That shell state protects me thirty minutes later as Roman transforms my family room into something straight out of a crime show. His laptop is on my coffee table. The package—sealed in an evidence bag now—sits beside it with everyone crowded around, waiting.
I’m glad Roman told Madi and Elle to stay home. If they get hurt because of me…
“This one’s different,” he says, pulling on gloves before carefully opening the bag. “No artifact from one of Clover’s stories. No knives or dead bees. Just…paper.”
He pulls out several light blue pages, each one protected in its own clear sleeve. A tiny V interlaced with a C sits in the bottom right corner.
I blink faster but can’t seem to focus.
“Those look like…” Valen leans closer, droplets of water clinging to his hair.
“Journal pages,” I whisper. “Those are from the maple tree journal.”
All eyes focus on me.
“The what now?” Chase asks, running a towel over his hair. I’m not even sure where everyone got cleaned up.
I can’t look away from the pages in Roman’s hands. Valen’s handwriting. Young. Careful. Coded. Entries I remember him writing while I was his lookout, making sure no one was coming.
“We had a hiding spot,” I force through dry lips. “An old maple tree on the outside of the property. There was a hollowed-out section about ten feet up. That’s where we hid this journal—the real one with most of the evidence we could collect. This is the one that would have…” My voice breaks. “I told Miriam we had to go back for it in case Valen couldn’t get to it. She told me Terra had found our evidence at the beehive and burned it all, so returning to get anything would only put me at more risk. I assumed if she found anything, she would’ve torn the place apart looking for more.”
Valen takes a bag from Roman’s hand. “I wrote these?”
“You did. Those were—” I swallow hard, but it doesn’t bring any moisture to my mouth. “They were what we needed for Vivian. The detailed ones. The ones that had proof of everything she was doing.”
“What proof?” Grant asks.
“Anything I could get copies of from Terra’s office. She always underestimated me, but Miriam had been secretly homeschooling me since I was young, so I knew how to use a computer.”
Sterling leans forward. “So, someone has a journal that was confiscated over fourteen years ago?”
“I don’t know. The night I ran, this one was still hidden. Unless—unless Valen went for it after I ran, I don’t know how anyone would have found it. If she’d known what we were hiding, she would have punished us for it. But we were so careful about our tree. It was our only safe space.”
“So that means someone has either visited the compound recently,” Grant says, “or has had copies of it for years.”
“They didn’t just find the journal.” Roman flips over another page wrapped in plastic. “They made their own notes on them.”
He angles a page toward me, and my stomach drops.
Across Valen’s careful teenage handwriting, in violent slashes made with a red marker, someone has written messages.
What you buried isn’t dead.
Roman flips to another page.
Roots run deep.
And another.
Some stories have a…twist.
On the final page, across an entry about protecting me, is a message that makes me dry heave.
The truth is sweeter than honey, but will you survive the sting?
The room is completely silent, but I know the truth.
“They know,” I whisper. “They know everything about…” I look up to find Valen studying me. “About us.”
