Page 47 of His Sold Fated Mate

He looked stressed, and I wanted to help. “Do you want dinner? I can cook.”

He shook his head. “No, I was just going to heat up leftovers and head to bed. I have a few things to do tomorrow, but after that, we can head to Riley’s pack.

He gave me a nod as he turned into the kitchen. The house fell silent as I watched him. The morning after we had sex, I felt like we were connected, maybe a little closer. But maybe I’d been wrong.

The next day, we headed to Riley’s pack. Klaus led the way to a conference space where the diary sat. I hadn’t expected it to look like any diary. I was expecting something dangerous. But it was a simple leather-bound book with a little lock on the side. It didn’t even look that old.

“They can’t unlock it?”

I raised an eyebrow. “Did they try?”

“A little, but Elize worried there might be a spell on it, and they don’t know what could happen if they put in the wrong code too many times.”

I picked the diary up and flipped it over. I scanned the leather and ran my fingers over the binding. I held the lock and rotated it a few times. It required four numbers.

A shiver ran down my spine, and I turned the dial. I wasn’t even sure what I was doing. It was like someone was doing it for me.

Four. I rotated it back to nine, then forward to seven, and then landed on three. The locked clicked and snapped open.

Klaus’s eyes widened. “Did you unlock it?”

I nodded. “Yeah, it just… I don’t know. Those numbers… it felt right.” I couldn’t put my finger on why, but it did.

I pulled the lock out and flipped the book open. I took in pages upon pages of writing. The letters were neat and organized. I sat down, flipping through them. There were dates written back over fifty years. Each page was a new date. Some were long and filled, while others were only a few lines. But you could tell whoever wrote in this used it every day.

“She had beautiful writing,” I state, running my finger along the fine print. “And you could feel her emotion in the writing.” I flipped to the middle, where the writing just stopped.

“There are a lot of pages in that. It’s going to take me some time to get through all of this.”

Klaus nodded. “Take your time.”

It took me a couple of days to get through it. She talked about the weather and her day. She spoke about learning magic and falling in love. You could tell when she was excited because her pen was heavier on the paper, while on other days she wrote lightly because she was down. There were even tear marks that stained the pages.

I was on the last page, and she was talking about her wedding. She had her dress in the closet, and she was eager to get up the next morning. The next page had been dated the wedding day, but nothing was written on it. There was no other writing after that.

I set the diary down just as Klaus came inside. He froze at the doorway. “Did you finish?”

I nodded.

“So?”

“She wrote a lot. She wrote about everything in her life. She was getting married, but it just stopped on her wedding day.”

Klaus frowned. “The guys were telling me about this woman who owned the diary. She never got married.”

I thought of all the books that I’d read and the little information I knew about dark magic. It sounded like she had been stood up. “It’s said that strong emotions can twist a person up. Turn a sweet and innocent person into someone else entirely. This woman, she wasn’t always bad. She actually sounded sweet.”

Klaus frowned. “Elize had a vision about her. She said the same thing.”

“Can I see the cauldron? I want to check it for marks. See if there is something that we all missed.”

“Couldn’t hurt. But for the record, I hate going into that room.”

“You don’t have to go.”

“I’m not letting you alone,” he countered.

I couldn’t help but smile, feeling that he cared. We headed down the hallway and into the meeting room, where the door that led to the basement was. We went down the spiral stairs, and a shiver went down my spine. The air felt colder, but nothing else.