Chapter 3

Elvara's Pov

I pulled Vaeron against me and backed away from the wall like the words might reach out and grab us.

"Mommy, why is there writing on the wall?"

"It's nothing, baby." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "Some kids probably did it as a joke. We're going to leave for a little bit, okay?"

He nodded, trusting me the way three-year-olds trust their mothers with everything, even lies. I checked him over anyway, running my hands down his arms, his back, his face, needing to feel with my own fingers that he was whole and untouched. He was. Whoever had been inside this apartment hadn't come for him.

That should have made me feel better. But It didn't.

My mind raced through every possibility while I kept Vaeron close and scanned the room again. Nothing was stolen. My laptop still sat on the counter. My jewelry, what little I owned, was untouched in the drawer. Someone hadn't come here for money.

They had come for something specific.

I thought of the folder hidden inside the lining of an old suitcase in the back of my closet, the one I hadn't opened in three years because I couldn't stand to look at what it contained, Messages, Recordings. A name I had buried so deep I sometimes convinced myself I imagined the whole thing. That folder was the only reason I had survived those first terrifying months alone. It was proof. And it was the one thing that could destroy the person who had threatened me.

If someone had come looking for that, then the danger I thought I'd escaped had never actually gone away. It had only been waiting. I was halfway to the closet when I heard footsteps in the hallway outside, fast and heavy, followed by a fist pounding against the open door.

"Elvara."

Kaelvian filled the doorway, chest rising and falling like he'd run the whole way up. His eyes swept the room once, cataloguing everything the way I imagined he did in every crisis, before landing on the wall behind me. I watched his face change. The anger from earlier that day, the coldness he'd worn like armor since the moment he saw me, all of it dropped away and something rawer took its place.

"I had a security team watching this building," he said. "They told me someone entered twenty minutes before you got home. I came straight here."

"You had people watching me?"

"I had people watching him." He nodded toward Vaeron, who was peering out from behind my leg. "After what happened at the office, I wasn't taking chances. Clearly I should have taken more."

He walked further into the apartment, stopping in front of the wall, and I watched something harden in his jaw as he read the words again.

"Who threatened you, Elvara?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Don't." His voice cracked on the word, sharper than I expected. "Don't stand there and lie to me again. Not after this." He gestured at the wall. "Someone broke into your home. Someone wrote that they wanted you gone. You didn't even flinch when you saw it, which means this isn't the first time you've been threatened."

I said nothing, but my silence answered for me.

"Whatever happened three years ago," he said, stepping closer, "it's happening again right now. Tell me what I'm missing."

I looked at Vaeron, still standing quiet and confused near the kitchen doorway, and I felt the weight of three years pressing down on me all at once. I had carried this alone for so long that I had forgotten what it felt like to let someone else hold part of it.

"Someone threatened my pregnancy," I said finally. The words tasted like poison after keeping them locked away for so long. "They told me if you found out about the baby, they would make sure neither of us survived. I believed them. I still believe them."

Kaelvian went very still.

"Who?"

"I can't tell you."

"Elvara." His hands curled at his sides, the same way they had in the hallway earlier that day. "Who scared you badly enough that you disappeared from me? Who scared you enough to hide my son for three years?"

"I can't."

"Why not?"

Because the person was someone he trusted. Because the moment I said the name out loud, it would break something in him that might never heal the right way, and because I still wasn't sure who else was involved, who else might be listening, who else might decide that Vaeron and I were loose ends that needed cleaning up.

"Because you won't believe me," I said instead, which was also true.

"Try me."

I opened my mouth, and then closed it again. I couldn't. Not yet. Not until I understood how deep this went.

Kaelvian studied me for a long moment, frustration and something like heartbreak moving across his face in equal measure. Then his eyes drifted back to the wall, and I watched them narrow on something near the bottom corner of the message, something I hadn't noticed in my panic.

A small mark, barely bigger than a coin, painted in the same black as the words above it. A wolf's head inside a circle, its jaw open, teeth bared.

Kaelvian went white.

"What is it?" I asked.

He crossed the room and crouched in front of the symbol, studying it like it had personally betrayed him. "This isn't graffiti. This is a security clearance mark. We use it internally, on restricted files, on executive floor badges. It's part of our internal branding system. Only someone with access to Veyr Wolves infrastructure would know this symbol, let alone think to use it."

My stomach dropped. "What are you saying?"

He rose slowly, turning to face me, and for the first time since I'd walked back into his life that morning, I saw real fear behind his eyes instead of anger.

"I'm saying whoever did this didn't come from outside my world." His voice dropped low, each word deliberate, like he needed to hear himself say it before he could believe it. "This wasn't someone outside my empire, Elvara."

He looked past me, toward the wall, toward the mark that had just changed everything.

"Someone inside my organization did this."