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"That's my thirty seconds," he said. "I'll leave you alone."

He went into the Mercantile. She stood on the cobblestones holding her batteries and breathing in the last trace of cedar from the air where he'd been.

She took the long way back, past the damaged fountain that was still being repaired, past the Book Nook where the orange cat watched her from the window, past the trailhead that led to the eastern ridge. The afternoon was clear, the air carrying the green sweetness of spring, and Hollow Oak vibrated around her with its usual quiet magic.

She thought about the night at the Silver Fang. How he'd sat beside her without pushing and offered to tell her something about himself that wasn't designed to impress her. The man who had no plans, no direction, no roots, sitting by a fire and being more honest than anyone she'd dated in a decade.

Then there was the dig site. His tiger bursting through the tree line, placing his body between her and a collapsing ridge without a second's hesitation. The shift back, naked and shaking, crouched over her in the dust, his first word was her name. Her skin crawled with goosebumps at the thought.

On top of all that was the pride meeting. She'd heard about it from Twyla, secondhand, the details incomplete. But the shape of it was clear: Criss had stood in front of his own family and challenged an elder who'd spent decades building a lie, and he'd done it knowing it would cost him. Not for glory. Not for her. Because the truth mattered more than comfort, and he'd finally decided to stop pretending he didn’t care about anything.

That was the thing Grant had never understood. That was the thing she'd been looking for without knowing it. Not a man who agreed with her about everything, or one who stepped aside when she needed space, or one who showed up only when invited. She wanted someone who cared about something enough to fight for it even when the fight was ugly. Someone whose convictions weren't borrowed or performative but earned through the specific pain of discovering that the thing you'd been told your whole life was a lie.

Criss hadn't just defied his pride for her. He'd defied them for himself. Because the man he'd been, the charming, rootless, commitment-allergic version, couldn't survive what he'd learned. And the man replacing him was harder to dismiss and harder to resist.

She missed him. She was still angry, still hurt, still carrying the sting of being managed instead of trusted. But underneath all of it, stubborn and persistent, was the simple, inconvenient truth that she missed his voice and his hands and the way he looked at her.

When she finally got to the site, she forced her mind off. Or tried. Focus.

The chamber entrance was still partially blocked from the second collapse, but she'd cleared enough rubble over the past week to access the interior. The treaty stone was waiting, its dual inscriptions patient in the dark. She set up her lights, opened her journal, and began the slow, painstaking work of translating every symbol in both layers.

She worked for ten hours. When she finally emerged, the sun was low and her wrist ached and her journal was full of new translations that confirmed everything she'd suspected and revealed things she hadn't expected.

The original inscription named names. Families who'd been stripped of their territorial magic. Elders who'd authorized the consolidation. And at the center of it, referenced repeatedly was the name she had assumed to find.

Ashkar.

She closed her journal and sat on the ridge in the fading light, looking down at Hollow Oak spread below her, golden and quiet in the evening sun.

She was going to finish this. Every translation, every symbol, every name. She was going to build a record so complete and so undeniable that no amount of curation could erase it again. Because that was all that mattered. It had to be.

27

CRISS

Since meeting Steph, Criss had seen himself as someone he'd never been before: quiet, deliberate, strategic. Of waking before dawn, masking his scent with the mineral clay Kieran showed him how to use, and tracking an old man's movements through the woods like he'd been doing it his whole life.

Criss had never been patient. He'd been charming, quick, good in a crisis. Patience was Kieran's department. But Kieran didn't know the full scope of what Criss was doing, only pieces, and Criss intended to keep it that way until he had something undeniable in hand.

The evidence had come together slowly. A conversation between Rydan and one of the Cole shifters, recorded on Criss's phone from behind a stone wall, in which Rydan discussed "adjusting the site's stability" to discourage further excavation. A second recording of Rydan instructing a younger tiger named Beckett to deliver a sealed envelope to the council clerk's office, contents unknown but timing suspicious, two days before Steph's permits had been delayed the first time. A photograph of Rydan at the dig site at three in the morning, taken from the tree line with the phone's zoom maxed out, showing the elder crouched beside the ward stones with his palms flat on the ground and amber light bleeding between his fingers.

Each piece was small. Together, they built a picture that couldn't be argued away as coincidence or tradition.

The hardest part hadn't been the surveillance. It had been the rest. Seeing Steph across the square and keeping his distance. Standing in the Mercantile doorway close enough to touch her and letting his hand drop. Walking away when his tiger was roaring at him to stay, to tell her everything, to stop playing this game and just be honest.

But honest without proof was just noise. He'd learned that from her, even if she didn't know she'd taught him.

He thought about her constantly. Not the way he used to think about women, idle appreciation, mental replay of good nights, the comfortable cycle of interest and detachment. This was different. He thought about the way she held her pen when she was writing fast, tucked between her index and middle finger instead of the standard grip. The way she said "fascinating" when she meant it and "interesting" when she was being polite.

He thought about the kind of man she deserved. Someone steady, who followed through and who didn't just show up in a crisis but stayed after it passed, when the work was boring and the days were long and the only thing required was reliability.

He'd never been that man. But he wanted to be. For the first time in his life, he wanted to be something specific, and the clarity of it was terrifying grounding.

Kieran noticed the change. Didn't say much about it, because Kieran communicated in silences and well-timed glances, but Criss caught him watching one morning while Criss reviewed his notes at the kitchen table before dawn.

"You're up early again," Kieran said.

"Got things to do."