Chapter 14
CRISS
Kieran had taken Freya and Sage to the Saturday market, which meant Criss had the main house to himself and no one to pretend for.
He'd spent the first hour doing absolutely nothing productive.
Made coffee, burned toast, ate the toast anyway, and stared out the kitchen window at the garden where Freya's herbs grew in neat, labeled rows that made him feel personally attacked by their organization.
His tiger was still doing the thing it had been doing since the night at the tavern, that low-frequency constant buzz of awareness pointed east, toward the ridge, toward her.
He'd stopped fighting it and started ignoring it, which wasn't the same as fixing it but at least required less energy.
She'd been unreasonable yesterday. He'd heard the ground shaking, heard her, and he'd reacted the way any sane person would react when someone was in the middle of a geological event.
The fact that she had a resume full of dangerous fieldwork didn't change the basic physics of falling rock.
But he'd handled it badly, and now he was sitting in his cousin's kitchen replaying the argument for the fourteenth time.
He needed a distraction but he knew if he went outside, he’d wander back and make things worse.
The house had a study off the main hallway, a small room Kieran used for council-adjacent work and the kind of record-keeping that came with being the most reliable tiger shifter in Hollow Oak for the better part of fifteen years.
Bookshelves lined two walls, filled with a mix of practical manuals, magical theory texts, and a section of leather-bound ledgers that Criss had walked past a dozen times without ever opening.
He figured he may as well bore himself to death.
The ledgers were Holt records. Family lineage, pride history, property transfers, alliance documentation.
Kieran kept them because someone had to, and because Miriam had impressed on him early that knowing where you came from was the first step in deciding where you were going.
Criss had always found that particular philosophy exhausting.
He knew where he came from. A fractured pride, an absent father, a mother who'd spent her life trying to hold the family together through sheer force of will and carefully worded phone calls.
But he was bored, and the ledgers were there, and reading dusty family records was at least more dignified than sitting on the porch thinking about Stephanie Ward's hands.
He pulled the first ledger from the shelf and settled into Kieran's desk chair.
The leather was cracked and the pages smelled like old paper and cedar.
The earliest entries were in formal script, dated to well over a century ago, documenting the Holt bloodline's arrival in the Blue Ridge region and their integration into what would eventually become Hollow Oak's founding supernatural community.
Standard stuff. Names, dates, births, deaths, matings. He scanned through decades of unremarkable family history, noting the patterns: Holts tended to produce strong shifters, serve in advisory or protective roles, and marry within the pride or into allied families. Solid. Respectable. Boring.
Then he hit a gap.
Between 1927 and 1943, there was nothing. Sixteen years of blank pages in a ledger that had been meticulously maintained for every other period. No births recorded, no deaths, no alliances, no property transfers. Just empty space where a decade and a half of family history should have been.
Criss flipped forward. The entries resumed in 1943 with a formal notation about a "restructuring of pride governance" and a list of family heads who'd been "reconfirmed" in their positions.
The language was stiff and bureaucratic in a way that didn't match the rest of the ledger's tone, like someone had written it for an audience rather than for the record.
He pulled the second ledger. Same gap. 1927 to 1943, nothing.
The third ledger, which covered alliance documentation and inter-pride agreements, had the gap too, but this one was different.
Pages hadn't been left blank. They'd been removed.
He could see the ragged edges where sheets had been cut from the binding, neat and deliberate, done with a blade rather than torn.
Someone had physically cut history out of this book.
Criss sat back in the chair and stared at the missing pages. His coffee had gone cold on the desk beside him. The house was quiet, just the tick of the hall clock and the faint rustle of wind through the open study window.
He'd grown up hearing the Holt legacy described in broad, comfortable terms. Strong bloodline.
Proud history. A family that had helped build Hollow Oak and earned its place through service and sacrifice.
His mother talked about it like scripture, something to be honored and aspired to.
Kieran had turned that legacy into action, becoming the Holt who served the town with his hands and his time.
And Criss had avoided it entirely, because living up to a legacy required believing it was worth living up to, and he'd never been convinced.
Now he was looking at evidence that the legacy itself might be fiction. Or at least, heavily edited.
He pulled every ledger from the shelf and spread them across the desk, cross-referencing dates and entries.
The pattern was consistent: every record covering the period between 1927 and 1943 had been altered.
Some were blank. Some had pages removed.
One had entries that had been written over, the original text scraped away and replaced with anodyne summaries that said much and revealed nothing.
The names that appeared after the gap were familiar.
Holts, Ashkars, Thornwells. The families that still held influence in Hollow Oak's supernatural community.
But the names that should have appeared during the gap, the ones that would have connected the pre-1927 lineage to the post-1943 restructuring, were gone.
Criss found one surviving reference, buried in a property transfer record that someone had apparently overlooked. A notation in faded ink: Contested holdings resolved per Elder Ashkar's directive. Dissenting families handled. Records adjusted accordingly.
Records adjusted accordingly.
He read the line three times. Records adjusted. Not lost. Not damaged. Adjusted. Someone had deliberately rewritten this history, and the name attached to the order was Ashkar.
He didn't know an Ashkar. The name wasn't one Kieran had mentioned, and it didn't appear in any of the post-1943 entries. Whoever Elder Ashkar was, they'd been thorough enough to erase their own involvement from the revised records while leaving just enough authority to enforce the changes.
Criss closed the ledgers and sat in the quiet study with his cold coffee. He'd come in here looking for a distraction, and boy had he found one. A whole hole in the foundation of everything his family claimed to be it would appear.
The front door opened and closed. Kieran's boots on the hardwood, followed by the lighter steps of Freya and the scattered patter of small feet that meant Sage had been let loose.
"Criss?" Kieran's voice from the hallway.
"Study."
Kieran appeared in the doorway, a paper bag from the market in one hand and his daughter balanced on his opposite hip.
Sage had her mother's copper hair and her father's hazel eyes, and she immediately reached for Criss with the grabby hands of a toddler who'd decided her cousin was her favorite jungle gym.
"Uncle Criss," she announced, which wasn't his title but was close enough that correcting her felt pointless.
He took her from Kieran and settled her on his knee, where she immediately started pulling at the buttons on his shirt. "Hey, little monster."
Kieran's eyes moved to the ledgers spread across the desk and his expression tightened. "What are you doing?"
"Reading." Criss kept his voice light. "Figured I'd brush up on the family tree. Fascinating stuff. Really riveting genealogy."
Kieran set the market bag on the floor and stepped into the study, his gaze moving across the open ledgers with the careful attention of a man who knew exactly what was in them. "Find anything interesting?"
"Sixteen years of nothing. Between 1927 and 1943, this family apparently didn't exist." Criss bounced Sage on his knee, her giggles filling the small room. "Care to explain that?"
Kieran was quiet for a moment. "I noticed the gaps years ago. Asked Miriam about it. She said some periods of pride history were sealed by the elders for the community's protection."
"Sealed or erased?"
"She didn't elaborate."
"And you didn't push?"
"I had other things to worry about." Kieran's tone was even, but there was a boundary in it, a line drawn. "The records are old, Criss. Whatever happened in that period, it was resolved before either of us was born."
"Resolved, or buried?"
Sage grabbed Criss's nose. He gently redirected her hand and met Kieran's eyes over her copper curls.
His cousin's expression was unreadable, which from Kieran meant it was very readable if you knew where to look.
He wasn't surprised by what Criss had found.
He was surprised that Criss had gone looking.
"Leave it alone," Kieran said.
"Yeah," Criss said, lifting Sage onto his shoulders where she grabbed fistfuls of his golden-brown hair and shrieked with delight. "Maybe."
He carried her to the kitchen for lunch and left the ledgers open on the desk, the gap between 1927 and 1943 staring at the ceiling like a wound that had been stitched closed but never healed.
He wasn't going to leave it alone. He already knew that, especially now that Kerian wanted him to. Whatever was missing seemed to be important enough to keep quiet. The question was what was it?