Chapter 27
CRISS
Since meeting Steph, Criss had seen himself as someone he'd never been before: quiet, deliberate, strategic. Of waking before dawn, masking his scent with the mineral clay Kieran showed him how to use, and tracking an old man's movements through the woods like he'd been doing it his whole life.
Criss had never been patient. He'd been charming, quick, good in a crisis. Patience was Kieran's department. But Kieran didn't know the full scope of what Criss was doing, only pieces, and Criss intended to keep it that way until he had something undeniable in hand.
The evidence had come together slowly. A conversation between Rydan and one of the Cole shifters, recorded on Criss's phone from behind a stone wall, in which Rydan discussed "adjusting the site's stability" to discourage further excavation.
A second recording of Rydan instructing a younger tiger named Beckett to deliver a sealed envelope to the council clerk's office, contents unknown but timing suspicious, two days before Steph's permits had been delayed the first time.
A photograph of Rydan at the dig site at three in the morning, taken from the tree line with the phone's zoom maxed out, showing the elder crouched beside the ward stones with his palms flat on the ground and amber light bleeding between his fingers.
Each piece was small. Together, they built a picture that couldn't be argued away as coincidence or tradition.
The hardest part hadn't been the surveillance.
It had been the rest. Seeing Steph across the square and keeping his distance.
Standing in the Mercantile doorway close enough to touch her and letting his hand drop.
Walking away when his tiger was roaring at him to stay, to tell her everything, to stop playing this game and just be honest.
But honest without proof was just noise. He'd learned that from her, even if she didn't know she'd taught him.
He thought about her constantly. Not the way he used to think about women, idle appreciation, mental replay of good nights, the comfortable cycle of interest and detachment.
This was different. He thought about the way she held her pen when she was writing fast, tucked between her index and middle finger instead of the standard grip.
The way she said "fascinating" when she meant it and "interesting" when she was being polite.
He thought about the kind of man she deserved. Someone steady, who followed through and who didn't just show up in a crisis but stayed after it passed, when the work was boring and the days were long and the only thing required was reliability.
He'd never been that man. But he wanted to be. For the first time in his life, he wanted to be something specific, and the clarity of it was terrifying grounding.
Kieran noticed the change. Didn't say much about it, because Kieran communicated in silences and well-timed glances, but Criss caught him watching one morning while Criss reviewed his notes at the kitchen table before dawn.
"You're up early again," Kieran said.
"Got things to do."
"You've had things to do for two weeks. You haven't told me what they are."
"When I'm done, you'll know everything."
Kieran poured his coffee. "Just be careful."
Careful. That was the word Criss carried with him into the woods every morning.
Careful with the clay mask on his skin. Careful with his distance from Rydan's property.
Careful with the phone in his jacket pocket, recording app running, storage filling up with the slow accumulation of a case that would end this.
Today was different. His tiger had been pulling toward the ridge since before dawn, the directional tug stronger than usual, insistent.
He knew Steph was at the site. She'd been going back regularly, working the chamber, and his tiger tracked her presence with the passive precision of something that couldn't turn off even if he asked it to.
She was there. She was safe. That was the baseline.
But now Rydan was moving too.
Criss had learned the elder's patterns. Rydan stayed at the old property north of town, ventured into Hollow Oak proper two or three times a week, and spent the rest of his time in a kind of holding pattern.
Conserving energy. Each ward manipulation, Criss had realized, cost him.
The collapse at the dig site. The ward attack in the square.
These weren't casual acts of magic. They were massive expenditures of power from a man whose reserves weren't what they'd been decades ago.
He needed recovery time between events, sometimes a full week before his movements regained their usual precision.
He'd been recovering for twelve days now. And this morning, he'd left the property at four a.m., heading east.
Toward the ridge. Toward her.
Criss followed at a distance, clay-masked, silent.
Rydan moved faster than usual. He carried no book today.
His hands were bare, fingers flexing at his sides, and even from fifty yards back Criss could see the faint amber glow building in his palms. Drawing power from the old wards as he passed through them, siphoning energy from the land itself.
Criss pulled out his phone. Recording. Timestamp. GPS active.
Rydan reached the basin as grey dawn light filtered through the canopy.
Steph's portable lights glowed from inside the chamber entrance.
She was already underground, deep in the carved walls and the treaty stone, doing the work she'd been doing every day for weeks.
She wouldn't hear anything from in there.
Wouldn't feel the vibrations until the stone was already moving.
Rydan walked to the center of the basin and knelt. His palms pressed flat against the fractured stone. The amber glow spread outward, flowing into the cracks, following fault lines, seeking every structural weakness his previous attacks had created. The ground began to vibrate.
This wasn't a targeted section meant to scare her off.
The energy was feeding into every fracture simultaneously, the ridge face, the chamber ceiling, the walls.
He was going to bring all of it down. The entire chamber buried under a thousand tons of limestone.
The treaty stone, the dual inscriptions, every piece of evidence she'd documented. And Steph with it.
She was inside and he was going to seal her in and let the mountain do what his hands couldn't. No body to explain.
No evidence to suppress. Just a tragic collapse at an unstable site, an archaeologist who'd been warned about the danger and refused to listen.
Clean. Final. The kind of accident that closed investigations instead of opening them.
Criss's vision went white hit, but not with rage. Something colder. His tiger didn't roar or snarl or surge. It locked into a stillness so complete that every sound in the forest amplified, every scent sharpened, and his body moved with a precision that bypassed thought entirely.
He stepped out of the tree line.
"That's enough, Rydan."
The elder's hands stilled. The amber glow dimmed but didn't disappear. He looked up at Criss, and the flat patience cracked. Surprise.
"You've been following me."
"I have." Criss held up his phone. The red recording indicator pulsed on the screen.
"This one makes seven. I've got you on audio discussing site destabilization with Marvin Cole.
I've got you on camera performing ward manipulation at three in the morning.
And I've got your courier delivering documents to the council clerk two days before Stephanie's permits were frozen.
" He kept his voice level despite the ice in his veins.
"And now I've got you channeling enough power to collapse an entire chamber with a woman inside it. "
Rydan rose slowly. The amber light faded from his hands. He stood in the basin surrounded by cracked stone and his own damage, and looked at Criss with an expression beyond anger, but still calculated. And that sent chills down his spine.
"You don't understand what you're interfering with," Rydan said.
"I understand you were about to kill her."
"I was protecting this community from exposure that would—"
"You were going to bury her alive. Don't dress it up. Don't give me tradition or preservation or the greater good. You were going to murder a woman to keep a secret, and I watched you do it."
The word murder landed in the basin like a stone in still water. Rydan's jaw tightened. His pale amber eyes flickered to the phone in Criss's hand, to the chamber entrance where Steph's lights still glowed, to the tree line behind Criss where escape routes lay.
"The recording is already backed up," Criss said, reading the calculation. "Kieran has a copy. If something happens to me or my phone, it goes to Emmett within the hour."
Rydan went still. Not the controlled stillness of authority but of a man who'd run out of moves.
"What do you want?" His voice had gone flat.
"I want you gone. Out of Hollow Oak. Away from the site, away from the council, away from her." Criss stepped closer. "These recordings go to Emmett tomorrow. All seven. He takes it to the council or the regional authority. I don't care which. But you're done here."
"The pride will turn on you."
"Some already have. The rest will see the evidence and decide for themselves."
"Your mother—"
"My mother raised me alone because men like you decided what our family was allowed to be. She'll survive your disapproval."
Rydan held his gaze. The dawn light was growing stronger, turning the dust in the basin gold. Without the amber glow in his hands, without the authority of hidden knowledge and unchallenged power, he looked exactly like what he was. An old man standing in a field of his own wreckage.
"You're destroying everything I built," he said. But the conviction was thin. He heard it himself, and the sound of his own authority failing did more damage than anything Criss could have said.
"You built it on a lie. It was already destroyed it yourself by destroying and silencing others. In my digging, I found out more truth that I could have thought, and that will be going into evidence as well."
Rydan looked at the chamber entrance one last time.
The dark opening that held the truth he'd tried three times to erase, still there, still intact.
Then he turned out of the basin toward the northern path.
His back was straight, but something in it had diminished.
The posture of a man leaving a room he'd never enter again.
Criss waited until Rydan disappeared into the tree line before his legs gave out.
He sat down hard on a fallen slab and pressed his hands against his face.
His fingers were trembling. Not from fear.
From the sustained effort of holding steady through a confrontation where the stakes had been a woman buried alive under a mountain, and the sudden gutting release now that it was over.
His tiger settled into quiet. Not coiled. Not alert. Just quiet, in the way an animal rests when the threat to its mate has been eliminated.
"Criss?"
He dropped his hands. Steph was standing at the chamber entrance, headlamp still on, journal in one hand. Dust on her face, clay on her fingers, dark curls escaping the pencil she'd twisted them up with. She was looking at him with an expression caught between confusion and alarm.
"What are you doing here?" she asked. "I heard voices."
He looked at her standing in the entrance of the chamber that would have been her grave ten minutes ago. Alive. Whole. Irritated at his presence, because of course she was.
"Criss." Sharper now. "What's going on?"
He pulled out his phone and held it up. "I need to show you something. All of it. And then I need you to decide if you can trust me, because I am done holding any of this back."
She studied him. The phone. His face. The empty basin, the fading scent of someone else's magic in the morning air.
She sat down on the slab beside him.
"Show me."