Chapter 114: Aldric’s Office

Reed

Aldric’s office looked exactly the same as it had the last time we’d stood in it demanding action, except now there were files spread across his desk instead of Astrid’s cracked phone. Academic files. I felt Xander stiffen beside me the moment he registered what he was looking at.

"You called us in for this?" Xander said, his voice already sharp.

"Sit," Aldric said, not unkindly. We didn’t. He continued anyway. "Astrid and Ivy have now missed several classes and an important checkpoint. I need to address it, whether either of you wants to hear that right now or not."

I hadn’t tracked the days properly, not with everything else consuming my attention, but hearing it stated so plainly made the passage of time land harder than I expected. Classes had continued. Assignments had come due. The academy had kept moving forward while our entire world had stopped the moment Astrid’s phone hit that hallway floor.

"We don’t care about assignments," Xander snapped. "She’s missing, and you’re worried about a checkpoint?"

"I know what you’re dealing with," Aldric said, his tone even. "But Moonshade cannot become another casualty in this. If the two of you abandon everything else while you search, you’ll have nothing left to come back to, and neither will they when they’re found."

Something in the way he said when rather than if settled into me more than I expected it to.

"Your bloodlines project," Aldric continued, sliding a folder toward us. "The Hidden Lycan Royal Bloodlines research. You, Xander, and Astrid were assigned a joint checkpoint. Astrid’s portion is incomplete, obviously, and without it the rest of the submission can’t move forward either."

"Then it waits," I said.

"I’m granting an extension," Aldric said. "But when she returns, I don’t want her walking back into an academy that simply paused and waited for her to catch up on her own. That does neither of you any favors, and it doesn’t help her either."

I didn’t argue with that. It made a kind of practical sense I didn’t have the energy to resent, not entirely.

"Ivy’s team is in a different position," Aldric added. "Her own project group can’t present without her, since she’s the one holding the primary research thread. I’ve spoken to them. They’re anxious, understandably, but they’ve asked to keep working in the hope she returns before their deadline."

That detail stuck somewhere in my chest longer than I expected. Even people who barely knew her were holding a place open, waiting.

We left his office without much more said between us, and the walk back through the academy corridors felt different than it had even a day earlier. Students went quiet in clusters as we passed, conversations dying mid-sentence. I caught fragments anyway.

"...probably just ran off together..."

"...the twins know more than they’re saying, I bet..."

"...people say the east wing’s haunted now, that’s why nobody..."

Xander’s jaw tightened with every word, and I caught his arm before he could turn toward the group nearest us. "Let them talk," I said. "We need information, not silence. If we start confronting every student repeating a rumor, nobody will tell us anything useful again."

He didn’t like it, but he let it go.

Estelle found us near the courtyard not long after, her expression drawn with what looked like real concern. "Any news?" she asked.

"No," I said.

"I keep thinking about the last time I saw her," Estelle said quietly. "Right before all of this happened. I wish I’d noticed something was wrong."

I filed the phrasing away without responding to it directly. Not suspicion, not yet, just something to hold onto.

"If there’s anything I can do," she continued, "help catch up on classes, cover for either of you at student council, anything at all, please let me know."

Xander said nothing, his expression cold enough that Estelle noticed it herself.

"Are you angry with me?" she asked him.

He still didn’t answer, and I stepped in before it could become something neither of us had the patience for right now. "We appreciate the offer," I said. "We’ll let you know."

She nodded, glanced once more between the two of us, and left.

Student council pulled at me not long after that, an upcoming academy event that still needed organizing whether or not the person organizing it had any interest left in doing it properly. My first instinct was to hand it all off entirely, let someone else manage details I couldn’t focus on. Then I reconsidered. If I disappeared from every visible responsibility, people would notice. And if whoever had taken Astrid was watching Moonshade closely enough to plan something this elaborate, they might notice too, and I had no interest in giving them any read on how deeply this had shaken us.

So I sat through the meeting. I approved venue requests and reviewed a budget proposal and behaved, as much as I could manage, like someone whose life hadn’t fractured days earlier.

While going through old paperwork tied to our abandoned bloodlines project, I came across a reference to territories connected to Moonshade’s early history, sections of the grounds that no longer appeared on current maps. It read as pure academic trivia at first, the kind of footnote easy to skim past. Then something nagged at me, some half-formed recollection of the east wing’s architecture, details that had never quite matched the rest of the academy’s construction the way they should have.

I didn’t chase the thought further that afternoon. I set it aside, a loose thread I couldn’t afford to pull on yet with everything else demanding attention.

That night, back at the apartment, Xander was already there when I arrived, the others having scattered to their own rooms hours earlier. The quiet pressed in the same way it had every night since Astrid disappeared, a silence that had nothing peaceful in it.

Our unfinished project sat on the table where we’d left it weeks ago, papers and notes still scattered exactly the way Astrid had organized them before any of this started. I picked up one of her pages without really meaning to, and found a line scrawled in the margin beside a paragraph on early academy records.

Why was this section removed from the records?

I stared at it for a long moment. She’d written it in her own hand, weeks before any of this happened, before the east wing, before Ivy’s messages, before any of it.

Whatever she’d been quietly investigating on her own, buried in the middle of a school assignment neither of us had taken seriously enough at the time, might turn out to matter far more than either of us had understood.