Chapter 22 #2
“They must have missed this place,” I say, but uncertainty creeps into my voice.
“No.” Soren kneels by the bed. With a grunt of effort, he flips the mattress.
Dried blood stains the underside, brown and crusted with age.
My breath catches.
He moves to the carpet next, peeling it back from the corner. The wooden floor beneath is darkened with more blood, a large stain that speaks of violence and death.
“My best tracker,” Calloway says quietly. “His nose doesn’t lie.”
Soren shoves the bed frame aside with supernatural strength. Something white gleams against the wall.
A skull.
My pulse pounds in my ears as Soren picks it up carefully, turning it in his hands. He sniffs the skull, then the blood on the mattress, then the stain on the floor.
“It’s a match,” he says finally. “The skull belongs to whoever bled on the mattress. We have the blood of two people here, no one else.” He sets the skull down with disturbing gentleness. “Somebody went to great lengths to remove the bodies and hide the evidence. But they missed this.”
“Based on the size, the skull most likely belonged to the father,” Soren’s partner says. “But what happened to the girl?”
I can guess. My stomach flips, threatening to revolt.
Kira, Alpha Strand’s tracker from Silver Rock Pack, steps forward. She kneels by the mattress, inhaling slowly.
“Sexual activity,” she says, her voice clinical. “The father interrupted. Violence ensued.”
“The girl could have been with her lover,” Alpha Voss from the East Ridge Pack says, appearing behind Calloway. His expression is grave. “The father walks in, doesn’t approve, tries to stop them. Things escalate.”
Alpha Strand enters the room as well. He looks around, his gaze sweeping over the torn posters, the shattered frames. “Are there any pictures of a young male? Any trace of a boyfriend?”
I follow his gaze. The photographs I can see show the girl with her father, with female friends. No young man. No evidence of a relationship.
“No,” I say quietly.
“In that case,” Calloway says, his voice hard, “it’s more likely that the father walked in on someone assaulting his daughter. He tried to protect her. The attacker killed him.”
“Given the level of violence required to start a massacre of this scale,” Strand adds, “a crime of that nature fits better than a lover’s quarrel.”
I return to the file, flipping through page after page. “It’s not documented here. None of this is.”
A loaded look, silent and damning, passes between the three alphas.
“Your father claims he conducted a thorough investigation and left no stone unturned,” Calloway says carefully, “but it appears he was protecting someone.”
The implications slam into me like a truck. I can’t breathe for a moment. Father documented everything. Every dead body, every location, every minute detail. Except this house. Except the mediator and his daughter. The two people who should have been at the center of his investigation.
Which means he knew. He knew what happened here, and he chose to bury it.
I order two investigators to tear the rest of the house apart, searching for any trace of the unknown third person. The one who may have started the entire massacre.
The rest of us file outside. My mind spins, trying to reconcile what we’ve found today with the story I’ve always known. The story my father told me. The story Zion confirmed.
“The carnage seems to have started here and spread outward,” Kira observes, studying the pattern of destruction across the settlement.
My gut churns. I’ve been too loyal, too trusting, to see the holes in the story.
“How did your brother say the violence started?” Alpha Voss asks, his tone conversational but his eyes sharp.
I make myself answer. “Zion was here for a meeting. The hybrids didn’t want pure-blooded shifters involved in their community, despite what my father insisted upon as alpha of the pack. They attacked Zion and the soldiers he brought with him.”
“Where?” Voss tilts his head.
I blink. “What?”
“Where was the meeting?” His voice remains mild, but there’s steel underneath. “Who was it with? Who else witnessed it?”
My jaw tightens. The questions expose holes I’ve never examined before. “The meeting was with the mediator of the hybrids. There were no others present.”
Voss and Calloway exchange another knowing glance.
“So, the meeting was with the mediator hybrid,” Calloway says slowly, “but we’ve established that he was murdered in his daughter’s room, along with the girl. Do you see where we’re headed with this?”
I go still, and then the memory crashes over me.
That day, eleven years ago. I was young, barely seventeen, but I remember. The phone call from Zion. The panic in my father’s eyes. The way he didn’t bring Zion home afterward but took him somewhere else, a place I wasn’t allowed to know anything about.
All the soldiers Zion had brought with him for what was supposed to be a simple meeting were dead.
I can’t breathe.
Surely not.
The three alphas watch me, but they don’t push. Their silence is almost worse than accusations.
“Until our investigation is complete,” Voss says finally, “we won’t pass judgment. But Darius, you need to understand what this looks like.”
I can’t speak. Can’t move. My entire understanding of that day, of the massacre, of everything that came after, is disintegrating before my eyes.
“We’re sending two investigators to the closest settlement,” Alpha Strand adds. “To ask questions. See if anyone remembers anything about that day.”
I nod mechanically.
Strand takes a step closer to me, and a look of sympathy crosses his face. “Sometimes the hardest part of becoming alpha isn’t taking power. It’s discovering what that power was built on.”
His counsel settles over me like a shroud.
The three alphas walk away, leaving me standing outside the ruins of the dead man’s home, still holding the photograph of him with his murdered daughter.
I stare down at the picture. The girl is young, smiling. She looks sweet. Harmless. Like any normal teenager who had her whole life ahead of her. Who should have had that life.
“What about children? What if there’s a child somewhere who doesn’t even know what they are yet?”
Violet’s voice echoes in my mind. That conversation in Miami. The way she pressed me on the hybrid issue, gently but persistently.
“What if you found one and realized they weren’t violent? Would you still kill them?”
I dismissed her concerns. Told her some creatures shouldn’t be allowed to exist. But looking at this girl’s face, at the evidence of what happened here…
The pieces don’t fit.
Why would my father leave this house out of his documentation? He described every other location. But not this one. Not the mediator’s house where the violence seems to have started.
And Zion’s story. The meeting that no one else witnessed. With a man who we now know was murdered in his own home, in his daughter’s room.
My chest tightens. I don’t want to think what I’m thinking. What really happened here eleven years ago?
Unease ripples through me. I accepted the story I was told without question. Perhaps I should have questioned it. Perhaps Violet was right to push back when I dismissed her concerns so easily.
I pull out my phone and stare at the dark screen. Still nothing from Ethan. Nothing from anyone. Violet is out there somewhere, and I’m here digging up secrets that may destroy everything I thought I knew about my family.
She would want me to find the truth. Even if it hurts. Even if it changes everything.
That’s who she is. That’s why the fates chose her for me.
I slip the photograph into my jacket pocket. This girl deserves to have her story told. Her father deserves justice. And if my family played a role in burying that truth, then I need to know. No matter what it costs me.
One way or another, the truth is coming out.
And when it does, I’ll know if everything I believed was built on a solid foundation or if there are cracks I never bothered to look for.
Around me, the settlement stretches in all directions. A graveyard of hybrid lives that ended violently.
The answers are here somewhere, buried under eleven years of silence and, quite possibly, carefully constructed lies.
I’m not sure I’m ready to find them.
I’ve spent these two days here at the site going over my father’s file on the massacre. Every detail now being uncovered is contradicting what his notes say. At this point, I don’t even know why I’m bothering to look at them.
It was all a lie.
Anger and exhaustion burn through me. No wonder my father never let the other packs investigate. He was afraid his web of lies would be uncovered. The details that have emerged paint a picture so gruesome and selfish that I find myself escaping here, behind a house where no one can see me.
I sink to the ground, leaning back against what used to be someone’s home. I need a minute to myself, a minute to pull myself together, to come to terms with what my family did.
Monsters. We’re all monsters.
I pull out my phone and stare at Violet’s number, my heart tightening. I’ve never once sought refuge in another person, but today, I want to hide in my mate’s arms and find some comfort there. I know she won’t pick up, but I can’t seem to stop myself from trying.
The sun bleeds orange and red across the horizon, and I’m so tired I can barely think straight. She doesn’t answer my call. I press the phone to my ear and leave her a voicemail.
“Violet.” My voice comes out rough, broken.
“I really need you right now.” I take a deep breath, squeezing my eyes shut.
“I know you’re angry with me, but I’m losing myself, and I need you here.
I need you by my side.” My breathing is ragged, the words spilling out before I can stop them.
“We’ll go away together. We’ll do whatever you want.
Just come back to me. I can’t survive without you. I can’t survive this without you.”
I end the message and let my hand drop to my side. The phone feels heavy in my palm. Everything feels heavy.
“Darius!”
Someone is calling my name. I push myself to my feet, reaching for the window frame behind me for support. The wood groans.
Then, it gives way completely.
I fall backward, the frame collapsing inward with me. I hit the ground hard, broken picture frames scattering beneath me. Glass shatters everywhere.
Carefully, I get to my feet, dusting off my jacket with my free hand. That’s when I see it.
A photograph, face up among the wreckage.
My phone starts ringing.
I reach for the broken picture frame with one hand and answer my phone with the other. The picture stares back at me, and my heart sinks. It’s a child.
As I look at her, my head starts to spin.
No. How is this possible?
It can’t be.
“Darius, you there?” I hear Ethan’s voice coming out of the phone in my hand. “We have a major problem.”
I can’t respond. My eyes stay fixed on the child in the picture.
“Zion found Violet. Both she and her mother have been imprisoned. They’re—”
“Hybrids.” The word comes out numbly. “They’re hybrids, aren’t they?”
The photograph trembles in my hand. Young Violet stares up at me, held safe in Lillian’s embrace, and everything I thought I knew crumbles to dust.