Read Chapter 15: The Château of the Black Wolf

The blood trail ended at the cave mouth, but the X gouged into the rock above it was fresh enough that sap still wept from the scratched lichen. Étienne pressed his palm flat against the stone, feeling the cold seep through his gloves, and listened.

Nothing. No breathing. No scrape of movement from the dark throat of the cave.

Claire stood at his shoulder, her medical kit dripping from the sling she’d fashioned. She had not looked at him since the mist, since her name had been called out of the fog like a hook on a line.

“It’s empty,” he said, though he could not know that. The words were a stone dropped into silence.

She said nothing.

He ducked inside anyway, shotgun low, and found only the smear of blood across the limestone floor and a single brass button stamped with the crest of a wolf — the same crest that marked the door of the château they had not yet seen, the one the poacher called the Loom.

He pocketed the button.

Back in Martigny, in the low-ceilinged room above the inn’s stable, Étienne sat with the wooden box on his knees. It had belonged to Gaspard. He had carried it through three countries and two wars of memory, never opening it, because opening it meant admitting his brother was dead and not just lost.

Claire watched from the window. Her rifle rested against the sill, and her fingers traced the edge of the bandage beneath her sleeve — the one she thought he hadn’t noticed.

“You’re going to open it now,” she said. It was not a question.

“The key fits the lock in the château, not this.” He turned the copper key over in his fingers. “But my brother kept things in here that he said would only make sense later. He liked riddles.”

“You think this is the later?”

Étienne set the key aside and worked the box’s false bottom loose with the edge of his knife. He knew the trick — Gaspard had shown him when they were boys, laughing at how easily Étienne had been fooled by the empty tray of fishing flies.

The diary inside was bound in cracked leather, the pages soft with age and damp. He opened it to the middle and found the code immediately — the same childish cipher they had invented for passing notes across the classroom, numbers replacing letters, the alphabet scrambled by Gaspard’s birthday.

But the code broke on the final pages. Those were written in plain French, the hand unsteady, the ink darker where the pen had pressed too hard.

Étienne’s lips moved as he read, his brow lowering. He read the passage three times before he closed the book.

“What does it say?” Claire asked.

He did not answer. He crossed the room to the washbasin and emptied the tepid water over his head, then stood dripping, his back to her.

“Étienne.”

“It describes a procedure,” he said, his voice raw. “Cutting, alchemy, stitching. A way to take the strength of a wolf and bind it into a man’s frame. They called it *la greffe* — the graft. They believed a hunter could become something more than human, a perfect guardian of the pass.”

“Who did it?”

He turned. His eyes were hollow.

“The signature is Gaspard’s. My brother wrote the manual. He was the first to undergo it.” He paused, and the words came out like splinters. “The creature we’ve been hunting isn’t one beast. It’s a splice — a patchwork of wolf and man and older things, shaped by the Loom. And the shaper who directs it all, the one Hartmann calls *her maker*… it’s him. It’s Gaspard. He’s alive.”

The silence that followed was dense enough to choke on.

Claire moved first. She crossed to him and took the diary from his hands, reading the final page herself, her lips forming the words silently. When she finished, she looked up at him with something that was not pity.

“You knew,” she said.

“I suspected.”

“A suspicion you chose not to share with the people bleeding for you.” Her voice flint. “Giancarlo carries the infection in his leg because of what we did not know. François has been lying to a dead man’s maker. And I — “ She stopped, and he saw the pulse jumping in her throat.

“I never knew for certain, Claire. The last time I saw him was on the glacier ridge. He fell — “ Étienne’s jaw tightened. “The rope snapped. I watched him drop into the crevasse. There was nothing I could do.”

“Only a fool believes a body taken by the mountain is a body that’s gone,” she said. “The mountain keeps what it wants. You know that better than most, don’t you?”

The accusation hung between them. He could have pushed back, could have shown her the scars that climbed his forearm beneath his sleeve. Instead he reached for the second copper key, the one pried from the dead monk’s hand, and held it beside his brother’s original.

Two keys. Two teeth of worn brass.

“That’s why Hartmann wanted you specifically,” Claire said slowly. “You’re not a vessel. You’re bait. She’s been drawing you toward the Loom this whole time, stringing us along with staged corpses and a dead monk’s treasure, because she wanted you to find this diary and read the truth — so that when you reach the door, you’ll hesitate.”

“I won’t hesitate.”

“You will. He’s your brother.”

Étienne looked at the diary, at the last entry dated eleven days before the crevasse swallowed his world. Gaspard’s handwriting had grown worse on the final page, the letters cramped with pain. The code had broken then, as if the author had stopped caring whether anyone understood.

The last line was written in block capitals, underlined three times:

IF I BECOME THE BEAST, IT WILL ONLY BE BECAUSE YOU LET ME.

When Étienne spoke, his voice was quiet as a blade sliding home.

“Then I’ll kill him myself.”

Claire did not answer. She only looked at the two keys in his hand and, beyond the window, at the darkening line of the alpine peaks where the Loom waited like a hearth that had never gone cold.