Chapter 16 Criss
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.
"You can come closer, young Holt. I could smell you from the square."
Criss's tiger went rigid. Not with fear but with the instinctive recognition of a dominant presence, the animal's awareness that it was in the company of something older and more controlled than itself. An alpha.
He closed the distance and stopped about ten feet away.
Up close, Rydan looked exactly like what he was: a man who had outlived the era he'd shaped and was watching the next generation fumble with the pieces he'd arranged.
Those pale amber eyes took Criss in with a single unhurried sweep, from his boots to his face, and whatever they catalogued didn't seem to impress him.
"Criss Holt," Rydan said. "Leora's son. You look like your grandfather."
"You knew my grandfather?"
"I knew most of the Holts who mattered." The phrasing was deliberate, and Criss heard the implication clearly: the ones who mattered, and by extension, the ones who didn't. "Your cousin has done well for himself here.
Kieran carries the family reputation with more discipline than I'd expected from someone with his background. "
"His background."
"Foster child. No pride structure. Raised by a human widow." Rydan said it without malice, the way someone might list items on a resume they found underwhelming. "And yet he's become indispensable. Credit where it's due."
"I'll pass along the compliment."
"Please do." Rydan shifted the book under his arm and regarded Criss with the patient focus of a man who had already decided how this conversation would end.
"And what about you? What brings you to Hollow Oak?
Kieran's charity? Your mother's concern?
Or are you here for a reason you haven't figured out yet? "
"I'm visiting family."
"For two months."
"I'm thorough."
There was something like the acknowledgment of a move in a game he'd been playing much longer than Criss had been alive. "You've been reading the family records. I can see it in the way you're looking at me. You found the gaps."
Criss didn't blink. "What gaps?"
"The ones between 1927 and 1943. The missing pages. The adjusted entries." Rydan's voice didn't change pitch or temperature. He could have been discussing the weather. "I'd be disappointed if you hadn't noticed. Holts have always been observant, even the ones who pretend not to be."
"So you know about the records."
"I wrote most of them." Rydan let that sit for a moment. "The ones that remain, at least. The originals served a different purpose, and that purpose expired long before you were born."
"What purpose?"
"Stability. Continuity. The preservation of a community that was one revelation away from tearing itself apart.
" Rydan took a step closer, and despite the man's age, Criss felt his tiger brace.
The dominance coming off the elder wasn't physical. It was something deeper, the authority of someone who had shaped the world Criss was standing in and his tiger couldn’t help but acknowledge it.
"Your bloodline survived, Criss. Not by accident.
Not by strength. By silence. Your ancestors understood that some truths are more dangerous than the lies that replace them, and they chose survival over principle. "
"Chose, or were told?"
"Does it matter? The result was the same. The Holts endured. The community stabilized. And the things that needed to stay buried stayed buried." Rydan's pale eyes held his without wavering. "Until now."
"The archaeologist."
"Miss Ward is a talented woman with a gift for hearing things the ground would rather keep quiet.
She is also, unfortunately, incapable of understanding that some doors are locked for everyone's protection.
" Rydan tilted his head slightly. "I've spoken with her.
She is not inclined to listen. Which brings me to you. "
"What about me?"
"You're a Holt. You carry the name, even if you've spent your adult life avoiding what it means.
And I suspect you've developed a personal interest in Miss Ward that complicates your judgment.
" He raised a hand before Criss could respond.
"I'm not asking for details. I'm asking you to consider your responsibilities. "
"My responsibilities to who?"
"To your family. To the pride that sheltered your bloodline when others were not so fortunate.
To the community that exists today because difficult men made difficult choices seventy years ago.
Your cousin built something here. Your mother sacrificed her comfort to give you options.
And the legacy they've both invested in rests on a foundation that Miss Ward's shovel is about to crack. "
Criss stood in the dappled shade of the path and felt something cold settle into place. Rydan wasn't asking him for help.
The old man looked at him and saw exactly what everyone else saw: the charming one, the careless one, the Holt who could be nudged with flattery or sidelined with guilt. A tool if useful. A liability if not.
"I appreciate the history lesson," Criss said.
"I hope you do." Rydan inclined his head with the same polite, non-deferential gesture Criss had a feeling he gave to everyone. "Enjoy your visit, Criss. And give my regards to Kieran."
He turned and continued up the path toward the northern ridge, unhurried, book tucked under his arm, disappearing into the shadows of the tree line.
Criss’s tiger was coiled tight. He had just been dismissed as if he was a young cub asking nonsense questions.
His entire life, people had looked at him and decided he was easy to handle.
His mother managed him with guilt. Kieran managed him with patience.
Women managed him by playing along. And now a man who had erased history and rewritten his family's legacy had looked him in the face and decided he wasn't worth worrying about.
He started walking back toward town. The afternoon sun was warm on his shoulders and the birds were loud in the canopy and Hollow Oak hummed with its usual quiet magic around him. Everything looked the same as it had an hour ago.
But something had shifted. Not in the town or the woods or the path under his boots, but somewhere behind his ribs where the jokes usually lived and the deflections stayed loaded and ready.
Rydan Ashkar was hiding something and it involved Criss’s family. And Kieran wouldn’t talk about it when he had asked initially.
If it hadn’t peaked his curiosity then, it did now. And as much as Criss didn’t care to think about it, it involved Stephanie, and that may have been the main source of his determination.