“Solomon.”
“He was very understanding.”
Percy was already at the desk, pulling the tape off the first box. His jaw was set and his eyes moved over the contents. The dart wound on his shoulder had healed weeks ago, but the memory of it sat behind his expression.
“Right.” I rubbed my palms against my jeans and crossed to the desk beside him. “Let’s see what my dead psychotic ex-boyfriend was hoarding.”
The first box was personal effects. Clothes, toiletries, a burner phone with a cracked screen. Solomon had already checked the phone and found nothing useful. No contacts saved, no call history, no texts. Wiped clean or never used.
Percy turned the burner phone over in his hands, checked the battery compartment, then set it aside and reached for the next layer without comment.
The second box held surveillance materials. A folder with photographs around the town. I wasn’t in the photos, but they were places I’d been, shot from the tree line, timestamped over several weeks. Maps of the town with routes marked in pencil.
A schedule, handwritten, documenting our movements. Mine, specifically. My walks to the bookshop site. My grocery runs. The times I left the cabin alone.
Percy pulled one of the maps toward him and traced a pencil line with his finger. His mouth pressed into a thin line. “This route. It’s the path between the station and the inn. The one I took the night of the fire call.” He looked up at Solomon. “The time he got to her.”
The guilt in his voice was quiet but unmistakable.
My stomach turned, but I kept going. I’d seen worse from Hudson. The man had kept a journal of my daily activities for six months before I escaped him the first time. Stalking was his baseline, not his ceiling.
“Here.” Solomon pulled a folder from the third box and opened it on the desk. “This is what concerns me.”
The folder held papers I didn’t expect.
Technical documents, printed, not handwritten. Chemical compound formulas with notations in the margins. Diagrams of devices that meant nothing to me but made Lucian straighten inhis chair. Cross-referenced timelines of patrol routes from the fire station.
Percy went still. His fingers hovered over a page of chemical notations, and I watched recognition register on his face.
The compound. The one that had been on the dart buried in his shoulder.
“These aren’t Hudson’s work,” Lucian said. His voice carried the measured calm that meant the opposite. “Hudson doesn’t seem educated enough. He couldn’t have produced this.”
“He didn’t.” Solomon’s jaw was tight. “These were given to him. Instructions. Someone was feeding him information, including our patrol schedules, the layout of the cabin grounds, and the chemical composition of the dart compound.”
“This formula.” Percy tapped the page, his voice flat. “Whoever wrote this designed what hit me.”
The dart compound is designed to suppress lycan healing. My chest constricted as the implication landed.
“Someone gave Hudson the tools to hurt you,” I said.
“And the intelligence to find us,” Solomon finished.
I turned back to the box. Pushed past the technical documents, the surveillance photos, the maps.
At the bottom of the third box, I found a journal.
Cheap, spiral-bound, the cover bent and coffee-stained. I flipped it open and Hudson’s life spilled across the pages in his usual disaster of a scrawl.
Slanted letters crammed together, smudged where his hand dragged through wet pen strokes, words misspelled and scratched out and rewritten worse.
I recognized it instantly. The passive-aggressive fridge notes and bedroom door rules had burned his handwriting into my brain permanently.
More surveillance logs. Dates, times, locations. But less organized and detailed. More personal with annotated threats. It was my schedule mapped out in his impatient, messy hand. Each entry pressed so hard the pen had grooved the paper beneath.
I turned another page and stopped.
My fingers hovered over the handwriting and my pulse kicked.
