Page 34 of Creed (Rock Hard Mountain Men #3)

I flipped open the journal to reveal the coded gibberish contained within, along with the loose-leaf pages filled with my translations.

“I already told you. The journal only explains how they escaped the cult and their shared husband. It barely even mentions the fact that all three of them were pregnant. Lisianthus didn’t seem to want to dwell on that fact too much, and mostly focused on the logistics of their escape.

There’s no mention of an underground vault anywhere. ”

Flipping to the back of the book, I turned to the very last page.

“The only page that stands out is this last one here.”

All six of us leaned over the table, examining the last page from various angles.

To grow, to build, and to survive. The future lies in the strength of one’s spine.

These were the exact same words I’d translated earlier. Nothing had changed. It provided no answers, and just sounded like a profound sendoff for an overall unpleasant story.

We all stared at the page and its meaningless words, until Trent suddenly picked up the journal and started turning it over in his hands.

“You know, when the police first asked me to look over the antiques they found in that coffin you guys dug up, I didn’t get to take a very close look at them. I was mostly focused on the most obvious details, but now that I’ve gotten a closer look at the journal, I realize that the binding is off.”

“Off?” Magnus questioned. He moved like he was going to take the journal from Trent and look for himself, but then changed his mind. “What do you mean, off .”

“Its hard to explain without going into a detailed lectured about how old books were bound, but the leather on the spine looks thicker than the rest of it. It should all be one piece of leather, and the spine usually gets stretched the most, so that shouldn’t be the case.”

Magnus, Brody, and I shared a look, and we all seemed to come to the same conclusion at the exact same time. Without a word, Magnus took the journal from Trent and handed it over to Brody, who pulled out a knife and used it to split open the journal’s leather binding.

Hidden within the spine of the book, we found three long, thin strips of leather. Each was printed with a series of random numbers, along with an engraving of a specific flower at the top.

Three strips of leather, each labeled with either a rose, a poppy, or a Lisianthus flower.

It was clear that each one coordinated to one of the Milford sisters, but the numbers made no sense.

Even when I tried using the code that Lisianthus had used for the rest of her journal, it was still meaningless.

“So, that’s one more key to the puzzle,” Ellis said as he examined one of the leather strips. “But what does this tell us?”

“Nothing,” I said as I threw one of the other leather strips onto the table. “This tells us nothing. These sisters are driving me up the wall with their constant codes and puzzles. I’m starting to think they’re doing it just to be annoying.”

Kayden picked up the leather strip I’d just throw down. “Maybe not. Like you said, the sisters were interested in codes and stuff like that. I think... these leather strips might be a scytale.”

He said it with such certainty, but I’d never heard that word before, and judging from the looks on everyone else’s faces, neither had they.

“What’s a scytale?”

“It’s a method the ancient Greeks used to send coded messages,” Kayden said, as though that should explain things.

We were all still just as lost.

With a sigh, Kayden picked up the wooden dowel.

“Here. I’ll show you. The message is printed out on a strip of leather, interspersed with other random letters, or in this case, numbers, to hide it.

There’s no way of knowing which numbers are part of the message, and which are meaningless, until you wrap it around a specifically sized dowel. Then, the numbers should line up.”

As he spoke, he wrapped the leather strip around the dowel, keeping each new loop snuggly pressed against the one before it.

In most places the numbers didn’t line up, except for one specific place on the dowel where everything lined up perfectly.

Assuming he was right, then the dozens of random numbers was actually a very specific string of eighteen numbers.

After doing this with all three pieces of leather, we started to see a pattern emerge.

The numbers at the end of each series were almost the same, and after some debate, we realized these must be dates.

They were the same year, near the beginning of the twentieth century, and no more than two months apart.

Right around the time when the Milford sisters had come to Emberwood.

My hand flew across a scrap piece of paper as I wrote the numbers down. “If we take out the dates, then we’re left with twelve numbers.”

“No,” Brody disagreed as he pointed to a specific spot on one of the leather strips. “Twelve numbers and two decimals. See this spot here. It just looks like an imperfection of the leather, but it’s too symmetrical. It must be intentional.”

One could always trust Brody’s sniper eyes to see what everyone else overlooked.

Adding the decimals to the string of numbers, I leaned back in my chair and looked at what I’d written down.

The answer was so obvious, I felt like an idiot for not seeing it before.

“It’s latitude and longitude. These are records of an exact location and date.”

Of course, our next step was to then look up those three locations.

At first, there was nothing special about those three locations, other than fact that they were all relatively nearby. We could have driven to any of them in just a few hours.

However, when we cross-referenced the locations with the dates listed as well, something surprising turned up.

“There used to be an orphanage at each of these locations,” Magnus announced. “They’re all gone now, but at the beginning of the century, each location was a sanctuary for orphan children.”

Holding up his phone, he showed us an old black and white photo of a modest wooden building. Even in the picture, there was an eclectic mix of children sitting on the steps.

The answer was clear. No one needed to say it out loud as we looked at the picture. These orphanages were where the Milford sisters had dropped off their children before eventually making their way to Emberwood.

Trent toyed with the cut open leather of the journal, reexamining the spine where the leather strips had been tucked away.

“Why go through so much trouble just to hide that information?”

Surprisingly, it was Ellis who spoke up. The man usually preferred to say quiet and follow Brody’s lead, so the sound of his voice filled with confidence, was extremely unusual.

“It’s in the name. Mothers of the Mountain .

They escaped from The Tamed Souls and dropped their children off at orphanages in order to protect them, so they wouldn’t be dragged back into the cult.

But they also couldn’t bear to completely cut off all ties to their children.

So, they kept this information recorded but hidden.

That way no one would ever find out, but they could still hold onto the hope that they might be able to find their children again one day. ”

His conclusion was mostly speculation. There was no evidence that what he was saying was correct, and human motivation was always hard to predict.

Yet, some instinct in me said that Ellis was absolutely right.

“The information was still hidden until now,” I couldn’t help but point out. “That means they never were able to track down their children again. The entire population of Emberwood referred to them as mothers, but they spent their whole lives separated from their actual children.”

They’d probably been waiting for a day when The Tamed Souls were no longer a threat to them, but despite living to an old age, that day never came.

As the six of us sat around, looking down at the remnants of the Milford sisters’ final secret, we all silently mourned for these women who had lived over a century ago.

We got a call from Deputy Hillard a few days later.

Chester Grieve had died in custody.

The man was old, and the stress of having been arrested—as well as having his plans thwarted—had apparently been too much for him. He’d suffered a heart attack while in custody, and despite the efforts of several doctors, the man hadn’t survived.

I couldn’t say that I was saddened by this news at all. Chester Grieve had not only kidnapped me and Kayden but had also been behind all the shit that Brody and Magnus had gone through recently.

Good riddance.

With him gone, The Tamed Souls cult had no reason to continue coming after us.

According to the investigation against them, most of the cult hadn’t even known what Chester Grieve’s ultimate goal was, and the few that did know weren’t as convinced as he was that we actually were descendants of their founder.

When Chester Grieve died, the cult’s motivation to pursue us died as well. Now, maybe we could finally sleep soundly at night.

At least, that was my hope.

A few hours after getting the call from Deputy Hillard, I sat on Brody’s front porch, going over the blueprints for my own house. It would take a while. The foundation hadn’t even been laid yet, but the future was finally looking bright, and it was the perfect time to continue moving forward.

Plus, I didn’t want to live in the spare bedroom forever. Kayden and I needed our own privacy.

I would have been with Kayden right that moment, but he was busy talking to his editor trying to explain why he wouldn’t have an article for her.

Trent and Ellis were also away. Trent had returned to look after his antique shop in town, and Ellis was continuing his job hunt.

He had an interview at the local hardware store that looked promising.

It wasn’t glamorous work, but it would give him something to do while he figured out what he wanted to do.

Overall, it was a peaceful day.

That peace only lasted a few hours and was shattered when Magnus approached us with a guilty look in his eye.

“Hey, guys. Can I talk to you about something?”

Brody and I both looked up from the blueprint we’d been studying.

“What’d you do?” we said in unison.

“Nothing bad,” he insisted. Although, he then muttered under his breath, “At least, I don’t think so.”

Taking his own seat on the porch, he handed us each a file. Just from the weight of it, I could tell that it only held a few pieces of paper, but I had no clue what it might contain.

“So, I know we concluded that Chester Grieve was probably crazy, but I was curious, so I ran an ancestry test on myself.”

“Please tell me you didn’t use one of those commercial DNA tests,” Brody said with a shake of his head. “Those things are public. We don’t need some distant cousin you’ve never heard of knocking at our door.”

Magnus quickly waved both hands in front of him, fending off Brody’s accusation. “No, no. Nothing like that. I know someone who could run the test for me privately. Nothing will be public, but... well, look.”

He held out his phone, which showed a long list of data. The first was the literal genetic breakdown of his DNA, but then under that was a complicated tree of various ancestors he was related to.

“What are we supposed to be looking at?” I asked. My gaze darted over the various lists of names and dates, but I found nothing out of the ordinary.

“Right there, at the end.” Magnus pointed to the earliest name on one of the shorter branches of his ancestral tree.

“Apparently, I have an ancestor who, at the turn of the twentieth century, grew up in an orphanage. I looked up the location of that orphanage and... it’s the same location that Rose Milford allegedly dropped off her child. ”

This had to be a joke. I refused to believe it, but I also knew that Magnus wouldn’t lie about something like this.

Surely, there had to be a mistake somewhere.

I was still reeling from this new piece of information when Magnus, unfortunately, continued.

“I also looked up you two as well. The results are in the files I gave you. It looks like?—”

“Don’t,” I interrupted him. “Don’t tell me what I think you’re about to say. I really don’t want to hear it.”

“But,” he started to say, but I cut him off again.

“Nope. I’m not listening to this. Chester Grieve was crazy, and that’s all there is to it.”

I handed back the file without opening it and left to take a walk to cool my head.

My denial only lasted as long as it took me to make a few laps around our property. Eventually, curiosity won, and I ended up looking at the file anyway.

There it was, written in black and white.

Chester Grieve had been right all along. That didn’t change the fact that the bastard was still crazy, but in this one instance the man’s instincts had been right.

Magnus, Brody, and I had met completely by chance while serving in the military.

What were the odds that all three of us would turn out to be distantly related?

Even more, what were the odds that we would randomly choose to settle down on the same patch of land where our ancestors had lived?

It was such an impossible coincidence that it almost seemed... unnatural.

No, I was not about to start entertaining the thought of witches and fate and the supernatural. Everything that had happened was entirely natural. Just very, very, very unlikely.

Magnus seemed more open to the idea of supernatural influence, while Brody was still on the fence about the whole thing. We agreed to disagree on the matter and left it at that.

The one thing we did agree on, was the fact that we needed to keep this information secret. Trent, Ellis, and Kayden could be brought into the loop, but other than that, we wouldn’t tell another living soul.

The Tamed Souls still existed, though its threat had mostly been declawed without Chester Grieve, and the Mothers of the Mountain still had believers in Emberwood. If it ever got out that we were actually descended from the founders of both cults, we would never know another moment’s peace.

The truth of our ancestry was locked away in Brody’s safe, and we tried to forget it as best as we could. Maybe someday we would build our own complex security measures to keep the information safely hidden, but for now we were happy to pretend that it didn’t exist.

There were plenty of other things for us to worry about, and a future that we needed to build.