Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
Kain
The screams have stopped, but I can’t sleep. Can’t even close my eyes without imagining her in pain, hearing those screams echoing in my mind.
My wrists are raw and bleeding where the doubled chains cut into them. The poison is spreading faster now, my body burning from the inside out. Every breath hurts. Every heartbeat feels like it might be my last.
But none of it compares to the agony of not knowing whether Anne is okay.
I dream about her when exhaustion finally drags me under for brief moments. Her smile. Her laugh. The way she looked at me in the stairwell when I told her I wanted her, her eyes shining with unshed tears.
Darius’s words haunt me. “I don’t know if Anne will survive this.”
Please, let her be okay. Please.
The cell door opens with that familiar metallic groan.
I jerk awake, my body immediately tensing up. Darius enters, and I look up at him, squinting at the light that shines in from behind him.
“Have you let Anne go?” I demand instantly.
“No.”
His response is too simple, and the rage that floods through me is instant and all-consuming.
Bastard!
“Where is she?” I snarl, pulling against the doubled chains. They don’t give, and I’m snatched back like a dog on a leash. “What did you do to her?”
“Calm down,” Darius says, his tone clipped. Cold.
“Calm down?” I look at him incredulously. “You’ve been torturing my mate for two days, and you want me to calm down?”
I lunge forward as far as my restraints allow, my wolf rising to the surface. If I could just get free, get my hands on him—
“I said, calm down.” There’s no alpha command in his voice yet, but the warning is clear.
“I’ll rip your throat out,” I growl. “I’ll tear you apart for what you’ve done to her. She’s innocent! She has nothing to do with this!”
“Stop acting like a feral animal.”
“How can I not be feral when my mate is being hurt?” I am furious and desperate.
Darius’s eyes flash gold, and suddenly, the full weight of his alpha command slams into me. “How do you think I feel?” His voice is thunder, reverberating through the cell and to my very bones. “Looking at the face of the traitor who’s been trying to harm my mate?”
His words force me back against the wall, my wolf retreating under the pressure of alpha dominance. But I fight it, glaring right back at him with every ounce of defiance I have left.
“I already told you,” I snarl through gritted teeth. “This wasn’t betrayal. It was revenge. I had every right—”
“Did you?” Darius cuts me off, and there’s a sudden hardening of his expression.
He’s holding a thick folder under his arm. He pulls up a chair and sits down directly in front of me, close enough that I could kick him if only the chains were longer. He opens the folder deliberately and pulls out the first document.
I bare my teeth at him. “What’s that?”
“Read.” He holds the paper up in front of my face.
Search Operation: Kain Ashford, Missing Pack Member – Month 1
My chest tightens as I scan the text. Teams deployed. Grid searches of the war zone. Witness interviews. Every detail meticulously documented.
Darius pulls it away and holds up another.
Month 6: Expanded search radius to include neutral territories
Then another.
Year 2: Interview with captured enemy combatant regarding missing wolves
And another.
Year 4: Investigation into trafficking rings operating near border regions
Each document he shows me is another shock. Another crack in the foundation of everything I was told. Everything I believed.
Year 7: Follow-up on reported sighting in human city
“Year one through year ten,” Darius says, his voice flat as he continues showing me page after page. “Countless searches conducted. For you.”
The search parties got smaller over time, but they never stopped. Never gave up completely.
He holds up the final report. The date takes my breath away.
Only eight months ago.
“No.” The word comes out strangled. “No, this isn’t—”
“Real?” Darius finishes. “It is.”
“Your father could’ve been staging them.” I’m grasping now, desperate to hold on to the truth I’ve believed for ten years. “Fake searches to cover up what he did. To make it look like—”
“I thought of that, too.” Darius sets the reports aside and pulls out a journal of some kind. It is older than the other documents, the pages yellowed with age.
He opens it carefully and holds it up so I can see the cramped handwriting. Dates. Names. Transactions.
“My father kept detailed records of everything,” Darius says, his voice heavy with deep-rooted bitterness. “Every political move. Every deal. Every dirty secret.”
He flips through pages slowly, letting me read entries as they appear.
Bribe paid to Council Member Harrows – 5000
Blackmail material secured on Beta candidate Marcus
Payment received from Silver Lake Pack for border dispute resolution
“He was meticulous about his sins,” Darius continues. “Bribes paid. Alliances made through blackmail. Even the affair he had with a neighboring pack’s luna. It’s all here. Every shameful act, documented.”
He stops on a specific page, holding it out steadily so I can read.
A list of financial transactions for the year I disappeared. Eighteen entries. Each one noted with brutal honesty about what it was for and why.
But no Covenant. No payment for selling pack members. No mention of Kain Ashford at all.
Darius flips forward several pages. “And then, there’s this.”
He holds the journal closer, and I read the entry he’s pointing to.
Another search party returned empty-handed today. A teenage girl made a scene about joining in order to find a boy, Kain Ashford. It was annoying, but public sentiment requires me to be accommodating since a mate bond is involved.
The words swirl in my vision, and I blink hard to make sure I’m seeing correctly.
“And this.” Darius turns to another page.
Year three. The searches are costing too many resources, but we cannot stop. Kain Ashford’s mate is still inciting the pack, and the families of the others missing are behind her. The scale will have to reduce regardless.
“Stop.” My voice is hoarse.
But Darius doesn’t stop. He keeps turning pages, holding each entry up for me to read.
It’s been seven years. Everyone else has given up except her. I don’t know whether to admire her loyalty or pity her delusion.
“I said, stop!” I roar, straining against the chains so hard, fresh blood streams down my arms.
Darius closes the journal and sets it carefully on his lap.
The silence that follows is deafening.
I stare at him, at the closed journal, at the stack of search reports beside him. At the evidence of a decade of searching. Of a pack that never gave up. Of an alpha who documented every sin except the one I was told he committed.
Because he never committed it.
“They lied to you,” Darius says quietly. “They made you believe you were abandoned so you’d have no loyalty to fight through. No reason to resist their mission.”
My mind reels, trying to process what this means.
Ten years of believing I was worthless. Disposable. Forgotten.
Ten years of hating the pack that supposedly sold me.
Ten years of planning revenge against people who were actually searching for me the entire time.
“No.” I shake my head, even though I can see the truth right in front of me. “No, they showed me documents. Official papers with your father’s signature.”
“Forged.” Darius’s voice is flat, matter of fact. “Whatever they showed you was fabricated. Did you ever consider that?”
The weight of it crashes down on me all at once.
Anne mourned me. Participated in search parties for years, refusing to give up hope even when everyone else told her to. The pack looked for me. Continuously. For almost a decade.
And I came back planning to destroy them all.
“Why?” My voice comes out harsh. “Why would they go to such lengths?”
“You know them better than I do.” Darius gathers the papers and places them back in the folder.
“You tell me. I wondered why they would have wanted a teenage boy, so I looked into other disappearances of young shifters. You were not the first nor the last. It took them ten years to make you into an obedient soldier, with their word seemingly gospel for you.”
I close my eyes, and the pieces finally click into place with sickening clarity.
Control. It was always about control.
Strip away our identities. Make us believe we’re alone, abandoned, worthless. That we have nothing and no one except the organization.
It’s easier to control someone who thinks they have nothing left to lose. Easier to turn them into weapons when they’re already dead inside.
I think about the other operatives I glimpsed during training. The hollow eyes. The mechanical way they followed orders. The absolute absence of hope in any of them. We were all the same. All broken in exactly the same way.
Darius is right: the Covenant got obedient soldiers. All of us were made to believe we’d been abandoned so that we’d do anything they asked.
“Anne…” I whisper, the name tearing out of me. “I need to know she’s okay. Please. Whatever you did to her—”
“That’s not up to me.” Darius takes the evidence he brought with him and heads for the door. “It all depends on what you do now.”
Then, he’s gone.
And I’m left alone with the ruins of everything I thought I knew.