Chapter 25 #2
“It could not happen.” He was laughing now, openly, his shoulders shaking with the force of it. “I bet she looked at you like you had lost your entire mind. Which you have, by the way. Lost your entire mind.”
I threw a pillow at his head. He caught it easily and tossed it back at me.
“Did you at least apologize before you ran away?” he asked.
“I didn’t run away. I strategically retreated.”
“You absolutely ran away. You ran away from your naked wife because you were embarrassed about murdering her bathroom door.”
“I’m going to murder you if you don’t shut up.”
“Worth it.”
We were in the middle of arguing about whether my response had been “appropriate caution” or “clinically unhinged behavior requiring professional intervention” when a shout came from outside.
“Alpha! There’s a package! A courier just delivered it!”
Noah and I looked at each other. The laughter died instantly. The temperature in the room seemed to drop ten degrees.
We ran outside together.
A cluster of guards surrounded a plain cardboard box sitting on the ground near the front gate. It looked completely innocuous. Brown cardboard. Standard size. No markings except for a label.
A few feet away, a human teenager straddled a rusty bicycle that had seen better days, maybe better decades.
He was wearing oversized headphones around his neck and chewing gum with aggressive nervousness.
His eyes were huge, darting between the six growling wolves in human form who had surrounded him.
If he thought having wolves as guards was odd as fuck, he didn’t mention it.
“It’s clean,” one of the guards reported, stepping back from the box. “Scanned it twice. No explosives, no poison, no magical signatures. It’s just a box.”
I moved closer and read the label.
The Happy Family.
No address. No return sender. Just those three words, written in neat black marker.
My blood ran cold.
“I just... I just had the delivery!” the kid squeaked, his voice cracking on every syllable. He lifted his hands in surrender, nearly losing his balance on the bicycle. “I didn’t do anything wrong! I swear to god, man, I just deliver stuff!”
I grabbed the handlebars of his bicycle, steadying it but also preventing him from fleeing. I leaned in close, letting just a hint of my alpha authority bleed into my voice.
“Who gave this to you?”
“A lady!” the kid stammered. “She was waiting by the gas station on the main road, like three miles from here. She gave me fifty bucks to ride it up here. Said it was a surprise gift for a baby shower or something. I didn’t ask questions, okay? Fifty bucks is fifty bucks.”
I released the handlebars and scanned the tree line beyond our property. The gas station was outside our patrol range. Too far for us to catch someone making a quick drop, especially if they knew our routes.
The enemy wasn’t attacking head on. They weren’t sending wolves to fight wolves. They were outsourcing. Using innocent humans as unwitting pawns to bypass our senses. We couldn’t scent a threat if the threat was using human delivery boys who had no idea what they were carrying.
Clever. Calculated. Infuriatingly smart.
And absolutely fucking terrifying.
“Let him go,” I told the guards. “He doesn’t know anything.”
The teenager pedaled away so fast his rusty bicycle nearly tipped over, disappearing down the road without a single backward glance. I didn’t blame him.
I turned to the box.
Noah and I carried it to the front steps, far from the house where Lina and the kids were. The guards formed a protective perimeter, their eyes scanning the trees, their bodies coiled and ready for an attack that might come from any direction.
I opened the box.
Inside was a single object, nestled in a bed of tissue paper. A pacifier. Blue plastic, well-worn from use, the silicone nipple slightly flattened and clouded from being chewed on for months.
I picked it up with hands that weren’t quite steady.
There were initials scratched into the handle. Small, crude letters, probably carved with a key or a pocket knife.
T.B.
Thomas Barrett.
Cole’s son.
I went pale. Beside me, Noah made a sound like he had been punched in the stomach.
Underneath the pacifier was a photograph. I pulled it out, already knowing I wasn’t going to like what I saw.
It was a picture of the Pack House. Our home. The building where we lived, where our children slept, where we had dinner together as a family. The photograph was taken from the tree line at the edge of the property, a clear angle with a direct line of sight to our front door.
In the corner of the image, a date had been stamped in white text.
Yesterday’s date.
They had been here. Right here. Close enough to photograph our home. Close enough to count our guards and map our routines and learn our weaknesses.
The message was clear. We know where you live. We can get to you whenever we want. Your walls mean nothing.
“Shit,” Noah whispered.
I stared at the photograph, my mind racing through implications and countermeasures and escape routes. But beneath all the tactical thinking, one thought dominated: I had to tell Cole.
I didn’t want to. The man had been searching for his son for months, following leads that went nowhere, burning himself out with desperate hope. This would break him. This would absolutely shatter him into pieces.
But I couldn’t keep it from him. He deserved to know that his son was alive. Even if the knowledge came wrapped in cruelty.
I pulled out my phone and made the calls.
Cole arrived first, followed closely by Hunt, then Ryder and Sawyer. Lina had seen the looks on our faces and immediately taken the kids to Sarah’s house without asking questions, a small army of guards following close behind her. She knew something was wrong. She trusted me to handle it.
I set the box on the coffee table and stepped back.
Cole stared at it for a long, terrible moment. His face was blank, carefully controlled, the expression of a man who had learned to expect the worst but still hoped for better.
He reached in and pulled out the pacifier.
The sound that came out of him was barely human.
He dropped to his knees on my living room floor, clutching the tiny piece of plastic to his chest like it was the most precious thing in the world. Sobs tore through him, raw and broken, his whole body shaking with a grief too big to contain.
“My boy,” he choked out between gasps. “My baby boy. She has my baby boy.”
I wanted to look away. I couldn’t. I stood there and watched my friend, my beta, one of the strongest men I had ever known, fall completely apart. Tears streamed down his face as he rocked back and forth, keening with a pain that made my own eyes burn and my chest ache.
Ryder’s jaw was clenched tight, his eyes bright with suppressed emotion. Sawyer had turned away, his hand pressed over his mouth. Hunt stood frozen, his fists shaking at his sides. Noah just looked sad.
Someone had done this. Someone had taken a child from his father, had used that innocent baby as a weapon, had sent back a piece of him just to twist the knife deeper. Mary. This was Mary’s work. Mary and Mira and whoever else was helping them orchestrate this campaign of terror.
They were going to fucking pay.
“Hunt!” I roared, my voice echoing off the walls. “With me!”
I was already moving, already shifting, my clothes shredding as my body transformed mid stride.
The change ripped through me faster than it ever had before, fueled by rage and protective instinct.
Bones cracked and reformed. Fur sprouted across my skin.
My hands became paws, my face elongated into a muzzle, and then I was running on four legs, a massive black wolf tearing through the front door.
I sprinted toward the tree line where the photograph had been taken, my paws eating up the ground, my lungs burning with exertion and fury. Hunt and two other enforcers followed, their wolves keeping pace behind me. We tore through the underbrush, noses to the ground, desperate for a scent.
The forest blurred around me. Trees, rocks, fallen logs, all of it streaming past in a rush of greens and browns. My wolf was fully in control now, driving us forward with single-minded determination. Find. Track. Hunt. Kill.
We found the spot.
The grass was matted down where someone had stood, the earth compressed by the weight of a body holding still for an extended period.
Boot prints marked the soft soil, clear indentations that told me our enemy had been here for a while.
Watching. Waiting. Taking their time to compose the perfect photograph.
I inhaled deeply, expecting the scent of Mary or a rogue or anyone we could track.
Instead, the air smelled like chemicals.
Harsh and burning, searing my nostrils, making my eyes water.
Bleach. Industrial grade bleach, poured all over the ground in massive quantities.
The liquid had soaked into the earth, yellowing the grass, killing everything it touched, destroying any trace of scent.
They had cleaned up after themselves. They had anticipated our response and neutralized our greatest advantage. They knew how we hunted.
It wasn’t just a cleanup. It was a message.
We know how you hunt. We are smarter than you. We will always be one step ahead.
I snapped my jaws at the chemical soaked air, fury and frustration boiling over. A howl ripped from my throat, long and loud and full of rage, echoing through the forest until the birds went silent and even the insects stopped their buzzing.
Hunt shifted beside me, his own frustration evident in every line of his human body.
“They planned this,” he said grimly. “Every step. The human courier. The untraceable chain. The bleach. They knew exactly what we would do and how to counter it.”
I shifted back to human form, ignoring the cold air on my bare skin. One of the enforcers tossed me a pair of spare pants from an emergency cache we kept hidden in a hollow tree.
“Get Ryder,” I ordered, pulling on the pants. “Tell him to bring his best trackers. We’re going to the gas station.”
The enforcer nodded and took off running.
Ryder arrived fifteen minutes later with a team of Moonfang’s finest trackers. They were good, I’d heard. Better than good. They had tracked rogues through rivers and across mountain ranges, through cities and deserts and every terrain in between.
We would need every ounce of their skill.
Noah stayed behind with Cole and Lina. I hated leaving my mate, but I couldn’t sit still. I couldn’t wait. Every second we wasted was another second Mary had to disappear with Thomas.
The old woman at the gas station was still there, sitting on a bench outside the convenience store, smoking a cigarette. When we approached, she squinted at us with rheumy eyes.
“Yes?” She asked.
“Hello, sorry to disturb you,” Hunt started, smiling and trying to charm the old lady. “Were you perhaps the person that gave a teenage boy a box…?”
“You’re looking for the package,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes, we are.”
She jerked her thumb toward the store. “Person behind the counter gave it to me. Asked me to give it to the kid when he came by on his bike. Fifty bucks to hold onto it for an hour. I didn’t ask questions.”
I pushed through the door of the convenience store. The person behind the counter, a bored-looking man in his fifties, pointed us to a neighbor from a nearby town who had been paid to deliver the package to the gas station.
The neighbor pointed us to a friend of a friend who had received it from a stranger at a bus station.
We followed the chain link by link, moving through a maze of innocent people who had been manipulated without their knowledge.
Each one gave us another name, another location, another person who had touched the box.
The trail wound through three towns, doubled back on itself twice, and eventually led us to Pine Valley.
Finally, we found the source.
A little boy, maybe seven years old, sat on the steps of a rundown apartment building. He was playing with a battered toy car, running it back and forth across the cracked concrete, making engine noises with his mouth.
He looked up when we approached, his eyes curious but not afraid. Kids were like that sometimes. They hadn’t learned yet that the world was full of monsters.
“Hey buddy,” I said, crouching down to his level. “We’re looking for a lady who might have given you something to deliver. Do you remember anyone like that?”
The kid nodded slowly, still pushing his car back and forth. “The pretty blonde lady? She was nice. She gave me five whole dollars to give a box to Mrs. Patterson down the street.”
“Can you tell me what she looked like?”
“She had yellow hair. Really long, like a princess. And she smelled like flowers. And she was holding a baby.”
A baby. Thomas.
My claws bit into my palms. I forced them to retract.
“Do you remember which way she went after she gave you the box?”
The kid pointed down the street, toward the edge of town where the buildings gave way to dense forest. “That way. She got into a car. A gray one.”
I turned to the trackers. “Can you pick up her scent?”
One of them, a grizzled older wolf with scars across his face, moved around the area where the kid was sitting. He inhaled deeply, his nose twitching, eyes half closed in concentration. He walked in slow circles, expanding his search, cataloging every smell.
“Got it,” he said finally. “Faint. Old. But I’ve got it.”
Relief crashed through me. We had a trail. We had a direction. We had a chance.
“Follow it,” I ordered. “Don’t lose it. Report back the moment you find anything.”
The trackers shifted and took off into the forest, a blur of fur and muscle disappearing between the trees.
It was just a matter of time now.
I had to believe that.