Page 47 of Match Made In Growl

"You've had things to do for two weeks. You haven't told me what they are."

"When I'm done, you'll know everything."

Kieran poured his coffee. "Just be careful."

Careful. That was the word Criss carried with him into the woods every morning. Careful with the clay mask on his skin. Careful with his distance from Rydan's property. Careful with the phone in his jacket pocket, recording app running, storage filling up with the slow accumulation of a case that would end this.

Today was different. His tiger had been pulling toward the ridge since before dawn, the directional tug stronger than usual, insistent. He knew Steph was at the site. She'd been going back regularly, working the chamber, and his tiger tracked her presence with the passive precision of something that couldn't turn off even if he asked it to. She was there. She was safe. That was the baseline.

But now Rydan was moving too.

Criss had learned the elder's patterns. Rydan stayed at the old property north of town, ventured into Hollow Oak proper two or three times a week, and spent the rest of his time in a kind of holding pattern. Conserving energy. Each ward manipulation, Criss had realized, cost him. The collapse at the dig site. The ward attack in the square. These weren't casual acts of magic. They were massive expenditures of power from a man whose reserves weren't what they'd been decades ago. He needed recovery time between events, sometimes a full week before his movements regained their usual precision.

He'd been recovering for twelve days now. And this morning, he'd left the property at four a.m., heading east.

Toward the ridge. Toward her.

Criss followed at a distance, clay-masked, silent. Rydan moved faster than usual. He carried no book today. His hands were bare, fingers flexing at his sides, and even from fifty yards back Criss could see the faint amber glow building in his palms. Drawing power from the old wards as he passed through them, siphoning energy from the land itself.

Criss pulled out his phone. Recording. Timestamp. GPS active.

Rydan reached the basin as grey dawn light filtered through the canopy. Steph's portable lights glowed from inside the chamber entrance. She was already underground, deep in the carved walls and the treaty stone, doing the work she'd been doing every day for weeks. She wouldn't hear anything from in there. Wouldn't feel the vibrations until the stone was already moving.

Rydan walked to the center of the basin and knelt. His palms pressed flat against the fractured stone. The amber glow spread outward, flowing into the cracks, following fault lines, seeking every structural weakness his previous attacks had created. The ground began to vibrate.

This wasn't a targeted section meant to scare her off. The energy was feeding into every fracture simultaneously, the ridge face, the chamber ceiling, the walls. He was going to bring all of it down. The entire chamber buried under a thousand tons of limestone. The treaty stone, the dual inscriptions, every piece of evidence she'd documented. And Steph with it.

She was inside and he was going to seal her in and let the mountain do what his hands couldn't. No body to explain. No evidence to suppress. Just a tragic collapse at an unstable site, an archaeologist who'd been warned about the danger and refused to listen. Clean. Final. The kind of accident that closed investigations instead of opening them.

Criss's vision went white hit, but not with rage. Something colder. His tiger didn't roar or snarl or surge. It locked into a stillness so complete that every sound in the forest amplified, every scent sharpened, and his body moved with a precision that bypassed thought entirely.

He stepped out of the tree line.

"That's enough, Rydan."

The elder's hands stilled. The amber glow dimmed but didn't disappear. He looked up at Criss, and the flat patience cracked. Surprise.

"You've been following me."

"I have." Criss held up his phone. The red recording indicator pulsed on the screen. "This one makes seven. I've got you on audio discussing site destabilization with Marvin Cole. I've got you on camera performing ward manipulation at three in the morning. And I've got your courier delivering documents to the council clerk two days before Stephanie's permits were frozen." He kept his voice level despite the ice in his veins. "And now I've got you channeling enough power to collapse an entire chamber with a woman inside it."

Rydan rose slowly. The amber light faded from his hands. He stood in the basin surrounded by cracked stone and his own damage, and looked at Criss with an expression beyond anger, but still calculated. And that sent chills down his spine.

"You don't understand what you're interfering with," Rydan said.

"I understand you were about to kill her."

"I was protecting this community from exposure that would⁠—"

"You were going to bury her alive. Don't dress it up. Don't give me tradition or preservation or the greater good. You were going to murder a woman to keep a secret, and I watched you do it."

The word murder landed in the basin like a stone in still water. Rydan's jaw tightened. His pale amber eyes flickered to the phone in Criss's hand, to the chamber entrance where Steph's lights still glowed, to the tree line behind Criss where escape routes lay.

"The recording is already backed up," Criss said, reading the calculation. "Kieran has a copy. If something happens to me or my phone, it goes to Emmett within the hour."

Rydan went still. Not the controlled stillness of authority but of a man who'd run out of moves.

"What do you want?" His voice had gone flat.