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"Your permits will be processed by tomorrow," Rydan said, setting his tea down. "I'll see to it personally. And your supplies should arrive by end of day."

"Thank you."

"I'm not obstructing your work, Miss Ward. I want to be clear about that." He stood, tucking his book under his arm. "I'm simply asking you to consider that not every buried thing is a treasure. Some of them were buried because they're dangerous. And the people who buried them loved this town enough to make difficult choices."

He inclined his head, a gesture that was polite without being deferential, and walked out of the café with the measured stride of someone who had said exactly what he intended to say and not a syllable more. But not before turning over his shoulder to say, “I’ll be staying in town for a bit. To make sure all things go smoothly with your dig.”

Steph sat with her coffee and watched him go. Through the window, she saw him cross the square, unhurried, pausing to nod at a shopkeeper opening her doors. He looked like any other retiree on a morning walk. Pleasant. Harmless. Part of the scenery.

She pulled her journal from her bag and flipped to the pages where she'd sketched the overnight symbols from the dig site. Tiger pride ward signatures. Interlocking crescents, vertical bisecting lines, the precise geometry of someone who understood territorial magic at an expert level.

She looked at the door Rydan Ashkar had just walked through, then back at her sketches before she finished her coffee and went to find Nora.

16

CRISS

Criss was halfway through a sandwich on Kieran's porch when Emmett's truck pulled into the driveway.

He wouldn't have thought much of it, Emmett stopped by regularly to coordinate with Kieran on council business, except that Emmett didn't get out of the truck right away. He sat behind the wheel for a good thirty seconds with his phone pressed to his ear, and even from the porch Criss could see the tension in the set of his broad shoulders. When he finally climbed out, his stormy gray-blue eyes swept the property as if calculating the mood.

"Kieran inside?" Emmett asked, crossing the yard.

"Kitchen." Criss took another bite of his sandwich. "Everything good?"

Emmett gave him the kind of look that answered the question and went inside. The screen door slapped shut behind him.

Criss chewed slowly. He could hear them through the open kitchen window, not every word but enough. Emmett's low voice carried the clipped cadence of someone delivering a briefing, and Kieran's responses were short. Then Emmett said a name that stopped Criss mid-bite.

"Rydan Ashkar showed up yesterday. Says he's consulting on the Ward dig in an advisory capacity, but he's never set foot in Hollow Oak in the six years I've been on the council. Now he's suddenly concerned about historical preservation."

"Where's he staying?" Kieran's voice.

"Not the inn. He's got a place outside town, past the northern ridge. Old property, hasn't been occupied in years."

"And you believe the advisory story?"

"I believe he said it. Whether I believe it is a different question."

Criss set his sandwich down. Rydan Ashkar. The name from the ledger, the one attached to the directive about adjusted records and relocated families. The name that had been scrubbed from every post-1943 entry in the Holt family history.

He was here. In Hollow Oak. Consulting on Stephanie's dig.

The kitchen conversation shifted to logistics and Criss stopped listening. He grabbed his jacket off the porch chair and headed for the trail into town, calling back through the screen door that he was picking up something from the Mercantile.

Main Street was quiet in the early afternoon, the post-lunch lull where shopkeepers restocked and the Griddle & Grind shifted from the breakfast rush to Twyla's afternoon tea service. Criss slowed as he reached the town square, scanning faces and storefronts without being obvious about it. He didn't know what Rydan Ashkar looked like, but the man was a tiger shifter and Criss's own tiger would recognize pride scent if he got close enough.

He was passing the learning center when he heard it. A woman's voice, bright and professional, calling out "Good afternoon, Elder Ashkar" as a figure emerged from the building's side entrance.

The man who stepped into the afternoon light was tall for his age, straight-backed, moving with the careful economy of someone whose body had once been powerful and still remembered how. Silver-dark hair brushed back from a lined face, amber eyes paler than Criss's own, clothes that were simple but precise in the way expensive things are when they don't need to advertise. He carried a leather-bound book under one arm.

Criss followed him.

He told himself he was just observing. Getting a look at the man whose name had appeared in erased records and cut pages. Satisfying a curiosity that had been gnawing at him since he'd sat in Kieran's study staring at sixteen years of missing history. He wasn't confronting anyone. He wasn't starting anything. He was just walking in the same direction as an old man on a public street.

Rydan turned off Main onto a narrower path that led toward the northern edge of town, past the last row of shops and into the transitional zone where cobblestone gave way to packed earth and the tree line pressed closer. It was quieter here, fewer people, the sounds of town muffled by distance and the thick canopy overhead.

Criss was maybe thirty feet behind when Rydan stopped walking.