled it out and opened it on the table in the middle of the room. The first few pages were water damaged but the writing was still readable. It was a personal record, not an official one.
Someone had written it by hand and the dates at the top of each page went back almost thirty years.
I read slowly.
The entries described a white fur wolf. Not as a threat or an enemy but as someone the writer knew personally.
Someone he cared about. The language was careful but the feeling underneath it was not. Whoever wrote this had been in love.
I turned to the last readable page and my stomach dropped.
The final entry was short. It said the bond had been discovered and that action had to be taken to protect the pack. It said the wolf and her mate had been dealt with.
It said the writer had ordered it himself and that he did not regret it but that the line had to end there.
The handwriting was my father's.
I stood there for a long moment and did not move.
So it was not political, it was never political. My father had loved a white fur wolf and when she bonded with someone else he had her killed.
That was the truth sitting inside that binder and it was ugly and it was real.
I pulled out my phone and photographed every page I could before the sound of boots in the hallway made me stop.
I closed the binder and slid it back into place. The footsteps stopped just outside the door, i killed my phone light and stood still.
The handle turned.
A guard stepped in and swept a flashlight across the room. It landed on me.
"Calix?" He lowered the flashlight slightly but did not relax. "What are you doing in here?"
"Couldn't sleep," I said. "I was looking for the old territory maps. My father mentioned them once and I got curious."
He looked at me for a second. "This room is restricted after hours."
"I know," I said. "I'll head out."
He stepped aside and I walked past him without rushing. I kept my pace even all the way back across the grounds to my dorm. My hands were steady but my head was not.
Back in my room I sat on the edge of my bed and went through the photographs on my phone one by one.
The entries confirmed what the image in my father's study had already suggested. He had known a white fur wolf personally.
He had loved her. Then he had killed her and her mate when he could not have her.
That meant Maddie was not just a secret on this campus.
She was the daughter of the woman my father had murdered.
If he ever found out who she really was it would not end at expulsion. He would never let her leave.
I locked my phone, pressed my hands together and sat with that for a while because there was nothing else I could do with it right then.
I could not go to Maddie at this hour with information like this. I could not go to my father either.
But I was not going to sit on it for long.
I needed to think clearly so I lay back and stared at the ceiling and started sorting through what I actually knew versus what I was assuming.
My father inflicted the curse. That was still a gap I had not filled but the archive had told me the curse was tied to the white fur line specifically. It was not hereditary.
It was targeted. He had built it into me as a way to keep me from ever being drawn to a white fur wolf the way he had been drawn to Maddie's mother.
He did not want me to make the same mistake he did.
But the mark had already happened and there was nothing he could do about that now.
I set my phone on the nightstand and stared at the ceiling for a while longer. Finn knocked on my door around one in the morning, probably wondering why my light was still on, but I did not answer.
I was not in the mood to explain anything to anyone.
In the morning I would go to Maddie before class. I would tell her what I found and let her decide what to do with it because it was her life and her parents and her right to know before I made any moves on my own.
I closed my eyes and the last thing I thought before sleep finally pulled me under was that I had walked into that archive looking for answers about the curse, but I had walked out carrying something much heavier than that.
The truth about my father was only the beginning.