Page 206 of A Warrior's Fate

Isla’s gaze shifted to the open book on the table, the writing in it so crisp and clean yet it could’ve been scribbles for how little they understood it.

Why would the killer give Lukas an old alpha’s journal? What was the message here?

She glanced up at Jonah. “Do you know what it says?”

“Just the name took me all night, and getting it was luck,” Jonah grumbled, hunching and placing both of his hands back down on the table. “I don’t know how I’ll get what the rest of the words are. I’ve only found writing like this in one other place.” He shuffled through his lot before picking up a folded parchment. He opened it and laid it flat on the table to reveal an ancestral chart tracing back, starting not from Kai, Kyran, or even Alpha Rainer. She wasn’t sure how many generations prior it was, but that didn’t matter. She couldn’t understand it. It was while Jonah explained how much research and puzzling he’d done to figure out Aneurin’s translation from the chart when Isla caught it.

She stepped back, jaw unhinging, before moving forward again. She squinted down at the fraying piece she noticed could’ve been torn. Beside the two names at the pinnacle of the lineage lay the fifth symbol.

Jonah clocked the action. “What is it?”

Isla pointed to the small marking. “What is that?”

Jonah’s shoulders sagged. “It’s a—pack insignia.”

Isla furrowed her brows. She’d never seen that before but recognized the symbols of Deimos and Phobos beside the various names below it. “Which pack?”

“Ares.”

Isla met Jonah’s eyes. “There’s no Pack of Ares.”

“There was, before—” He gestured to the two names at the top of the tree-like figure again. Ghosts behind the foreign lettering. “It was split. Divided between the alpha’s two sons after the War of Realms concluded.”

The War of Realms?

Isla had heard pieces of those battles oh-so-long ago that had changed the tides of the world. When wolves, witches, and all other beings banded together, aided by the deities from their divine lands, against the cruel, immortal fae. What was left after the “original keepers of magic” had lost and retreated to their ethereal domain was their mortal ruins beyond the witch’s western border and “other stains on the world” that everyone who’d passed on the tale didn’t know the true meaning of.

Isla couldn’t wrap her mind around it. Why that mattered now, millennia later.

“But I thought back before the decimation, the alphas were brothers, not dating all the way back to the War of Realms, and Ares…it wasn’t a pack. It’s a pass between the packs. Lukas told me—”

Jonah’s eyes flashed with anger as he said lowly, “Lukas had no idea what he was talking about and had no business saying it.”

Isla swallowed. Aggression was something she’d never seen from him, and that felt…personal.

The smallest bit of defiance, for that man who she still felt defensive over despite nearly having killed her, rose in her gut. “How do you know Ares was a pack?”

Jonah’s own throat bobbed, and he schooled his face to sort through the stacks. What else did he have? “I read the right books.”

An answer all too familiar.

Isla felt her nostrils flare but moved on. For now. “If Alpha Aneurin was in power during the decimation…that was the time of our native languages, if not the Common. Why would he use an ancient dialect beyond the ones we’re even aware of to chronicle in a journal?”

“Maybe he didn’t want anyone to know what he was writing,” Jonah answered with a lift of his shoulders before pulling over a canvas envelope of some sort. From it, he extracted a wrinkled, discolored piece of artwork and laid it out for Isla. “What do you recognize?”

Isla gazed down at the parchment. The portrait, done from the waist up, had been crafted by what seemed to be a shaky hand. It showed a woman with moon-white hair and eyes such a dark violet, they were nearly black. Atop her head, stark against the lightness, she donned a crown. Not quite the diadem before them, but in her hands…in her folded hands over its hilt, she clutched a dagger. The dagger.

Eyes widening again, Isla noted the woman’s extravagant clothing and other pieces of large jewelry. “Who is this?”

“No idea.” Jonah flipped the page, revealing more of the old language scribbled on the back of the sheet. “But I’ll see what I can piece together with these names.” He nodded to the marker. “And then maybe I can figure out what that means. Ameera said you found more.”

“Kai has the one I took last night,” Isla said, before deducing, summarizing, for herself, “They mark points of the tunnels—which means the language makes sense if those have existed since Deimos and Phobos were one Ares.” How could that have gone unlearned, unknown? Hidden. “The packs have always been linked…even though nearly everyone’s forgotten.”

“Always,” Jonah echoed before his voice darkened. “Which begs the question—why is that important now? What’s changed?”

Isla didn’t have an answer. Didn’t know if she wanted one.

Isla felt a warm touch on her shoulder and the light brush of lips against her forehead. She jolted up from where she’d been slumped and dozing on an armchair beside the wall-scaling hearth in another area of the library, its crackling fire the only source of light and heat. She’d been fighting off sleep for hours, each time she closed her eyes for too long brought reminders of bright red stares and imminent death.

---