Chapter 5: The Archive

I called Roark from the floor of the back room with the old page shaking in my hand.

He picked up on the first ring.

"Is it Kyler?"

"No. Is Addison okay?"

"She's in her room playing music loud enough to rattle the windows." He paused. "What's wrong?"

"Does your pack keep records? Old ones? Council minutes?"

"In the basement. My grandfather never threw out a piece of paper in his life."

"I'm coming over."

"It's ten at night, Danica."

"Then put the coffee on."

The Brannigan archive was a cellar under the log house, cold and dry and packed floor to ceiling with steel shelves.

Roark pulled a chain and one bare bulb came on.

I put the old page on the worktable.

Then he looked at the name under the stamp and swore under his breath.

"Desiree's great-grandfather was Council chair in the thirties," he said.

"So it's her family's ban."

"It's her family's everything."

We started on the 1930s shelf.

Roark read the way he did everything, slow and steady, never skipping a line.

I read like I was being chased.

"You're going to miss something," he said.

"You're going to die of old age before you finish that box."

"I'm twenty-eight."

"Exactly. Halfway there."

He threw a paper clip at me.

I found it first, in a cloth-bound Council minute book with a broken clasp.

March 1931.

The chair moved to ban "the silver practice known as moon ink" as witchcraft and a danger to the natural order of the packs.

Three Alpha families seconded.

Four she-wolves stood up to speak against it.

They just wrote: Objections noted. Motion carried.

Roark found the rest in the pack's own ledger.

Keep reading free with an account. Start Marked by My Ex's Biggest Rival from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.