Page 48 of Match Made In Growl

"I want you gone. Out of Hollow Oak. Away from the site, away from the council, away from her." Criss stepped closer. "These recordings go to Emmett tomorrow. All seven. He takes it to the council or the regional authority. I don't care which. But you're done here."

"The pride will turn on you."

"Some already have. The rest will see the evidence and decide for themselves."

"Your mother⁠—"

"My mother raised me alone because men like you decided what our family was allowed to be. She'll survive your disapproval."

Rydan held his gaze. The dawn light was growing stronger, turning the dust in the basin gold. Without the amber glow in his hands, without the authority of hidden knowledge and unchallenged power, he looked exactly like what he was. An old man standing in a field of his own wreckage.

"You're destroying everything I built," he said. But the conviction was thin. He heard it himself, and the sound of his own authority failing did more damage than anything Criss could have said.

"You built it on a lie. It was already destroyed it yourself by destroying and silencing others. In my digging, I found out more truth that I could have thought, and that will be going into evidence as well."

Rydan looked at the chamber entrance one last time. The dark opening that held the truth he'd tried three times to erase, still there, still intact. Then he turned out of the basin toward the northern path. His back was straight, but something in it had diminished. The posture of a man leaving a room he'd never enter again.

Criss waited until Rydan disappeared into the tree line before his legs gave out. He sat down hard on a fallen slab and pressed his hands against his face. His fingers were trembling. Not from fear. From the sustained effort of holding steady through a confrontation where the stakes had been a woman buried alive under a mountain, and the sudden gutting release now that it was over.

His tiger settled into quiet. Not coiled. Not alert. Just quiet, in the way an animal rests when the threat to its mate has been eliminated.

"Criss?"

He dropped his hands. Steph was standing at the chamber entrance, headlamp still on, journal in one hand. Dust on her face, clay on her fingers, dark curls escaping the pencil she'd twisted them up with. She was looking at him with an expression caught between confusion and alarm.

"What are you doing here?" she asked. "I heard voices."

He looked at her standing in the entrance of the chamber that would have been her grave ten minutes ago. Alive. Whole. Irritated at his presence, because of course she was.

"Criss." Sharper now. "What's going on?"

He pulled out his phone and held it up. "I need to show you something. All of it. And then I need you to decide if you can trust me, because I am done holding any of this back."

She studied him. The phone. His face. The empty basin, the fading scent of someone else's magic in the morning air.

She sat down on the slab beside him.

"Show me."

28

STEPHANIE

Criss was reaching for his phone to play the first recording when the voice came from the tree line.

"You think you can just threaten me and live happily ever after?"

Rydan Ashkar stepped back into the basin. Not the dignified retreat she'd watched through café windows and heard described secondhand. He was different now. The composure had cracked open and what lived underneath was older and uglier than the polished exterior had ever suggested. His silver-dark hair was loose from its usual careful arrangement, his pale amber eyes wide and bright with something that wasn't quite madness but lived in the same neighborhood.

He was laughing. Low, broken, the sound of a man who'd held the world in a particular shape for seventy years and just felt it slip.

"You're so naive, boy." Rydan's hands were at his sides, fingers splayed with an amber glow that seemed to be feeding off something deeper than the wards, pulling from a well of power that made the air taste like copper. "You think I could just be erased? Just like so many of your bloodlines were?"

Criss was on his feet, his body angling between her and Rydan on instinct.

"What did you say?" Criss's voice was quiet.

"The Holts survived because I allowed it. The Merricks survived because they were useful. The Coles bent the knee early enough to keep their names." Rydan stepped further into the basin, and with each step the glow in his hands intensified, amber light spilling across the fractured stone. "But the Brennans? The Volkov line? The Tanaka pride branch that had the audacity to demand transparency?" His mouth curved. "They didn't survive, Criss. They didn't relocate. They didn't choose silence."