38. Silas
Oath of Stone:
Etch in earth. Truth binds forever.
The flight from Willowbrook to Chicago takes forty-five minutes on a Council charter.
I spend the entire time staring out the window at the patchwork of farmland below, turning over everything we’ve found.
Victor Ash’s wards. The sealed records. The bonding failures.
The wall in my memory where my mother’s death should be.
By the time the plane touches down at O’Hare, I’ve constructed about a dozen theories and none of them fit.
The Council building occupies the top four floors of a glass tower on Michigan Avenue.
I badge in at the ground-floor security checkpoint—the badge still works, which tells me my access hasn’t been revoked yet—and take the elevator to thirty-two.
The doors open onto a hallway of polished marble and brass fixtures, the kind of architecture designed to intimidate.
Helena’s office is at the end of the corridor. Her assistant isn’t at the desk, which means either it’s lunch or something has gone wrong. Given the look on Helena’s face when I push open her door, it’s the latter.
She’s standing behind her desk, papers in one hand, phone in the other, her jaw clenched so tight I can see the muscle jumping.
She’s wearing her Council uniform—tailored blazer, pressed trousers, hair pulled back in a severe knot—but the effect is undermined by the flush on her cheeks and the barely contained fury in her eyes.
“Get out,” she says, assuming I’m the person she was just yelling at on the phone.
“It’s me.”
She looks up. The fury doesn’t fade, but it shifts, rearranging itself into something more complicated.
“Silas. What the hell are you doing here? You’re supposed to be in Willowbrook.”
“I need to talk to you.”
“I’m in the middle of—”
“Helena. Please.”
Something in my voice makes her pause. She sets the phone down, drops the papers on the desk, and sits. She doesn’t invite me to sit.
That’s fine. I don’t want to sit.
“I just got out of a meeting with Marcus Deveraux,” she says, and the name comes out like a curse.
“He’s been pressuring the regional representatives for months about the TrueBond implementation numbers.
We’re not meeting projections in Willowbrook.
Unbonded Omegas aren’t using the app. Bond registrations are flatlining. He wants to know why.”
“Why does Marcus care about Willowbrook so much?” I ask.
“Because he owns TrueBond,” she says. “But that's only part of it.” She pins me with a look.
“Three years ago, he personally funded the Rift monitoring expansion. The sensors, the data collection, all of it. His money, his equipment, his analysts.” My brain catches on that.
“Why would a dating app developer fund Rift monitoring?”
“Because the Council commissioned it, and Deveraux bid on the contract. It’s not complicated, Silas. He’s a businessman. He saw an opportunity, and he took it.”
“But why would he care about Rift data?”
Helena exhales through her nose. “He doesn’t care about the data.
He cares about the correlation. Omegas in high-Rift areas have lower bonding success rates.
Lower bonding rates mean lower TrueBond adoption.
Lower adoption means less revenue. He wants the Rift stabilized so his platform can work the way it’s supposed to. ”
“That’s circular. The Rift destabilizes Omegas, and Omegas can’t bond because of the Rift, and the solution is to stabilize the Rift so Omegas can bond on an app that only exists because Omegas need help bonding?”
“I didn’t say it made sense. I said that’s what he wants.”
I lean against the wall. The pieces are moving, shifting, but they still won’t line up. Marcus Deveraux. TrueBond. Rift monitoring. Victor Ash’s hidden wards. The sealed family records.
“Helena, I need to ask you something, and I need you to answer me honestly.”
“I always answer you honestly.”
“You don’t. You answer me correctly. There’s a difference.”
Her expression flickers. “What do you want to know?”
“How did Mom die?”
The question lands in the room like a stone in still water. Helena goes very still.
“Silas—”
“How did she die? I can’t remember. I realized it two days ago. I’ve gone over it a thousand times in my head, and there’s nothing there. Just a blank space where the memory should be. And I know I used to know. I know someone told me, and I believed them, and now I can’t find the belief anymore.”
Helena stands. She walks to the window, her back to me, her arms crossed. Outside, Chicago sprawls in every direction—glass and steel and lake water glinting in the afternoon sun.
“She died in a road accident,” Helena says. “Car crash on Lake Shore Drive. Wet pavement, lost control, hit the barrier. You were at home with Dad when we got the call.”
“But that’s not what I remember, because I don’t remember anything. There’s a wall, Helena. A clean, smooth wall where a traumatic memory should be. And I’ve been doing this job long enough to know that walls like that don’t build themselves.”
She doesn’t turn around.
“Helena. I need you to listen to me. Not as my boss. Not as our father’s protege. As my sister. Just my sister. Can you do that?”
Her shoulders tense. When she speaks, her voice is different—smaller, stripped of the Council polish.
“I was fifteen. You were ten. Mom had been sick for a while—we both knew that, even if no one said it out loud. But she was getting better. The treatments were working. And then one night she didn’t come home, and Dad told us there’d been an accident.”
“And you believed him.”
“I had no reason not to. Dad was grieving. We all were. The funeral happened, the cards stopped coming, and we moved on. That’s what you do.”
“That’s what you do when the story makes sense. But something doesn’t make sense here, and I think you know it.”
She turns around. Her eyes are bright, but her jaw is set.
“You’re asking me to question our father. The man who raised us after Mom died. The man who got me this position, who trained you, who—”
“The man who sent me to Willowbrook with a mission that doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. The man whose office sealed the Ash family records. The man who sat across from me at my commissioning and told me Omegas were too biologically unstable to serve on the Council.”
Helena flinches. Actually flinches, like I’ve struck her.
“Silas—”
“Someone altered my memory, Helena. That’s not a theory.
That’s a fact. And the only people with access to memory alteration are blood witches.
Council-sanctioned blood witches who operate under direct orders from regional representatives or above.
Our father is a regional representative.
Our mother died, and I can’t remember how, and a blood witch erased the memory. Do the math.”
The room is silent. Helena’s breathing has gone shallow, her chest rising and falling too fast.
“You’re asking me to believe that our father killed our mother and then erased your memory of it.”
“I’m asking you to consider it.”
“That’s insane.”
“Is it? Victor Ash built hidden wards that fed a Rift for decades, and no one noticed. Bonds have been failing in Willowbrook for years, and no one really investigated. The Council has been pushing TrueBond on unbonded Omegas in a town where bonds physically can’t take, and no one asked why.
The whole system is designed to produce a specific outcome—unbonded Omegas, unstable magic, a dependent population that needs the Council to fix a problem the Council created.
None of that is insane. It’s just evil.”
Helena sits down heavily. She looks older than her thirty-four years. There are lines around her eyes that I don’t remember seeing before.
“You don’t understand,” she says quietly. “You don’t understand what you’re accusing people of.”
“Then help me understand.”
She’s quiet for a long time. The clock on the wall ticks. Outside, a siren wails somewhere in the distance.
“When Mom died,” Helena says slowly, “Dad changed. He became harder. More focused. He threw himself into Council work, and he brought us with him. You were young enough to adapt. I was old enough to see what was happening, but I didn’t have a choice. He was all we had.”
“Helena—”
“I’m an Omega, Silas.”
The words hit me like a physical blow. I stare at her, certain I’ve misheard.
“What?”
“An Omega. I’ve been on suppressants since I was sixteen.
The day after Mom’s funeral, Dad put me on them and told me what would happen if anyone found out.
An Omega on the Council was unthinkable.
An unbonded Omega even more so. He said he was protecting me.
He said the suppressants would let me have the career I wanted without the limitations of my biology. ”
The room tilts. Every assumption I’ve held about my sister—about my family, about the trajectory that led us both to the Council—crumbles and reassembles into something unrecognizable.
“You’ve been hiding this for eighteen years.”
“I’ve been surviving for eighteen years. There’s a difference.”
“And the bonding failures in Willowbrook. The suppressants that aren’t working. The heats that are coming early—”
“A side effect. I’ve been reading the reports.
The same thing that’s breaking the bonds is degrading the suppressant formulas.
Whatever is happening with the Rift is affecting all Omega biology, not just the unbonded ones.
If it gets worse, I’ll be exposed. Every hidden Omega in Chicago will be exposed. ”
She looks at me, and for the first time, I see it—the fear she’s been carrying, the exhaustion underneath the ambition, the cost of eighteen years of pretending to be something she’s not.
“The Rift isn’t just destabilizing Willowbrook,” I say, the pieces finally clicking into place. “It’s a power source. The magic that bleeds through—it doesn’t dissipate. It goes somewhere. It’s being collected.”
“Collected by whom?”