The archives were a cathedral of secrets—chill, silent, and so immense that my first instinct was to tiptoe. Even the hinges of the ancient double doors groaned in deference to the gravity within, sealing us away from the rest of the palace with a sound like the lid closing on a tomb. My shoes echoed across polished flagstone, the click ricocheting between shelves stacked so high they disappeared into shadow. The air was heavy with dust and the weight of things never meant to be spoken aloud.
Derick's hand squeezed mine, warm and alive. He paused, letting me stand in the entryway, drink in the enormity, and steady my trembling fingers. "This is my favorite place in the world," he whispered, voice pitched for my ears alone. "Second only to wherever you are, of course."
My lips twitched, but I barely dared to smile. It felt like laughter here would crack the stained glass of reverence, topple the fragile order of centuries. Sunlight angled in through windows thirty feet above, striping the darkness with columns of light and exposing the endless ballet of dust motes. The shelves were black oak, darker than night, carved in the baroque style with snarling wolves and coiled vines. Every row was packed tight with books—leather-bound, canvas-wrapped, brittle things that looked like they'd crumble if I even glanced at them too hard.
Derick led me deeper, past a bust of some long-dead philosopher whose glare still radiated judgment. "The public only sees the west wing," he confided, voice low. "This is the restricted collection. The real history, not the polished version for the tour groups." He gestured to a wrought iron spiral staircase that wound up into gloom. "But today, we're going downstairs. That's where the fun stuff is."
I followed as he navigated a maze of narrow corridors and alcoves, past locked cabinets and glass cases filled with curling scrolls. The air cooled as we descended. I expected the smell of mold or rot, but all I caught was the perfume of dry paper and something faintly mineral.
At the bottom of the stairs, Derick paused before an unassuming door. It had no label, just a small thumbprint reader and a keypad. He pressed his finger to the sensor, typed in a code, and waited as gears chunked and a heavy deadbolt retracted. The door swung open, revealing a cramped room with a heavy table at its center—solid oak, deeply scored with blade marks and burn scars. The only light came from a desk lamp with a green glass shade, casting a pool of gold over the chaos that covered the tabletop.
Papers, some ancient and foxed, others crisp from modern printers, lay in haphazard stacks. Three battered laptops fought for space among open books and canisters of sharpened pencils. On one end, a row of sticky notes formed a rainbow of frantic thought. The opposite wall was tacked with photocopies, graphs, and what looked like a hand-drawn family tree that spanned all the way back to the first Silvermoon.
I caught my breath. "You did all this?"
Derick's ears pinked. "Well… Some. Matt helps with the computers, and Mom's old advisor—he brings me anything interesting from the council archives. But most of it… yeah. I started when I was fifteen." He brushed crumbs off a battered office chair and motioned for me to sit. "It's not much, but—"
"It's amazing," I interrupted, and meant it. My gaze roved the chaos, recognizing some of the names on the printouts—old enemies, ancient treaties, rumors I'd heard in childhood but never dreamed were real. "How long do you spend down here?"
He grinned, sinking into the seat beside me. "As much as I can get away with. Dad thinks it's a waste of time. But… I've always wanted to know how things really happened. Not the story for public consumption, but the truth." His hand brushed a printout, smoothing it with unconscious reverence. "What's the point of inheriting a kingdom if you can't figure out how to fix it?"
He gestured for me to look at the centerpiece of the table: a timeline, painstakingly inked on butcher paper and weighted at both ends with bookends shaped like howling wolves. The line started in bright red at the left and faded to black as it ran off the page to the right. Beneath it, dozens of tiny flags marked events and milestones, each labeled in Derick's neat, compulsive handwriting.
I leaned in, tracing the curve of the timeline with my finger. At the start: THE GREAT WAR, written in blood red and surrounded by jagged lines. Years bled forward, the color fading. "What am I looking at?" I asked softly.
"The decline," Derick answered, his tone stripped of its usual warmth. "Every recorded power loss since the war. Each flag is a moment we lost something—an ability, a bloodline, a piece of our history. Some are well known, like the massacre at Blood River. Others… hidden, or denied outright." He flipped open a yellow legal pad, revealing dense columns of numbers. "I cross-checked council birth records, old medical logs, personal diaries, anything I could get."
I pointed to a cluster of blue flags near the early years. "What happened here?"
Derick's eyes darkened. "That's when we lost full-moon immunity. Before then, some packs could shift at will, even under a new moon. My mother remembers her grandmother telling stories of it—how the elders could stay wolf as long as they wanted, even teach their children to talk and run before their first year. Then, after the massacre…" He shrugged. "Gone, just like that."
A shiver ran over my skin. I remembered the way my own shift had felt last night—electric and alive, but still bound to the tyranny of the moon. "Why did it stop?" I asked, my voice barely audible.
"That's what I'm trying to find out." Derick's hand hovered over the next section, where the red faded to a sickly pink. "Around this time, we started seeing the first mate bond failures. Some pairs just… didn't click. No matter how hard they tried, the bond refused to lock." He pulled a crumpled article from beneath a laptop, showing me a photograph of a wolf with hollow, colorless eyes. "Early council records called them 'ghost pairs.' They went insane, sometimes violent. Most were exiled or executed. Dad doesn't like to talk about it, but there are files on everyone who tried to fake a mate bond." He looked up, his gaze hot with determination. "I think it's all connected."
My pulse ticked up a notch. "You think the Council did something to us."
Derick flinched, almost imperceptibly. "Not on purpose. But their solution—pushing non-fated pairs together, arranging alliances by force—it's like welding two broken parts and expecting a whole. It never works. The bond is sacred for a reason." His voice dipped lower, barely above a growl. "They thought quantity would make up for quality. It's killing us, Cassy."
For a moment, I couldn't breathe. The truth of it—how the Council's desperation to rebuild had warped us, how every new generation was a little weaker, a little less magical—felt like standing on a trapdoor, waiting to fall.
I studied the faces in the family tree on the wall, recognizing the hollow spaces where names had been erased, where lines simply ended. "What do you want to do about it?" I asked, the question trembling between us.
Derick's hand closed over mine, his thumb stroking the line of my knuckles. He hesitated, then spoke, words rushed and fragile: "I want to prove it. I want to show Dad—and the Council—that the mate bond is all that ever mattered. That the old ways were right." He let out a shuddering breath, his eyes raw. "I want to bring it back."
My heart pounded. "Is that possible?"
He nodded, once, sharp and certain. "If we can find enough evidence. If we can convince them to end the arranged matchings, the forced bonds… Maybe the next generation will heal. Maybe we'll get back what we lost."
Silence settled, thick as honey. In the hush, I could hear the echo of old voices—my father's warnings, Josh's contempt, the whispers that had hounded me since childhood. I thought of my own mate bond, how it had flared to life the moment I looked at Derick.
I glanced down, letting my eyes rest on the ink and paper between us. The line of decline. The bright pinpricks of hope.
"You're going to need help," I said, my voice suddenly steady. "You can't do this alone."
Derick grinned—a real, wolfish flash of teeth. "I was hoping you'd say that."
We sat there a moment, hands entwined, the past and future spread before us in fragile, crumbling sheets. I'd never wanted power, never wanted destiny, but in this moment, sitting beside Derick in the cold archives, I wanted—badly—for him to win.
He swept a hand over the timeline, reverent. "If we can fix this," he said, "maybe we can fix everything."
I looked up, meeting his gaze across the battered table. "Let's start with us," I said. "Let's prove the bond is real."
The next hour passed in a blur as I looked through the different books, careful not to rip anything.
The lamp cast a feeble gold halo over Derick's research table, the light barely holding back the shadows that pooled in the corners of the archive. He hovered over the timeline, pencil in hand, lost in a world of his own making. I let myself drift away, weaving through the narrow aisles that branched off from his study like tributaries from a river, each lined with treasures and forgotten curses.
Every step I took raised a scentless swirl of dust, the thick kind that coated every surface in an unbroken patina. My fingers itched with the urge to touch, to pry open secrets that no one had looked at in a hundred years. I reached up, tracing the spines with a fingertip, reading the faded gold-leaf titles: THE MYTHOS OF MOONKIND; ALPHA PRIMORDIAL; WOLVES OF THE DARK AGES. Most had that dense, academic air—pages stuffed with statistics, footnotes like iron fetters. But now and then I glimpsed something wilder: books rebound in too-supple leather, or scrolls tied with strips of red-dyed sinew.
I plucked one at random, letting it fall open in my hand. A page of drawings—a wolf's skull, labeled in spidery script; beside it, a human skull with the jaw forced wide, exposing a ring of sharp canines where ordinary teeth should be. I shivered and shoved it back into place.
"Find anything good?" Derick's voice drifted from the study, rough with concentration but still tethered to me.
"Some of these books are bound in actual wolf skin," I called back, voice thin with equal parts horror and awe. "Is that legal?"
He laughed. "Technically, none of this is legal. That's why it's in the basement."
I snorted, then continued my search. Most of the shelves were organized by era or subject, but a few had been cannibalized for storage, holding boxes and battered file folders. In the third aisle, I found a stack of battered journals, the topmost wrapped in cracked leather that looked ready to disintegrate. I picked it up, careful not to let the spine crumble in my hands. The first page was blank except for a name: ALDERSON, THOMAS, 2057.
The entries inside were uneven—some a few lines, others entire pages of shaky cursive. The ink had bled in places, blurring the words, but enough remained to piece together a story. I skimmed the opening entries. All ordinary: "Rain today. Wolves restless." "Shifted in the yard. New pup fell into the rosebush." I skipped ahead. The handwriting slanted steeper, the words turning frantic. "CAN'T SLEEP. Bond is poison. BURNS." Then, in larger letters, "I REJECTED HER. BY MOON, BY BLOOD, I AM ALONE."
My breath froze. I scanned the next pages, following the agony as it unfolded. "Day three. Still burns. Dreamed I tore my own heart out. Can't remember her scent." Then, a week later: "It is over. No mark left. The pain is gone. Empty."
I closed the journal, heart hammering. The mate bond—the thing that everyone believed unbreakable—could be rejected. Not just broken, but erased.
I clutched the journal to my chest and hurried back to Derick, who didn't look up from his timeline until I dropped the book in front of him. He glanced at the cover, brow furrowing. "What's this?"
"Just read the last ten pages." My voice sounded distant to my own ears, as if it belonged to someone else entirely.
He opened the journal, his eyes darting as he absorbed the entries. His hand trembled slightly when he reached the last one. "I've seen rumors," he said, voice low. "But never a firsthand account." He turned the page, as if unable to stop himself. "If this is real, then…"
I nodded, finishing the thought for him. "Then every time the Council forced a mate bond, they risked driving someone mad. And every time someone rejected it, they were erased from the record."
Derick ran his hand through his hair, the gesture more violent than I'd ever seen from him. "This changes everything." He shut the book, staring at the cracked leather cover as if it might snarl back at him. "Do you know what this means, Cassy?"
I shook my head, still reeling.
"It means that if a wolf rejects a forced bond, they might still be able to find their fated mate. The Council tried to breed loyalty, but all they did was create more ghosts." He reached for my hand, squeezing hard. "You found the missing link."
I blinked, barely able to process the idea. "But if it hurts that bad… If it leaves you empty… Wouldn't it be better not to bond at all?"
He let out a ragged sigh, his thumb tracing the line of my wrist. "No bond is always worse than a true one. But a fake bond—it's a kind of death." He looked up at me, eyes bright and wet. "You saved me from that fate."
I wanted to say something—anything—but the words caught in my throat. Instead, I leaned forward, letting my forehead rest against his. The silence stretched between us, heavy with realization.