Read Chapter 18: Library of Forgotten

The library door swung open on silent hinges, and Iona stepped into a room that smelled of old paper, beeswax, and something deeper—peat smoke trapped in the tapestries that lined the walls like frozen ghosts. Moonlight silvered the tall windows, casting everything in a pale glow that made the dust motes look like drifting stars.

She had expected a library. She had not expected this.

The room rose two stories, shelves carved into the stone itself, crammed with volumes bound in leather so old it had gone the color of dried blood. A ladder on wheels ran along a brass rail. In the center, a massive oak table held an astrolabe, a stack of yellowed maps, and a scattering of quills that looked as though they had not been touched in a century.

"Morag spent most of her time here," Lachlan said from the doorway. His voice was quiet, almost reverent. "When she wasn't in the kitchens, or the garden."

Iona turned to look at him. He stood framed by the door, his shoulders broad against the narrow arch, and she saw something soften in his face that she had never seen before. Grief, yes. But also—relief, perhaps. That someone else was finally standing in this room, seeing what he saw.

"Show me the family records," she said. "Anything with names. Dates. Connections."

He crossed to a shelf near the fireplace and pulled down a volume bound in green leather, cracked with age. "This is the register. Births, deaths, marriages—going back four hundred years. But if you're looking for something specific—"

"I don't know what I'm looking for." Iona took the book, its weight surprising in her hands. The pages were thick, handmade, the ink faded to brown in places but still legible. She set it on the table and began to page through. "Your grandmother mentioned something to Ellis. About a woman from Glasgow."

Lachlan was silent for a long moment. "The diary."

"Ellis told me she found a diary. Said it mentioned someone with a locket."

He moved to a different shelf—lower, dustier, as though it had not been touched in years. He pulled out a small volume, bound in worn black leather, no larger than her palm. The spine cracked when he opened it, and he handed it to her with the care of a man passing a live coal.

"Morag's private journal. She kept it from 1978 to 1982. I found it after she died, hidden behind a loose stone in the hearth."

Iona took it. The pages were soft with age, the handwriting small and precise. She turned to the middle where a ribbon marker, faded to gray, had been left. The entry was dated November 1980.

*The woman arrived today from Glasgow with the child. She claims no knowledge of the locket's purpose, but she wears it openly, and I saw the way it caught the light—silver, yes, but with something else. Gold worked into the chain, old gold, the kind we do not make anymore. She calls herself MacRae now, but her mother was Blackwood, and she cannot hide that blood no matter how far south she runs.*

Iona's breath caught. She read the passage again, then a third time, her finger tracing the words.

"She calls herself MacRae now, but her mother was Blackwood." The words came out of her mouth before she could stop them.

Lachlan did not look surprised. He stood very still, watching her. "Keep reading."

She turned the page.

*The child is a bonny thing, dark-haired and curious. She asked about the wolves in the tapestry, and I told her they were only stories. Her mother flinched. She knows. She knows what this place holds, and she is afraid—not of us, but of what the locket might do. I tried to explain that it is not a weapon, that it is a key, no more dangerous than a door handle. But she would not listen. She left the next morning without saying goodbye, and she took the locket with her, though it was never hers to take.*

Iona looked up. The room had gone very quiet. The fire in the hearth popped once, and she felt the sound like a gunshot in her chest.

"Your mother," Lachlan said quietly, "came here in 1980. She was pregnant. With you, I think—or perhaps with a sibling who did not survive. I don't know. Morag's diary does not say."

Iona's hands were shaking. She set the journal down carefully, afraid she might tear a page. "My mother is Eilidh MacRae. She grew up in Glasgow. She was a seamstress. She met my father when he was a student at the university. There is no Blackwood in her—" She stopped. Because there was. There must have been. Her mother had never spoken of her family. Never once. When Iona had asked about grandparents, the answer had always been the same: *Gone. Long gone. No one left to visit.*

"Come with me," Lachlan said.

He led her out of the library and down a narrow corridor she had not noticed before, hidden behind a tapestry showing a stag hunt. The corridor ended in a small round room, clearly once a chapel, though the altar had been removed. On the walls hung portraits, dozens of them, in gilt frames that had tarnished with time.

He stopped before one near the back, half-shrouded in shadow. He lifted a candle from a bracket and held it up, illuminating the canvas.

Iona felt the floor tilt.

The woman in the portrait had dark hair pinned in an elaborate arrangement, a high collar of lace, and a face that could have been her mother's—or her own. The same heart-shaped face. The same slight downturn at the corner of the mouth, as though the sitter was perpetually on the verge of saying something dry. The same eyes, that particular shade of heather-gray that Iona saw every morning in the mirror.

"Who is this?" Her voice was barely a whisper.

"Eilidh Blackwood," Lachlan said. "My great-great-aunt. She died in 1898, unmarried, after what the family records call 'a scandal that required her removal to Glasgow.'" He paused. "She was the last person to wear that locket before it disappeared."

Iona reached up and touched the chain at her throat. She had worn the locket for as long as she could remember. Her mother had given it to her on her sixteenth birthday, with a strange warning: *Never take it off. Not for anyone. You will understand someday, or you won't, but it does not matter. It is yours now, and it will protect you as it protected me.*

She had always assumed the words were sentimental. A mother's superstition. The locket was pretty, old, but she had never opened it—the clasp was fused shut, and she had never wanted to force it.

"Your mother," Lachlan said, "knew what this locket was when she came here. Morag's diary is clear on that. She knew it was a key to the pack's deepest secrets—and she took it anyway. She ran."

Iona could not look away from the portrait. The woman's face looked back at her, serene and knowing, as though she had been waiting a hundred years for someone to finally ask the question.

"Why would she run?"

Lachlan's voice was very gentle. "Because there are things in this valley—in this family—that are better left locked. Morag believed your mother was afraid of what the locket could do. Not to her, but to someone else. Someone she loved."

Iona turned to face him. The candlelight carved hollows under his cheekbones, made his eyes look black. "You know more than you're saying."

"I know what Morag wrote. And I know what I saw, the night she died." He paused. "The rogue that killed her—it wasn't just any wolf. It was mine."

Iona stared at him. "Yours?"

"My brother. Duncan." The words came out rough, like they hurt him to speak. "He was turned. By something old, something neither of us understood. And the locket—" He reached out, stopping just short of touching the chain at her throat. "Morag believed it might have stopped him. If she had still been wearing it, or if your mother had not taken it away—"

He stopped. The silence stretched between them, thick and heavy.

"Your mother never told you why she left, did she?"

Iona's hands were cold. She thought of her mother's careful silence, the way she changed the subject whenever the Highlands came up, the way she had looked at Iona's father when he mentioned Scotland—like a woman watching a storm roll in from a distance.

"No," she said. "She never told me anything."

She looked at the portrait again. Eilidh Blackwood stared back, her heather-gray eyes full of a hundred years of secrets, and Iona felt something shift inside her chest—a door opening, a lock turning.

She touched the locket at her throat and felt it warm against her fingers.