Bryce keeps her rifle trained on Baxian after he claims Danika was his mate, but Baxian exposes Danika’s handwriting tattooed on his chest and insists he is telling the truth. Bryce rejects the idea because Danika never told her, yet Baxian explains that he and Danika met two years before her death during Danika’s research into ancient shifter bloodlines. As Bryce remembers that Danika stopped casually sleeping with people around that time, Baxian’s story becomes harder to dismiss. Baxian says they hid the bond because Sabine, Sandriel, and the Asteri would all have used it against them.

Baxian then reveals that Danika’s synth investigation was not the whole story. According to Baxian, Danika was trying to uncover the origins of shifters and Fae, hoping that ancient bloodlines might reveal both where their peoples came from and a way to challenge Sabine’s grip on the wolves if Danika died early. After meeting Baxian, Danika also searched for a path into another world where they might someday live together freely. The revelation devastates Bryce because it proves Danika kept an enormous part of her life hidden while still loving Bryce deeply.

When Bryce asks about Sofie Renast, Baxian says Danika found Sofie while tracing thunderbird lineage and likely had theories about thunderbird power beyond ancestry alone. Baxian immediately recognizes the letters and numbers carved into Sofie’s body and identifies them as a room code from the Asteri Archives, a code he once memorized after escorting Sandriel to the Asteri palace and noticing her emerge shaken from that room. Baxian gave the code to Danika, Danika became obsessed with it, and Bryce concludes that Danika later sent Sofie undercover to enter the room because Sofie could move through the archives without suspicion. Baxian believes Sofie spent three years infiltrating the system, discovered something world-altering there, and then fled to Kavalla.

Bryce and Hunt take this information back to Ruhn’s house, where Declan, Ruhn, Flynn, Hypaxia, and Ithan join them, and Tharion arrives later. Bryce learns that the public story about the fight at Urd’s Temple is that Pollux, Mordoc, and the Hind heroically stopped a rebel attack, while Pippa escaped and Bryce’s group has not yet been exposed. Declan cannot penetrate the archive database itself, but he can access the Eternal Palace camera system. He finds footage of Sofie, disguised as an archivist, entering the coded room two months earlier and leaving fifteen minutes later visibly shaken but carrying nothing visible, confirming that the room exists and that Sofie really reached it.

The footage convinces Bryce that Danika’s secret was real and still matters. Despite Hunt’s dread at the thought of challenging the Asteri inside their own stronghold, Bryce declares that they need to reach the Eternal City and break into the archives themselves, adding that she knows someone familiar with the palace who could help them navigate it. After Bryce and Hunt leave, Ithan remains with Tharion, talks through his numb reaction to Danika and Baxian, and hears Tharion’s warning to settle any unresolved business before the mission. Taking the warning seriously, Ithan decides there is something he needs to do.