Declan
We follow the truck at a distance.
It’s not hard. The road out here is long and straight, cutting through miles of forest with nowhere to turn off.
We don’t need to stay close—Kyran’s people have already confirmed the route Dr. Moore takes home every night, and it hasn’t changed once.
The man is a creature of habit. Same truck, same time, same road.
You’d think someone running illegal experiments on shifters would mix-up his routine every once in a while.
I guess arrogance has a way of making people predictable.
Cole drives. Zeke rides shotgun. Kyran and two of his bears follow in a second vehicle, headlights off.
I sit in the back seat with my window cracked because that scent is still out there.
Faint, but present and pulling at my mind.
I can’t shake it. I don’t want to, which bothers me more than the scent itself.
I press my forehead against the cool glass and watch the taillights ahead of us, two red dots winding through the dark.
Focus. That’s what I need right now. Focus on the mission; focus on the plan.
Follow him home. Wait for the house to go dark.
Move in. After that, we deliver a message he won’t be able to ignore.
The truck turns off the main road after another twenty minutes, onto a private drive that winds uphill through thick rows of towering oak trees whose branches form a canopy overhead. When the trees thin out, I get my first clear look at the house.
It’s not a mansion, but close. Two stories, stone and timber, with a wide wraparound porch. There’s a detached garage, a garden that’s been put to bed for the season. It resembles a real home where a family like mine might live. I can’t make the image match to what I know about the man who owns it.
Cole pulls off the road well before we reach the driveway, easing our vehicle into a gap between the trees where it won’t be visible from the house. He kills the engine before Kyran’s SUV slides in behind us, silent as a ghost.
“There,” Zeke says quietly, nodding toward the house.
The truck has pulled into the driveway. The driver’s side door opens, and Dr. Moore steps out. Even from a distance, I recognize him from the photos Kyran’s contacts provided—tall, thin, silver-haired, moving with the speed of a man who considers every wasted second a personal offense.
But he doesn’t go inside. He walks around to the passenger side, and that’s when I realize he’s not alone.
The passenger door opens, and a girl stumbles out, catching herself on the doorframe. Moore is by her side immediately.
She’s small. Blonde hair falls around her face, shoulders hunched looking as if she’s cold, hurting or both. She leans into him as they make their way toward the front door, her feet unsteady on the gravel until he practically has to carry her to the porch and up the steps.
Something swells in my chest. Not the anxiety I’ve been carrying for weeks. Something sharper. A tightening behind my ribs that has nothing to do with the plan and everything to do with the way she’s moving. Barely holding on to consciousness.
“Who is that?” Cole asks, lowering his binoculars.
“His daughter.” Kyran’s voice comes through the cracked window from where he’s standing beside our vehicle. “Iris.”
So that’s her. My thoughts turn to the reports I’ve reviewed. Twenty-one. Lives with him, works at the facility in some role or another.
Knowing it and seeing her for myself are two different things. I watch Moore guide her through the front door before it swings shut. His daughter, and she could barely stand.
What the hell is he doing to her in that place?
I shove the question down. She’s not my problem. The mission is, and the mission is clear: get to Moore, deliver the message, get out. Whatever’s going on with his daughter is a separate issue that has nothing to do with my pack.
So why can’t I stop staring at the front door?
“Declan.” Cole’s watching me again, wearing that same frown from earlier. “You good?”
“Fine.” I pull my gaze away from the house. “We wait for the lights.”
It takes over an hour before any lights move through the house—downstairs first, then upstairs, room to room. I track them, building a rough layout in my head. Kitchen on the left, living room on the right. Staircase in the center.
The girl’s room is the second window from the left on the upper floor. Her light appears, stays on for a while, then finally clicks off. Moore’s room is at the far end. His light is the last to go.
The house settles into darkness. I give it another thirty minutes, letting the silence deepen, waiting for him to fall into whatever sleep a man like him is capable of. Does he have pleasant dreams after congratulating himself on a job well done?
The whole time, that scent lingers at the edges of my awareness. Closer now. Stronger. I breathe through my mouth to keep it from distracting me.
Finally, my wolf reaches the end of his patience, and it’s time to move on to the next step. “Let’s go.”
We move on foot, staying low, using the tree line for cover until there’s nothing left but the open stretch of yard between us and the house. The night is still overcast; no moon, no stars. Just the thick, low clouds that have been hanging around for hours. Good. The darker the better.
Kyran takes two of his bears around to the back.
Cole and Zeke flank the front door. I go in through a side window that’s been left unlocked.
Sloppy, for a man with so many enemies. Or maybe not sloppy.
Maybe it’s the confidence of someone who believes his fences with razor wire and guards are enough.
They’re not.
I move through the dark, quiet. Beginning with the first floor on instinct, letting my eyes adjust. Hardwood floors, area rugs, expensive furniture.
No family photos on the mantel at all, only books and medical journals stacked in neat rows.
The kitchen is clean, telling me no one really cooks in it.
Resembling a model home, or a movie set. It’s almost eerie.
I find the stairs and take them two at a time, placing my feet at the edges where the wood is less likely to creak. Moore’s room is at the end of the hall. The door is closed, but not locked.
He’s asleep when I open it. Flat on his back, breathing evenly, one arm draped across his chest. For a man whose work involves caging and experimenting on people, he sure sleeps soundly.
That tells me something about him that I already suspected. He doesn’t feel guilty. He doesn’t lie awake wondering if what he’s doing is wrong. He sleeps like a man who believes he’s right.
I cross the room in a few long strides, clamp one hand over his mouth, and haul him out of bed before he can make a sound. He’s lighter than I expected—thin, wiry. His eyes fly open wide, and he tries to scream against my palm.
“Don’t,” I warn. Low and steady, the voice I’ve been practicing since I became alpha. “Make a sound and this gets worse for you and the girl.”
He goes still. Smart man.
I drag him downstairs, his bare feet scrambling on the hardwood, and drop him on the living room couch. Cole and Zeke are already inside, near the living room doorway. Kyran fills the opposite corner, arms crossed, breathing hard.
Moore’s eyes dart between us, calculating. Even in his pajamas, hair standing on end, pulse hammering in his throat, I can see the gears turning. He’s sizing us up. Strategizing. Already looking for leverage.
Then I hear heavy footsteps on the stairs, and one of Kyran’s bears appears in the doorway with the girl.
She’s half-conscious, blinking against the sudden light when Cole switches on a lamp.
She’s wearing an oversized T-shirt and pajama shorts, her blonde hair tangled, her skin pale.
She looks sick. Wrung out. She’s leaning into the bear’s grip, not because she wants to, but because her legs can’t hold her up.
And there it is again. That tugging sensation I felt before. Stronger now, more intense than anything I’ve ever known. My wolf surges forward so hard I almost lose my footing while every instinct screams at me to cross the room and rip her out of that bear’s hands.
Not because he’s hurting her. He’s not. He’s being careful, his grip light on her arm.
Something in me doesn’t want anyone else’s hands on her at all.
Now is not the time. Whatever this is, it has to wait. “Sit her down,” I order, and my voice comes out rougher than it should.
The bear guides her to the armchair near the fireplace. She drops into it, and right away, her head touches the back like it’s too heavy for her to hold up. She’s shaking. Whether from cold, fear or whatever was done to her at that facility, I can’t tell. Probably all three.
I turn back to Moore. “Here’s what’s going to happen,” I tell him.
“You’re going to shut it down. All of it.
The facility, the experiments, whatever you’re running out of any other location.
You’re going to dismantle your operation, release anyone you’re holding, and disappear.
If you do that, this ends here. Tonight. ”
He stares at me. The fear is still there, I smell it on him, but something else is creeping in underneath it. Something that looks a lot like amusement. “And if I don’t?” he asks before he rakes his fingers through his hair to tame it. As if that’s what matters now.
“Then we take your daughter.” The words taste wrong in my mouth, but I force myself through it. “And you can spend the rest of your life wondering what happened to her.”
I wait for his face to crumble the way any father’s would when his child’s safety is on the line. That’s the whole point. He took our people, so we threaten to take his. Eye for an eye. The only language men like him understand.
But he doesn’t crumble. He laughs. Acting like I’ve just said the funniest thing he’s heard in years. He leans back against the couch cushions, shaking his head while another laugh falls from his lips.
I glance at Cole. He looks as confused as I feel. Zeke’s hand has drifted to the knife tucked into his waistband.
“What’s so funny?” I demand.
“You are.” Moore wipes his eyes with the back of his hand, still chuckling. “All of you. You really think I didn’t plan for this? That a man in my position leaves anything to chance?”
The amusement drains from his face, replaced by something cold and certain. “You triggered an alarm the moment you entered the house.”
I hear Cole grunt behind me, and Kyran’s low growl from across the room. My eyes move over the walls, the ceiling, looking for cameras, sensors, anything I should have noticed and didn’t.
“Every door. Every window.” Moore’s voice is conversational, almost friendly. “I know who you are. I know what you’re capable of. Did you really think I wouldn’t prepare for the possibility of you showing up at my home?”
As if on cue, a soft hissing sound fills the air.
At first, I think it’s a trick of the adrenaline flooding my system. But then I taste it. Faint, chemical.
Every vent in the room is exhaling something thin and colorless into the space around us.
“Don’t bother holding your breath,” Moore says, rising from the couch. He straightens his pajama shirt with a sharp tug and lifts his chin, defiant. “You’ve already inhaled enough. It only affects shifters, by the way. Humans are perfectly fine.”
Using his hand, he gestures toward his daughter, who is staring at him with wide, unfocused eyes. “As you can see.”
The effect is almost instant.
My knees soften along with every muscle in my body.
The power that comes with being what I am starts to drain, like someone pulled a plug at the base of my spine.
I reach for the wall and miss, my hand swiping through empty air.
Across the room, one of Kyran’s bears drops to a knee. Cole grabs the doorframe. Zeke sways.
“What…?” That’s as much as I can mumble. My tongue feels thick. Heavy.
“A compound of my own design,” Moore says. He’s moving now, stepping around me, heading for the hallway. “Targeted suppression of the enhanced nervous system unique to shifters. You’ll recover within an hour or so. But by then…”
He doesn’t finish the sentence. He doesn’t need to.
I try to move after him. Every step feels like wading through swamp water. The wolf inside me is howling, raging, throwing himself against the walls of my skull, and I can’t reach him. Feeling like a door has been slammed between us.
Moore is in the hallway now. I hear him moving fast, hear a closet open, hear the jingle of keys. He’s leaving.
Without his daughter.
I turn my head—even that takes effort, my neck stiff, my vision swimming—and I see her trying to stand. She pushes herself up from the armchair, makes it halfway, and her legs buckle. She catches herself on the arm. “Dad…” Her voice is thin, barely there. “Dad, I can’t… I can’t get up…”
“Iris,” he barks on his way to the door. “Now.”
She tries again. Falls. Her knees hit the hardwood with a sound that makes something in my chest crack open. She’s reaching out one hand toward the hallway where his voice came from.
And she’s crying. Tears roll down her face, silent and steady, she’s too exhausted for anything more. “Please,” she whispers. “Don’t leave me here.”
Silence. One beat. Two.
The front door opens. Closes. An engine turns over. Tires on gravel, accelerating, fading.
He left her.
The realization cuts through the fog in my brain.
The girl is on the floor, crying, reaching for him, and he left her. He left her with a roomful of shifters he drugged and threatened and doesn’t know a damn thing about, and he drove away.
The gas is thick in my lungs, dragging me to my knees, and the room is tilting sideways. Cole is on the floor, mumbling curses. Zeke is slumped against the wall. Kyran is still upright but barely, braced against the mantle with both hands, his breathing ragged.
But through all of it, I see her. Curled on the floor next to the armchair, her hand still reaching toward the empty hallway. Her eyes are closed now. The tears are still falling.
My wolf goes quiet. Not calm, but focused. Fixed on the girl on the floor while nothing else in the world exists.
I’ve watched my brothers go through it. I’ve watched Tara go through it. I told myself it wouldn’t happen to me. Not now, not in the middle of everything, not when there’s so much at stake.
But the wolf doesn’t care about timing. It never does.
All I see is her face, pale and tear-streaked, and the only thought left in my foggy head is one I couldn’t fight even if I wanted to.
Mine.