Two hours. That’s how long I run.
Full shift. Low to the dirt, lungs on fire, the trees blurring into a dark smear. My wolf keeps pushing for more distance, as if enough miles could erase the memory of Sienna Hart.
It can’t.
By the time I shift back to the eastern ridge, I’m forcing myself to think about Lilian Hart instead.
Her mother.
That kind of anger is much easier to live with.
Delete
I find her in the library.
It’s past midnight, and she’s sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the lowest shelf, her shoes off, her hair loose, three books open around her. She has a notebook balanced on her knee and she’s writing in it with the focused, private intensity of someone who has forgotten there is a world outside her own head.
She doesn’t hear me come in.
I stand in the doorway for a moment and watch her. The lamp behind her throws gold across her hair. She bites the end of her pen, frowns at something she’s written, and crosses it out.
“You’re dripping.”
“I ran.”
“At midnight?”
“Couldn’t sleep.”
She finally looks up. She scans my face the way she scans everything — quick, cataloguing, missing nothing. “You ran in wolf form,” she says. “Your eyes are still slightly gold.”
I cross the room and sit in the chair across from her, because standing in the doorway watching her feels like standing at the edge of something I can’t come back from.
“I owe you an explanation,” I say.
Her pen stills. “About what?”
“My father. Your mother. What I know. What I should have told you before tonight.”
She sets the notebook down. Waits.
I’ve rehearsed this in my head before. Not for her specifically — I didn’t know she existed until three days ago. But I’ve turned these facts over so many times.
“My father was Callum Byrne.” I let that hang in the air for a second.
“He was Alpha for eighteen years. He actually believed the world could recover after the Exposure.”
Sienna stayed quiet, letting me talk.
“Not just humans and wolves tolerating each other, but actually building something together.”
A short, dry laugh escapes me. “Most of the other Alphas thought he was naive.” I looked her straight in the eyes.
“For a long time, so did I.”
“You were wrong,” Sienna says softly.
“I was twenty-three. I thought I knew what the world was.”
She doesn’t push. She just watches me with those dark eyes, and it’s easier than it should be to keep talking.
“Your mother came to him with her research eight years ago. She was the first human geneticist who’d managed to map the shift sequence on a cellular level. Not theoretically — actually, with evidence. My father said she was extraordinary. That she moved through the science the way wolves move through territory — as she belonged there.”
Something flickers in Sienna’s expression. Pride, I think. Old and complicated.
“Together, they built something neither side thought possible. She had the science. My father had the pack’s trust. They believed that would be enough.”
I shake my head.
“It wasn’t.”
“Which was?”
“Using it to develop a weapon. Taking her work on werewolf biology and inverting it — not to understand us, but to dismantle us. Permanently.” I meet her eyes. “She tried to stop them. She brought my father evidence. They made a plan to expose the Architects through supernatural council channels — the same way you did tonight, with your files and your photographs.”
“What happened?”
I lean forward, elbows on my knees.
“She was dead within the week. Car accident, officially. My father went to the council alone. Three months later, he died in what the record calls a territorial challenge gone wrong.” My jaw locks. “It was an execution. They sedated him first — the same chemical signature we found in Dario’s blood — and then they staged the rest.”
The room is very quiet.
Sienna hasn’t moved. Her pen is lying on the open notebook, forgotten, and her hands are still in her lap.
“You’ve known,” she says. “This whole time. You’ve known it was the same people.”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve been carrying that alone for five years.”
I don’t answer. The silence says it for me.
She unfolds herself from the floor in one quiet motion and crosses to the shelf directly beside my chair. I watch her eyes move across the spines, reading titles.
She pulls one out.
It’s a small book. Old, cloth-covered, the spine creased with use. She turns it over, opens it to the first page, and holds it out to me.
I take it.
The handwriting inside the front cover is looping, left-slanted, and confident. An inscription. Not to me.
To Callum — who always believed the walls between us were only walls. Thank you for letting me through.
“My mother’s handwriting,” Sienna says. Her voice is steady, but barely. “I recognise it from the journals.”
I stare at the inscription for a long time.
Callum Byrne kept this book on his shelf. And when he died, it came to me with everything else — his territory, his debts, his unfinished war — and I put it here without ever opening it.
“He kept it,” I say. More to myself than to her.
“He kept it,” she agrees.
Neither of us speaks for a moment.
“I should have protected her,” I say. “The pack should have. If we’d known what the Architects were planning —”
“You were twenty-three,” Sienna says. She says it the same way I said it ten minutes ago, turning my own words back on me with perfect precision. “You thought you knew what the world was.”
She holds my gaze.
My wolf goes utterly still.
“I’m not going to let them do it again,” I say.
She holds my gaze. “Neither am I.”
Sienna reaches for the page to close it. Sienna traced the inside of the cover with her thumb.
She stopped, frowning. “The binding’s been fixed,” she muttered.
She gave it a light press, and the spine gave way with a soft crack, letting a folded piece of paper slide right into her lap.
She frowns and opens it. Her eyes move across the page once, then again. Slowly, she looks up at me.
Her voice is barely distinct. “Kieran, what does bite compatibility mean?”
Aksara