The Broken Crown

A Storm is Coming

The locked door lies before me, a key in one hand as I find it hard to move from where I have planted myself. My entire body is tense, my muscles aching for any movement as I am frozen in space, unaware of what to expect behind the door. They told me it was clean, that the blood was washed out of the carpet and the walls repainted, the broken coffee table taken out, and her body handled gently as it was brought to the coroner. I had my men search the home thoroughly, inspecting it for any sign it was Asger who did this because the bold message he had sent me to my own front door. 

"Do you want me to open it?" Brie asks, standing beside me as we both look to the yellow-painted wooden door. I had visited here only a handful of times since I became alpha, finding my grandmother to be a shining light in the darkness surrounding me. Yet that light has been put out by Asger, as he left behind her dismembered body and a message for me written on the mirror of my mother's old vanity. Asger no longer felt the need to hide his identity from me as the man who tried to kill me, rather, he took my grandmother's blood and wrote a message for me to warn me off. 

Shaking my head, I reach my arm forward and unlock the hollow house, the empty hallway stretching out before us as I look around the entrance. "They cleaned it up well," I comment, gazing around the small entryway as Brie follows me inside. "To resell it no doubt." 

"Your parents are moving from their home as we speak," Brie informs, her phone buzzing every few seconds to update her on my adoptive parent's move. Ever since my grandmother was murdered, I had a place in my own home setup for my parents in the eastern wing. If Asger was able to sneak into this pack, or at least someone working for him, then there is still someone or a group of people within this pack allowing for a breach in our security. 

I had ordered for Brie to increase security along every boarder and within the neighborhoods, exhausting the number of our men left here to defend the pack and not go out to war. Brie's own husband is one of those men out at war, more specifically within Evercrest Ridge to help keep order within the fallen pack. Edward's daughter survived the attack, and if she is willing to work with me, when I win this war I have assured her she will run Evercrest Ridge under the title her father held. I would not expect her to refuse such a proposition since she is so much like her father. 

"Where is the vanity?" 

"Down the hall and to the right. Second door down. Your grandmother kept many things from her daughter." 

"I heard my mother was the favorite before she ran off with my dad," I comment, trying to make small talk as we both head towards the room. "Any word on that message which contained that dust?" 

Brie pauses for a second before answering. "No one I have talked to has informed me they can speak Elder, much less read it."

"So it is Elder? Elder Elf?" I ask, raising an eyebrow as I thought Brie had no idea as to what the script was, much less the language it was in. 

"Oh, I am only making an educated guess. The script reminds me of the Elder which elves used before the fall of their empire eons ago. Witches and sorceresses know the language too, their spells are often written in it." 

I leave it there, no pushing Brie further as I give her an odd look. Something is not right with how she tries to dismiss how she knows it as an educated guess. Yet I leave the conversation to die there, knowing to focus on what we are going to see now before the evening when the obituary will be made. My aunt, the last biological relative I know of, will be flying in this afternoon. From what I have heard from others, my aunt and mother did not get along in the end. 

Pushing open the door to the room, the room is small but efficient, the vanity placed before the bed as my mother's graduation picture from high school is on the vanity. I notice the dried blood on the vanity mirror, the slanted letters written in crimson, and as I near it, a rage is fueled within me. To think Asger used my human grandmother just for a message when she had no mix-up in any of this. She was innocent, but I remember that Oliver once told me not even the innocent are spared in times of war.