Page 4

CADE

L yra lasted exactly forty-seven minutes after Cade's dramatic exit before her curiosity won the battle against common sense.

She'd spent those forty-seven minutes pacing the inn's main floor, ostensibly cleaning but mostly working herself into a righteous fury.

Who did he think he was, storming into her inherited property and issuing orders like some kind of supernatural dictator?

And what was with that whole intimidation display—the golden eyes and the way the windows had rattled when he'd lost his temper?

More importantly, why had her magic responded to his presence like it recognized something familiar?

Nico had made his excuses and left shortly after Cade's departure, but not before pressing a business card into her hand. "For when you inevitably decide to ignore the alpha's very reasonable advice," he'd said with that knowing smile. "Call me before you do anything spectacularly dangerous."

Now, as afternoon shadows stretched across the kitchen floor, Lyra found herself staring at the cellar door with the kind of focus that usually preceded her most spectacular mistakes.

"He said stay away from the rune," she muttered, twisting a copper curl around her finger. "He didn't say anything about not looking at it."

It was a flimsy justification and she knew it, but her magic had been humming restlessly ever since she'd woken up in Cade's arms. The silvery rune on her palm seemed to pulse with its own rhythm, and every instinct she possessed was pulling her back toward the cellar.

Besides, it was her inn. Her grandmother's legacy. If there was some kind of ancient magical artifact buried in the basement, didn't she have a right to understand what she was dealing with?

"Just a quick look," Lyra told herself, grabbing a flashlight from the kitchen drawer. "No touching. Just... observation."

The cellar felt different when she descended the stairs.

The air was charged with residual energy from her earlier magical explosion, and the stone mosaic on the floor seemed to shimmer in the flashlight beam.

But it was the sigil left by the founders in the center that drew her attention like a magnet.

The obsidian stone was still cracked down the middle, but the fissure no longer pulsed with light.

Instead, it seemed to absorb the beam of her flashlight, creating a pool of absolute darkness so intense it seared into her vision.

The symbols carved around its perimeter were clearer now, as if her magical contact had somehow sharpened their definition.

Lyra knelt beside the rune, careful to keep her hands well away from its surface.

Up close, she could see that the symbols weren't random—they formed a pattern that reminded her of circuit boards or maybe astronomical charts.

Lines connected various points, creating a network of relationships that her chaos magic instinctively tried to interpret.

"What were you meant to do?" she asked the stone, as if it might answer. "And why did you react to me like that?"

The silence stretched for several minutes before Lyra noticed something that made her heart skip. The crack in the stone wasn't just a fissure—it was shaped like something. A tree, maybe, or a river system. The more she stared at it, the more it looked like a map.

"Son of a hex," she breathed, leaning closer. "You're not just a lock, are you? You're a key."

That's when she noticed the second thing that should have sent her running upstairs: the silvery sigil on her palm was glowing.

Not brightly, just a soft luminescence that matched the wavelength of the symbols around the rune's edge. As she watched, fascinated despite herself, the glow intensified slightly, as if responding to her proximity to the stone.

"Okay, that's probably bad," Lyra said, but she didn't move away.

Her magic was practically singing now, recognizing something in the ancient artifact that her conscious mind couldn't quite grasp.

It felt like standing on the edge of a vast library and knowing that all the answers she'd ever wanted were just within reach.

The sigil on her palm pulsed once, twice, then settled into a steady glow that illuminated the stone's surface in ways her flashlight couldn't. New symbols became visible in the rune's depths—not carved but somehow embedded in the obsidian itself, as if they'd been written in light and frozen in stone.

"Holy sage," Lyra whispered, reaching out instinctively to trace one of the newly visible patterns.

The moment her fingertip made contact with the stone's surface, the world exploded into sensation.

This time, though, there was no violent surge of uncontrolled power. Instead, knowledge flowed into her mind like water filling a vessel—images, emotions, and memories that weren't her own but somehow felt familiar anyway.

She saw three figures standing around the rune in this very cellar, but the cellar was different—newer, cleaner, lit by torches that cast dancing shadows on stone walls.

A woman with copper hair and amber eyes that looked disturbingly like Lyra's own.

A man who moved with predatory grace and eyes that flashed gold in the torchlight.

And a third figure, tall and ethereal, with pale skin and dark hair and features that seemed to shift when she tried to focus on them.

The founder's trinity. Witch, wolf, and fae, working together to bind something that thrashed and raged beneath the stone floor.

Lyra could feel its hunger, its desperate desire to break free and reclaim what it believed was rightfully its. The thing beneath the rune wasn't just dangerous—it was ancient beyond measure and absolutely furious about being contained.

But the founders had been clever. They hadn't just built a prison; they'd built a lock that could only be opened by their own bloodlines working together.

Three keys for three locks, with safeguards built in to prevent any single descendant from accidentally releasing what they'd worked so hard to contain.

The vision shifted, showing her the years that followed.

The founders aging and dying, their descendants spreading across the country but always maintaining some connection to Mistwhisper Falls.

The rune sleeping peacefully beneath the inn, its power held in careful balance by protections that had held for over two centuries.

Until today.

Until her.

The knowledge struck her like a blow: she hadn't just cracked the rune's surface. She'd awakened it. And in awakening it, she'd begun a process that couldn't be undone without the help of the other founder bloodlines.

The wolf and the fae. Like Cade. Like Nico.

"Oh," Lyra breathed, understanding flooding through her. "Oh, no."

She attempted to break contact with the stone, yet it was too late. The rune had recognized her, claimed her, marked her as one of its three keys. Power flowed up through her fingertips—not violent this time, but inexorable, like tide coming in.

The silvery mark on her palm began to burn.

Not with heat, but with a cold fire that seemed to rewrite her very DNA.

She could feel the magic changing her, connecting her to the rune and through it to the sleeping thing beneath the inn.

The markings etched onto her palm spread, creating delicate traceries that spiraled up her wrist like living tattoos.

Lyra opened her mouth to scream, but no sound came out. The power was too vast, too ancient, too utterly beyond anything her chaos magic was equipped to handle. She was drowning in sensation, lost in the weight of centuries and the terrible responsibility that came with founder blood.

That's when she notices the creak of footsteps on the cellar stairs.

"Lyra!" Cade's voice, sharp with panic and something akin to fury. "What did you do?"

She tried to answer, tried to explain, but the words wouldn't come.

The link between her and the rune was complete now, unbreakable, and she could feel it pulling at something deep in her chest. Her magic, her life force, her very sense of self—all of it flowing into the ancient stone and the sleeping entity beneath.

Strong arms wrapped around her waist, hauling her backward. The moment Cade touched her, though, everything changed.

His wolf's power slammed into the connection like a dam breaking. Suddenly she could breathe again, think again, exist as something more than just a conduit for ancient magic. The burning in her palm subsided to a manageable ache, and the world stopped spinning quite so violently.

But Cade wasn't unaffected by the contact.

At the first spark of contact between them, Lyra felt his wolf surge to the surface with an intensity that made her earlier magical explosion look like a gentle breeze.

Power radiated from him in waves that made the cellar walls vibrate, and she could feel his human control slipping away like water through her fingers.

"Cade," she gasped, still clinging to his arms. "You need to let go."

"Can't," he growled, his voice deeper than it had been upstairs, rougher. "The connection—I can feel what you're feeling. What you're bound to."

His eyes were pure gold now, no trace of green left in them. When he spoke, she could see fangs that definitely hadn't been there a moment ago. "The thing under the rune. It's aware of you now. Aware and interested."

Lyra shivered at the hunger she'd sensed in the vision, the patient malevolence that had been waiting beneath the inn for so long. "How bad is 'interested'?"

"Bad enough that you're not staying here alone tonight," Cade said, then seemed to realize what he'd just said. His grip on her loosened slightly, though he didn't let go completely. "I mean?—"

"You mean you're going into full alpha protection mode," Lyra finished, surprised by how unsurprised she was by the prospect. Something about being in his arms felt right in a way that should have been alarming but somehow wasn't.