Chapter 10 Last Dire’s Ashes
LAST DIRE'S ASHES
GIDEON
The floor had disappeared beneath old texts, copied records, hand-annotated pages from the council archives I'd spent fifteen years quietly stealing because men like my father made a habit of burning history they found inconvenient.
Bloodline charts inked by hands long dead, following the thread of dire lineage through generations until the thread just stopped.
Cut off or buried. No ceremony. Just gone.
I hadn't slept. My tea had gone cold twice. I'd refilled it once and forgotten to drink it.
My chest ached. The soul-stitches I'd made yesterday morning were already fraying at the edges, pulled loose by the sheer amount of magic I'd been burning through. Every time I reached for power to check a ward, to verify a protection spell, to do anything useful, I felt them tear a little wider.
You're killing yourself. Slowly. One spell at a time.
I dragged my attention back to the bloodline records.
Daniel's line was well-documented through four generations.
Head Alphas left paper trails. Every succession recorded, every significant pack event catalogued.
Ronan's name appeared regularly through the earlier records—a brother in good standing, a secondary fighter, present at pack events with the comfortable frequency of a man who belonged.
And then his name stopped.
There was a gap in the records spanning three weeks. Unusual for a pack that documented everything. Then a single entry, terse and final, in handwriting I recognized.
R. Callahan. Scouting raid, northern perimeter. Confirmed deceased. Body recovered and interred. Closed matter.
Closed matter.
Someone closed it. Someone made the decision that questions stopped here, that grief was allowed to begin and the record was allowed to end.
I sat with that entry for a long time.
The thing about closed matters was what they didn't say. No witness names. No specifics of the raid. No account of how the body had been identified. Just certainty, delivered in three words, by a man who worked for my father.
Fuck.
I pulled the adjacent file. Inside was a statement. Hand-written. The paper was damaged at the edges, water-stained, folded and unfolded so many times the creases had worn thin.
The name at the top was a border patrol scout I didn't recognize.
I read it once. Sat very still. Read it again.
The raid hadn't been a scouting mission gone wrong.
The border scout described it with the halting specificity of someone who'd never stopped seeing what they'd seen: a coordinated strike by people he didn't recognize, carrying instruments he didn't have names for, moving with focused purpose.
They'd been looking for someone. They'd known exactly which wolf to separate from the group.
The target had been the last living dire.
That's what the scout called him. The last living dire.
The scout described Ronan going down fighting. Described waiting, hidden, for the group to clear the area.
When he finally moved, Ronan's body was gone.
Not taken visibly. Just absent. The ground held evidence of a fight and nothing else. No tracks. No blood trail. Just a space where a wolf had fallen and then stopped being there.
The burned body that appeared in pack records afterward had never been verified by anyone who could confirm it.
The raid was a trap. Ronan was the target. And someone made sure that even if the trap was noticed, the trail led nowhere.
I sat on my bedroom floor surrounded by paper and felt the cold settle into my bones.
Someone had known what Ronan was long before Hollow Pines did. Someone with resources and patience and access to information that should have been impossible to get. Someone who'd wanted the last living dire badly enough to engineer a disappearance that held for thirty years.
I stood. Grabbed my coat and walked out.
I heard him before I saw him.
The sound of an axe finding wood had a rhythm when the person swinging knew what they were doing. Steady, unhurried, automatic. I followed the sound through the trees and found Ronan in a clearing where the pack kept winter firewood, splitting logs with focused economy.
He was wearing a flannel the color of pine bark, sleeves rolled to his elbows despite the cold. The top two buttons were open and the fabric pulled across his shoulders every time he raised the axe.
Don't stare. You're here for a reason. A reason that has nothing to do with—
The axe came down. The log split clean. Ronan crouched to toss the halves onto the pile and his flannel rode up at the back.
Fuck.
I looked at the sky instead. Which was beige and unhelpful.
You're a witch of considerable age and experience. You are not getting hard over a man splitting firewood. You have dignity. You have professional standards. You have—
The flannel pulled across his back again when he reset the next log.
—apparently lost your goddamn mind.
I shifted my weight. Thought about the bloodline records. The council archives. The cold bedroom floor. Anything that lived in a different part of my brain than the part currently cataloging the exact width of Ronan's shoulders.
It wasn't even a particularly remarkable flannel.
This is not a reasonable response to a flannel.
He knew I was there. He brought the axe down once more, splitting the log cleanly, then set it aside and turned to look at me without appearing surprised.
“Gideon,” he said.
Say something. Words. In a sequence that makes sense.
“I was walking,” I said.
Ronan picked up another log. Positioned it. Brought the axe down.
The flannel pulled across his back again.
For fuck's sake.
I stood at the edge of the clearing and didn't leave. We both understood I wasn't going to.
After a while he said, without looking at me, “You've been avoiding me.”
He set the axe against the woodpile. Turned to face me. His expression was guarded in ways it hadn't been in his apartment. Carefully even. The face of a man who'd decided that openness was a resource he couldn't keep spending on someone who kept walking out the door.
That landed harder than I wanted it to.
“If you're scared of me,” he said, “just say it.”
“I'm not scared of you,” I said. “I got scared of myself. Of what I felt standing that close to you and not being able to do a damn thing about it. So I left. Which wasn't fair.”
Ronan looked at me steadily. The guarded expression didn't move, but behind it a recalibration happened.
“You left,” he said. “Didn't say anything. Just went.”
“I know.”
“That's not an explanation.”
“No. It's just what happened. And I'm sorry for it.”
He studied me for a long moment. “You gonna tell me what actually happened? What made you bolt like that?”
I should've expected the question. Should've had an answer ready that wasn't a half-truth dressed up in careful phrasing.
“My magic reacted to yours in a way I wasn't expecting. Felt like it was going to pull me under if I didn't back off. So I did.”
It wasn't entirely a lie. The magic had reacted. Just not the way I was describing. Not in a way that threatened me.
In a way that threatened him.
Ronan's expression didn't change, but I felt the tether pull tight. A sensation like pressure against my ribs, skepticism threaded through the bond in a way that had nothing to do with words. He didn't believe me. Not completely.
But he didn't push.
“Okay,” he said.
The tether eased slightly, though the doubt didn't leave it entirely.
I hated that I couldn't give him the truth. Hated that the curse kept my mouth locked around the words that mattered, that the only answer I could offer was this threadbare excuse that satisfied neither of us.
A log shifted in the pile. A bird moved in the canopy.
“Sit down,” Ronan said finally. He gestured toward the fallen log at the edge of the clearing. “You look like hell.”
“I haven't slept.”
“I know. Sit anyway.”
The log was cold through my coat, the bark rough and real. Ronan sat beside me. Not pressed close but near enough that I was aware of the heat coming off him.
Wolf. Running hot. Always running hot. Stop noticing.
Ronan set another log on the stump and split it clean in one swing. The axe head bit deep into the wood beneath with a solid thunk that echoed off the trees.
“You wanna try?” he asked, not looking up.
“Absolutely not.”
“Why not?”
“Because I'm a witch, not a lumberjack. I have other skills.”
“Yeah?” Ronan straightened and held out the axe handle toward me. “What skills?”
“Intellectual ones.”
His mouth twitched. “So you're saying you can't do it.”
“I'm saying I don't need to prove anything by swinging a sharp object at wood.”
“Right. Because you can't.”
I looked at him. At the challenge written plainly across his face, dry and unassuming but absolutely deliberate. At the axe still extended in my direction like an invitation I was too smart to accept.
“Fine,” I said. “Give it here.”
He handed it over. Our fingers brushed against the handle and the contact sent a jolt straight through me that had nothing to do with magic and everything to do with the fact that his hands were rough and warm and I needed to get a grip on myself before this became obvious.
The axe was heavier than I'd expected. I adjusted my stance and tried to remember if I'd ever actually done this before.
“You're holding it wrong,” Ronan said.
“I'm holding it fine.”
“You're choking up too high. You need to slide your top hand down for more leverage.”
I adjusted my grip. “Like this?”
“Yeah. Now widen your stance. You're gonna throw your back out standing like that.”
I widened my stance. Felt his eyes on me, tracking the adjustments, and tried very hard not to think about the fact that he was watching the way I moved.
“Okay,” Ronan said. “Now just bring it up over your head and let gravity do the work. Don't force it. Let the weight of the blade pull it down.”
I lifted the axe. Brought it down.