Chapter 8 — Four Words

Sandra’s POV

I read it a third time.

You were never safe.

The handwriting was neat. Controlled. The kind you develop when you’ve been taught to write properly rather than the kind that just happens naturally. No signature. No indication of who’d sent it or why or what exactly it was supposed to mean.

I folded it back along its crease and stood in my doorway and looked at the empty corridor where the man had been and thought about what kind of person sends a warning through someone else’s hands. Someone who wanted distance between themselves and the message. Someone who needed me to know something without being able to be connected to the knowing.

Someone who was afraid.

I went back inside and sat at my desk and put the note flat in front of me and the wolfbane casing beside it and looked at both of them together.

In the first life I’d died believing the dagger was about Zadok. Someone wanted him dead, I’d gotten in the way, simple brutal arithmetic. I’d spent my last conscious minutes thinking about him and Vanessa and what I’d heard and I’d never once considered the possibility that the dagger had anything to do with me specifically.

You were never safe.

Past tense. Not you aren’t safe now. Not be careful going forward. Past tense, which meant whoever wrote this was telling me the danger wasn’t new. It had existed before I stepped in front of that blade. It had existed before the ceremony. Maybe long before.

Which meant either the dagger had always had two possible targets and I’d simply been the one it found. Or it had never been about Zadok at all.

I pressed two fingers against my mouth and sat with that for a moment.

If the dagger was meant for me then everything I’d understood about my death was wrong. And if everything I’d understood about my death was wrong then the grief I’d built around Zadok’s words — she knew what she was to me — took on a different weight. Not necessarily a lighter one. But different.

I needed more information. I needed it carefully, without showing my hand, without letting anyone in this house know that I was looking.

I tucked the note inside my journal and the casing into the small inner pocket of my coat and went down to lunch.

The dining room had my father at the head of the table, Vanessa to his left, two pack officials I recognized from the first life sitting across from each other and talking about territory markings. Normal afternoon. Nothing to indicate that someone had been through my room three hours ago.

I sat in my usual chair and accepted the plate Dara set in front of me and listened to the table conversation with most of my attention while the rest of it stayed on Vanessa.

She was performing today. I could see it clearly now that I was looking for it — the warmth slightly too consistent, the laugh coming just a beat after it should if it were genuine, the way she touched her hair when the pack officials looked at her. Vanessa in public was a construction. Careful, practiced, convincing enough that I’d mistaken it for her actual personality for years.

What had Dara said this morning. She was different before her mother got involved in her education.

I thought about that. About what kind of education produces a woman who performs warmth this fluently while searching her half sister’s room in the same morning.

“Sandra.” My father’s voice. I looked up. “The Blackwood estate is hosting a formal dinner next week. You’ll attend.”

It wasn’t a question. It was also the first thing he’d directed at me in two days which was about average for him.

“Of course,” I said.

Vanessa looked at me over the rim of her cup. “Zadok specifically mentioned wanting the whole household present.” A small pause. “He’s been asking about you actually.”

The table didn’t react. Why would they. It was a casual enough thing to say.

Except Vanessa didn’t say casual things. Every word out of her mouth in a social setting had been placed there deliberately and the placement of this one — in front of my father, in front of pack officials, framed as something light and observational — was a test. She was watching to see what my face did with the information.

I reached for my water.

“That’s kind of him,” I said. Mild. Unaffected. The vocal equivalent of a closed door.

Something tightened almost imperceptibly around her eyes. She looked away.

My father was already talking about something else.

After lunch I found the corridor that ran alongside the estate’s old records room and I stood outside it for a long moment before I went in. The records room was technically accessible to household members but nobody really used it — dusty, poorly lit, full of pack history that most people didn’t find interesting enough to seek out.

I found it interesting.

I was looking for land records specifically. Territory agreements, old boundary negotiations, anything that touched on the Whitmore name — my father’s name, my name — and its relationship to the Blackwood estate. In the first life I’d never thought to look. Why would I. I’d known my origin story, or thought I had. Wrong mother, unfortunate timing, tolerated not wanted.

But you were never safe implied a history I hadn’t been told. And histories left paper.

It took me forty minutes of careful searching before I found something. A folded document near the back of the third shelf, filed between two larger bound records like someone had slipped it there in a hurry. Old paper, the ink faded to brown at the edges.

I carried it to the small window and opened it.

It was an agreement. Formal, witnessed, dated twenty years back. I read through the legal language slowly, parsing the old pack terminology, and the further down the page I got the colder the room felt.

My name was in it.

Not my father’s name. Mine. Sandra Elara Whitmore, referenced by name in a document written two years before I was born, in a clause that described me as — I read the words three times to make sure I had them right — a binding condition of the Whitmore-Blackwood territorial agreement.

I had been written into a contract before I existed.

The door to the records room opened behind me.