Chapter 24

Chapter 24

It was musty in the storage room. Dust filled the air as long–dormant papers, files, and boxes were shifted around. Hale was digging through piles of this and that, muttering to himself about where he might have put my father’s papers.

The dust made me sneeze, but it did not take away the tangy smell Hale gave off that called to every fiber of my being. This close, I was already wondering how difficult it could possibly be to have S** on the sheet–covered old desk in the corner without breaking it.

Something told me Hale and I would decimate the thing.

“Stop staring at my a’s,” Hale growled as he bent under a shelf and pulled out a cardboard box that was somewhat less dusty than the rest.

I snapped my eyes up to his face as he produced a box simply labeled “Oswald” in black marker. “I wasn’t staring

1

“Liar,” Hale snorted. He chuckled at me under his breath, though. It wasn’t as if part of him didn’t like the fact that I was physically attracted to him. He just didn’t want the distraction at the moment.

Okay, perhaps he was right in calling me a liar. But in my defense, it was a mighty fine as

Hale carried the box out of the storage room and into the library, setting it down on a long table next to one of the bookshelves containing volumes bound in leather that probably hadn’t been touched for as long as this book had been.

“I don’t know what you’re expecting we’ll find in here. Mother told me it’s just a bunch of his old Beta papers and things he was working on,” Mason said with a shrug

“I don’t know,” I sighed, pulling the flimsy cover off the box. “Something” It wasn’t as if I believed everything the Luna Regent said.

There were papers, notebooks, and ledgers piled to the brim inside the box. I recognized my father’s handwriting ora few of them at the top of the box, and instantly, my heart began to ache.

“This is going to take a while,” Hale said, digging in as well.

We sat side–by–side so we could each see what the other was looking at when we needed to point things out or ask questions. “Spring Ball, Yule Feast…” I mumbled, scouring guest lists. None of that seemed to be of any importance.

“These are minutes from a meeting with my father and our Alpha allies,” Hale offered. We looked them over together, but neither of us found anything suspicious. Or even noteworthy, other than the fact that Fullbright and Shadowmoon had been at odds for years.

My father’s handwriting was small, and not always legible. Our temples touched as we tried to puzzle through his datebook.” But it turned out to be just as unhelpful as everything else.

Hale pulled out a third stack, and a heavy book with a frayed ribbon sticking out of it slid out. “What’s this?” he asked, picking it up off the floor.

It looked familiar to me, but I couldn’t quite place it at first. I took it from Hale and began leafing through the pages. “It’s Father’s diary!” I said excitedly. “I knew I’d seen it before!”

“Excellent!” Hale sat back down beside me, and we poured over the pages.

Most of the entries were about me. Watching me grow up, the antics Hale and I got up to. It wasn’t really surprising, but it was touching. It made me smile, and it also had me fighting off tears from time to time as I thought about all of those memoires we’d shared together..

Hale blushed a bit when my father observed in his writing that “Mason moons over my girl like a lovesick puppy. I’d better prepare her to be Lup someday.”

“A lovesick puppy, huh?” I teased, nudging him in the arm with my elbow, not that I actually believed a word of it. My father was just seeing things through the lens of a protective parent.

“Yes, well, we were all young once” Hale mumbled, rubbing the back of his n*eck.

I stared at him, my mouth falling open for a moment before I was able to speak. “Wait, you liked me, too?”

“Too?” Hale looked back at me, his eyes wide. “What do you mean, “too“?”

“Uh..” I didn’t know how I’d let that sl*p out. “L.. um… that was… a sl*p of the tongue?”

Hale groaned and thumped his forehead against my father’s diary entry. “So much wasted time.”

I knew I was beet red by now, so I just snatched the diary into my hands and fl*pped the page. Clearing my throat, I reminded him, “Yes.. well.. we have research to do.”

Then I felt Hale’s hand slide over my thigh. “Sl*p of the tongue, hmm?” he murmured, voice low and seductive

I swallowed. I was well aware of where he’d like to sl*p HIS tongue.

Now Was not the unie, however.

“Come on, let’s just… research..?” I tried, but it was a losing battle.

Perhaps now was the time after all….

Hale pulled me into his lap, the diary thumping onto the table behind me. I could feel him hard through his pants, making my heart rattle against my rib cage as excitement shot through my stomach.

And here he’d been pretending all this time to be unaffected by our closeness.

“Mason…” I whispered as he curved a hand around the back of my n*eck and began pulling my l*ps down to his.

Then he paused, looking just past my shoulder. “Kora… something’s changed.”

Seeing as he was still hard as a rock, I couldn’t imagine what that could be. “Hmm?” I asked, feeling frustrated that he’d stopped.

Hale turned me around in his lap and pointed to the open diary. “His handwriting..

I looked down at the diary. Sure enough, the page it was open to bore my father’s handwriting, but it was jerky, scribbled, and unaligned. I reached over and picked up the diary, settling it between us so we both could read it.

“The days are numbered. She comes at night. Deborah. Deborah?” Hale read aloud.

We both frowned. “It makes no sense,” I stated the obvious.

Hale fl*pped to the next page.

The handwriting had devolved even more, and my father was not even writing in complete sentences.

“What in the world?” I asked, tracing my hands over the letters. It was my father’s handwriting, alright, but it was not… him. “Mother must not have seen this,” Hale said, peering at the letters, swiveling his head back and forth to make sense of the gibberish.

“Even if she did, it would hardly make any sense,” I added. Ifl*pped to the next page.

“Deborah, it said. Over, and over, and over, in decreasing legibility. The more we read, the less sense this, and the woman’s name, made. ‘Deborah… Deborah…”

We got to the ribbon and turned that page over.

“I will do as you say,” Hale read.

We looked at each other. I imagined my eyes were just as wide, and confused as Hale’s.

“What the hell?” Hale said.