Chapter 18 Criss
CRISS
The thing about Rydan Ashkar's words was that they worked like slow poison. Not the kind that hit you all at once and knocked you flat, but the kind that seeped, finding the cracks and settling in.
Criss had spent the afternoon splitting firewood behind the cabin because it was the only thing he'd found that made his brain shut up for more than five minutes.
Swing, crack, split, stack. Repeat. The rhythm was good and the ache in his shoulders was better, and as long as he kept moving, he didn't have to sit with the cold knot that had taken up residence in his chest since Rydan had looked at him and decided he was obedient.
Your bloodline survived. Not by accident. Not by strength. By silence.
Swing. Crack. Split.
I knew most of the Holts who mattered.
The log exploded under the axe and both halves went flying. Criss buried the blade in the stump and stood there breathing hard, sweat cooling on his neck despite the evening chill.
It had been over a week since the night at the Silver Fang.
Over a week since Stephanie Ward had left his bed before dawn without a word, and in the days since, she'd managed to be exactly nowhere he was.
Not at the Griddle & Grind when he stopped in for coffee.
Not at the Mercantile when he ran errands for Kieran.
Not on any trail or street or corner of Hollow Oak where their paths might have naturally crossed.
She was either avoiding him with surgical precision or the universe was collaborating, and given his luck, it was probably both.
He'd told himself it didn't bother him. He'd told himself that plenty of times, and it hadn't gotten any more convincing.
The truth was that her absence had left a gap in his peripheral vision that his tiger kept trying to fill, orienting east toward the ridge every time Criss let his attention slip, like a compass he couldn't degauss.
And now Rydan Ashkar was in town, asking questions about the dig, meeting with Steph, making veiled references to the Holt family's complicity in whatever the hell had been scrubbed from those ledgers.
The man had as much as told Criss that his bloodline owed its survival to looking the other way, and then suggested that Criss's "personal interest" in Stephanie was a liability.
Which meant Rydan knew about them. Or suspected. Or didn't care either way and had mentioned it just to watch Criss flinch.
He pulled the axe free and set another log on the stump.
The sky was darkening fast, the last light catching the treetops while the ground fell into blue shadow.
Somewhere inside the main house, he could hear Sage laughing and the low murmur of Kieran and Freya talking over dinner.
Warm sounds. Family sounds. The kind of thing Criss usually found comforting and tonight found unbearable.
He needed to talk to Kieran about Rydan.
Not the vague, half-deflected conversation from the study, but a real one.
If Kieran knew who Ashkar was and what he'd done to the family records, then his "leave it alone" carried more weight than Criss had given it at the time.
And if Kieran didn't know, then he needed to.
Criss stacked the last of the split wood and headed for the main house. He made it as far as the back porch before his tiger locked up.
One second he was climbing the steps, hand on the railing, mind already forming the opening line of a conversation he didn't want to have. The next, every muscle in his body seized and his vision sharpened as his tiger surged forward with a force that nearly drove him to his knees.
East. The pull was east, violent and absolute, like a hook set in his sternum and yanked. Not the lazy compass drift he'd been ignoring for days. This was urgent. This was fear, not his own but something transmitted through a channel he didn't understand and couldn't close, and it tasted danger.
He was off the porch and running before the thought fully formed.
The trail into the eastern woods was dark, the canopy blocking what little twilight remained, and his human eyes couldn't keep up with the speed his body was demanding.
He stripped his shirt mid-stride, kicked off his boots, and let the shift take him.
The change was faster than usual, his tiger ripping through skin and bone with an urgency that bypassed the usual controlled transition.
One stride he was a man running barefoot on packed earth.
The next he was four hundred pounds of muscle and striped fur tearing through the underbrush with eyes that turned the dark woods into a landscape of silver and shadow.
His paws barely touched the ground. Branches whipped past his flanks.
The scent trail hit him like a wall: rain-soaked earth, green herbs, the fading traces of coffee and leather and her, threaded through with something acrid and wrong that made his tiger snarl.
Fresh, active magic. And it reeked af malice intent.
He covered the distance to the basin in minutes and exploded through the tree line just as the ground opened up.
The trench along the basin's western edge collapsed inward with a sound like a giant exhaling, stone and earth folding into a void that hadn't existed ten seconds ago.
Dust and debris blew outward in a cloud that whited out the basin, and through it he could hear her, not screaming but swearing, loud and fierce, scrambling away from the collapse zone with her field pack clutched to her chest.
Steph emerged from the dust cloud coughing and stumbling, headlamp still on, illuminating the destruction in a narrow beam that swung wildly as she moved. She was covered in limestone dust, her dark curls white with it, and she was moving fast toward the oak tree when the second event started.
The ridge face above the chamber entrance groaned.
Not the settling sound of natural stone but a deliberate, grinding protest, as if the rock was being forced apart from inside.
Cracks appeared in the limestone, racing upward from the chamber entrance in patterns too regular to be geological.
Something was pulling the ridge apart, targeting the opening Steph had been working in, and if the face collapsed it would seal the chamber permanently and crush anything in its path. And Steph was directly below it.
Criss's tiger covered the distance in three bounds.
He hit her at full speed, his massive body between her and the ridge, and the impact carried them both behind the oak's root system as the face let go.
Slabs of limestone crashed into the basin where she'd been standing half a second earlier, the impact shaking the ground so hard his teeth rattled.
Dust billowed over them in a choking wave, and he pressed his body over hers, shielding her from the debris that pinged off his hide like thrown gravel.
The collapse lasted maybe fifteen seconds. When it stopped, the silence was enormous.
Criss shifted back. The transition was rougher than usual, his body protesting the rapid change, muscles cramping as bone and sinew reorganized.
He ended up crouched over Steph in the dark, naked and breathing hard, his hands braced on either side of her head and her headlamp shining directly into his face.
"Criss?" Her voice was hoarse from the dust. "What the hell..."
"Are you hurt?"
"I'm... no. I don't think so." She was shaking.
He could feel it through her whole body, the fine tremor of adrenaline and shock.
Her eyes were wide and her hands were gripping his forearms and she hadn't pushed him away yet, which told him exactly how scared she was.
"The trench just collapsed. There was no warning, no energy spike, nothing on the magnetometer or that I could feel. It just went."
"I know." He pulled back enough to give her space but stayed close, scanning the destroyed basin.
The chamber entrance was buried under tons of fallen limestone.
The trench was gone entirely, swallowed into whatever void had opened beneath it.
And the air smelled wrong, that acrid trace of magic still hanging in the dust like smoke after a fire.
"This wasn't geological," Steph said. She was sitting up now, wiping dust from her face with the back of her hand. Her eyes were adjusting, reading the destruction then coming to the realization that this wasn’t a natural incident.
"Trenches don't fold inward like that. And the ridge face, the crack pattern was symmetric. Like it was engineered."
"Yeah."
"Someone triggered this." Her voice had gone flat with that particular angry-calm of a woman. "While I was inside the chamber. Someone waited until I was underground and triggered a collapse designed to seal the entrance."
Criss looked at the buried chamber, at the precision of the destruction in the way the collapse had only targeted exactly the areas where Steph had been working and left the rest of the basin largely intact.
This wasn't random or a warning. It was a message that said I can reach you whenever I want, wherever you are, and there is nothing you can do to stop it.
He thought about Rydan Ashkar walking up that northern path with his book under his arm and his absolute certainty that silence was a virtue.
Testing how far you'll go, his tiger said, or maybe he said it to himself. Testing whether fear will keep you quiet.
Steph was watching him. The shaking hadn't stopped, but it had changed, the sharp edge of terror giving way to something rawer as the adrenaline caught up with her nervous system and flooded in.
Her chest was heaving, dust-coated curls plastered to her neck, and her fingers were still locked around his forearms with a grip that would leave marks.
Then her eyes dropped. Down from his face, across his bare chest, over the hard lines of his stomach and lower, and the realization of exactly how naked he was landed on her face in real time.
"You shifted," she said, voice rough.
"Yeah."
"You're not wearing anything."
"Tends to happen."
Her gaze came back up to his. The fear was still there, written in the rapid pulse he could see hammering in her throat, but something else was bleeding through it now, hot and reckless and alive.
The particular wildness of a body that had just been inches from death and needed proof that it was still here, still breathing, still capable of feeling something other than terror.
Her hand moved from his forearm to the side of his neck. Her palm was warm and gritty with dust and her fingers curled into the hair at his nape, and the touch sent a jolt through him making him harder than he already was.
"I almost died," she whispered.
"You didn't."
"Because of you."
Her thumb traced along his jaw, and Criss held very still because the adrenaline in his own blood was screaming and his tiger was right there, so close to the surface he felt it in his teeth, and the woman underneath him was looking at him like he was the only solid thing left in a world that had just tried to swallow her whole.
"Steph," he said, his voice low, almost hoarse with need.
TThat was all it took before she pulled him down to her.