18. Leo
LEO
Brynn says seven hundred years like it’s a sentence handed down, and then the floor stops screaming and goes silent, and the silence is worse.
I have her in my arms before I decide to move. The mark on her collarbone glows brighter now. Hot under my mouth when I press my lips to it without thinking.
“Leo.” She’s shaking. “The throne. I felt it. It knew me.”
“I felt it too.” I felt the whole resort lurch like a ship hitting rock. “Get dressed. We’re not staying in here.”
“That’s your answer? Run?”
“My answer is finding out what just woke up under us before it decides to introduce itself.”
The brothers are already in the corridor.
The floor moved under the entire resort. Tristan’s half-dressed and smiling like he planned it. Evander has a tablet that shouldn’t work in a lunar storm, and it’s working anyway, which tells me he’s powering it with magic he won’t admit to.
Dominic’s leaning on the wall like he’s been waiting for us to finish.
“You two have terrible timing,” he says.
I pull the suite door shut behind Brynn. “What moved?”
“The east foundation dropped four feet.” Evander doesn’t look up. “Then stopped. There’s a chamber under the resort that wasn’t on any map. It’s on every map now. It rewrote them.”
“It rewrote the maps?” Tristan repeats. “Sure. Normal building behavior.”
“It’s a vault.” Evander finally looks up, and his face is doing the thing it only does when he’s genuinely unsettled, which is going very still. “Bloodline-sealed. Van Alstein bloodline-sealed. And it just unsealed itself.”
I feel Brynn go rigid beside me.
“When?” I ask. I already know. I can see it on her face.
“Eleven minutes ago.” Evander’s eyes cut to Brynn. To the glow at her collar. “Give or take.”
The vault is down past the cellars, past the wine, past three doors that didn’t exist this morning.
We descend in a line. Me first. Brynn behind me with her hand holding on to the back of my shirt, and I don’t tell her to let go.
The stairs are stone. Old. Older than the resort, older than the family, carved with the same symbols that keep burning across Brynn’s walls at night.
She reads them as we pass. I watch her lips move.
“Stop,” I murmur.
“I can’t help it. They’re loud.”
“What do they say?”
She swallows. “Welcome home.”
I don’t tell the others that.
Evelina is already at the bottom.
She shouldn’t be. There’s no way she beat us down here. But she’s standing in front of the vault door in a pale robe, no mask now, looking older than I’ve ever let myself see her.
“Mom.” Tristan stops short. “How did you get down here?”
“I’ve known where this door was for two hundred years.” She doesn’t turn around. “I’ve spent two hundred years making sure none of you ever found it.”
The door behind her is enormous. Two slabs of black stone joined down the middle, every inch carved, a bright seam running between them where the seal split. Light bleeds through the gap. The same shade as Brynn’s mark.
“What is this?” My voice comes out harder than I mean. “And don’t tell me it’s a vault. Evander already said that.”
Evelina turns.
Her eyes find Brynn first. Not me. Brynn. And something moves across her face that I’ve never seen on my mother in thirty-six years.
It’s grief.
“It opened for her,” she says quietly. “I hoped I had more time.”
“More time for what?” Tristan’s not laughing now. “Mom. What is this?”
Evelina folds her hands. When she speaks, it’s the voice she uses in the boardroom, the one that’s ended wars and merged empires and never once trembled.
It’s trembling.
“You’ve all been told you’re competing for the position of CEO.” She lets that sit. “That was a lie I built to keep you safe. There is the CEO for our company, but the position is for the seat of the High Alpha.”
“A lie,” Dominic says. He’s grinning. He’s the only one. “For what?”
“For the throne behind this door.” She gestures at the seam of light.
“The seat of the High Alpha. The true ruler of the bloodline. Whoever holds it controls the Covenant itself. Every treaty. Every bond. Every witch and wolf alliance forged in seven hundred years answers to whoever sits in that chair.”
The corridor goes very quiet.
“That’s not just a job,” Evander says slowly. “That’s a crown.”
“Yes.”
“You let us fight over a crown,” Tristan says, “and called it a board vote?”
“I let you fight over a number on a balance sheet.” Evelina’s chin lifts. “Because the truth would’ve started a war between my own sons, and I have buried enough family.”
I should be angry. I am angry. But there’s a colder thing moving under the anger, and it’s looking at the bright seam, and it already knows what’s coming.
“There’s a catch.” I say it flat. “There’s always a catch with you. Why hasn’t anyone sat in it for seven hundred years?”
Evelina meets my eyes.
“Because the throne will only accept a bonded Alpha.” She pauses. “A true bond. Witnessed and sealed. Not a contract. Not a convenient match. The real thing. The Covenant can tell the difference, and it’ll kill anyone who lies to it.”
“Bonded,” Tristan repeats.
“Fully. Mate-marked. Chosen.”
Every brother turns to look at me.
At the mark glowing through Brynn’s collar.
At her hand still holding my shirt.
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me?” Tristan says.
It lands on all of them at once, and they handle it the way they handle everything, which is badly and out loud.
“So he wins.” Tristan throws his hands up. “By accident. By spilling a witch on himself at a matchmaking ritual. Seven centuries of bloodline and the crown goes to the one who didn’t even want it.”
“I still don’t want it,” I say.
“That makes it even worse!”
Evander hasn’t moved. He’s watching the door, and the seam, and Brynn, and I can see the gears behind his eyes turning too fast.
“Someone manipulated the records to put her in his path,” he says. Quiet. “Someone wanted this exact bond. Someone wanted this door to open.” He looks at our mother. “You’re not surprised it’s her. You knew. You knew the throne would want a Fairmont.”
“I suspected.”
“You suspected.” Evander’s voice could cut glass. “And you said nothing while someone hunted her through the resort.”
Dominic, who has said almost nothing, pushes off the wall.
He’s still grinning, but it’s gone thin.
“This is the best night of my life,” he says. “Leo’s pushed into a relationship. Tristan’s furious. Mom’s been lying since before we were born. And nobody’s noticed the door’s still opening.”
We all turn.
He’s right.
The seam of light is widening.
Not slowly. The two slabs are grinding apart on their own, no hand on them, the glow pouring out brighter and brighter until it floods the whole stairwell and I have to throw an arm across my eyes.
Brynn doesn’t shield hers.
She steps forward. Out of my reach. Toward the light, like it’s pulling her, and her mark is blazing now, full silver, the half-finished vow on her skin answering whatever’s behind that door.
“Brynn.” I grab for her. “Brynn, don’t.”
“I have to. It’s calling me.” Her voice isn’t all hers. “Leo. It knows my name. It’s known my name for seven hundred years.”
“Then it can wait.”
I get a hand on her wrist. The mark flares white where I touch her, and a pulse rolls out of the door and knocks every one of us back a step. Even Evelina.
The voice that comes out of the vault is the same one from the ceremony. Every voice. No voice.
It says one word, and the word is hers.
Witness.
“Mom.” My eyes are still streaming from the light. “Whatever’s behind that door, you stop it. Now.”
“I can’t.” Evelina hasn’t moved. She’s staring into the brightness with her hands pressed to her mouth. “I never could. I only ever locked the door. I never held the key.”
“Then who does?”
“She does.”
Brynn takes another step. Her bare feet on the black stone. The light swallows her to the knees, the waist, and the bond between us pulls so hard it nearly takes me off my feet, because she’s walking into something and I can feel it reaching back.
I move. Tristan catches my arm.
“If the door wants a bonded Alpha,” he says, low, fast, all the anger burned out of him, “and you go in there before it’s done, it tests you. You heard her. It kills liars. Are you sure of what you are to her? Because half-finished marks are half a lie to a thing that old.”
I look at the mark on her skin. Half-formed. Raw. A vow nobody said out loud.
I think about every time I told myself it was just the bond. Just biology. Just the resort’s magic forcing my hand.
I shake him off.
“I’m sure.”
I walk into the light after her.
The cold hits first. Then the silence, total, the storm and my brothers and my mother all cut off behind me like a door closed on the world.
Brynn’s ahead of me, lit pale and bright, her hand already lifting toward the dais.
And the throne is there.
Except it isn’t a throne. Not the way I pictured one. It’s two seats carved from one piece of moon-pale stone, set side by side, worn smooth in the center of each like something sat in them for centuries and then got up and never came back.
Two seats.
Not one.
The Covenant didn’t build a crown for an Alpha.
It built a crown for a pair.
Brynn turns to look at me across the glow. Her eyes are wet and wide and entirely hers again, and her voice when it comes is very small.
“Leo,” she says. “It’s not choosing a king.”
The vault doors finish opening behind us with a sound like a held breath finally released.
And every symbol on every wall, on the stairs, on her skin, lights up at once.