Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
Marcus
I run until the land forgets me.
Two hours out, maybe more, the pines start to smell wrong, and the dirt under my paws turns unfamiliar.
Home sits a long way behind me now. Adrian’s coordinates drag me past the last of our territory, deep into a country where our kind doesn’t set foot.
He wouldn’t say why over the phone, only to shift and come.
Cole and Tomas will be with the girls. I’ve told myself that since I crossed my own tree line, and it hasn’t loosened the knot in my chest. Leaving Jessa and the girls behind, even guarded, goes against everything the animal in me wants.
The wolf keeps trying to turn me around. I push it down and run harder.
The clearing opens where the coordinates end, and Adrian’s already there, standing over a low mound of turned earth. He’s got a pair of pants slung over one shoulder, thrown to me before I’ve fully shifted back. I pull them on.
“What am I looking at?” I ask, looking around.
“Keep it down.” His voice stays under the wind. “We’re on Ridgeback ground. We shouldn’t be here at all.” He crouches at the edge of the mound. “You needed to see it for yourself, though.”
I lower myself beside him. Somebody dug shallow and left fast. Two bodies lie side by side in the dirt, gone to bone in places, the rest of them held together by cold and the years. A man and a woman, both young, probably in their teens, from what’s left of them.
“So these are the two who went missing,” I murmur as I reach out touch one of their bones. The bone breaks as if it is made of sand, and my jaw tightens. However, I keep my thoughts to myself.
“That’s them.” Adrian’s jaw works. “Dead a long while. Long before anyone bothered to look.”
“So I was right.” The words bring me no pleasure at all.
“Apparently.” He picks two thin sticks off the ground and leans over the woman’s remains. “That’s not why I dragged you out here, though. Look at this.”
He parts the dirt near her hand with the sticks, careful not to touch her, and I see the fingers curled tightly even now, locked around something small, a ring. Working the soil back, he lets it catch the light without lifting it free.
My whole body goes cold.
I know that ring. Ten years gone, and I’d still recognize it blind.
“That’s Daniel’s,” I breathe.
“I thought so.” Adrian sets the sticks down. “It seems like she yanked it off her attacker’s finger. That’s why I wanted you here.” The silence holds a beat. “It wasn’t on his body when we buried him. We looked.”
I stare at the signet pressed into a dead woman’s palm, three territories from where my brother bled out in his own home a decade ago. “How did it get here?”
Adrian has no answer. Rogues killed Daniel and Hannah.
That’s what the investigation found all those years ago, a few of them craving bloodshed in their untamed minds, and they destroyed my family while leaving my sleeping niece untouched, a small mercy.
But rogues don’t steal. They don’t keep trophies.
They kill, and they leave. They’re mindless creatures.
“If it was hunters,” I say slowly, “we’d have gone to war. You don’t kill a sitting alpha, even a temporary one, and walk away without consequences. The pack would have hunted them down.”
Adrian chooses his words with care. “I don’t want to drag up old wounds. But the state Daniel and Hannah were left in, all that tearing, it always read as our kind: claws, teeth, nothing a human hand does. We bought the rogue explanation easily, didn’t we?”
“What are you saying?” I narrow my eyes at him.
He rolls the sticks between his fingers.
“Only that there are two ways this reads, and I don’t like either.
First, the hunters have learned to kill with tooth and claw, which leaves the question of where a hunter gets either.
” He nods at the grave. “Or the crew that put these two in the ground is the one that came for your brother. This girl got a grip on her attacker, and she tore that ring off his hand going down. Just look at the way she’s holding it. ”
My hand drags down my face. “I don’t know what to think right now.”
“Do we take it to the alpha?”
“No.” The word’s out before Adrian finishes the question. “Not a word to him. We keep digging.” I straighten. “He brushed me off over Bella, and he’ll do the same here. I won’t give him the chance to bury this.”
I let out a breath, trying to calm down. “I want to know who actually worked Daniel’s case, who walked the house, who called it rogues, who signed it off. Then I want it opened again and kept quiet.”
Adrian lets out a long breath. “You’re asking me to reopen a killing the alpha closed himself and keep him blind to it. That’s not a small thing to hide.”
“We’ll find a way.” I look back at the grave. “We always do.”
He steps off toward the trees with his phone, keeping his voice under the wind. I stay crouched by the grave a while longer.
For ten years, I took the rogue story at face value because I was too grief-stricken, too angry to trust myself, so I let my uncle handle it.
I stare down at the ring, my blood curdling inside me.
This ring was what our father gave Daniel.
I know how precious it was to him. He never once took it off.
My one mistake was not investigating the murders myself.
Pushing to my feet, I turn my back on the graves.
I need to find out what really happened that night. The bloodbath I walked into, why was a child spared when rogues don’t discriminate between the age of their victims? Why did the attackers take my brother’s ring?
Why were Daniel and Hannah murdered if it wasn’t rogues?
“Marcus?” Adrian steps toward me, his expression serious. “What do you want me to do now?”
I turn back to the gravesite where two teenagers lie together, their families unaware that they never ran off. “Inform the pack of the bodies. Keep it quiet. And in the meantime, get me Daniel and Hannah’s file, Adrian. Whatever happened back then, I want answers.”
Adrian nods.
As I shift to leave, my thoughts are filled with turmoil.
These two were killed with wolfsbane. My thumb and forefinger that had pressed against the bone rub together idly.
The proof is irrefutable.
This is starting to become a serious problem.
Home glows dark gold with evening by the time I clear my tree line.
Cole and Tomas are sprawled across the grass with the girls, the wreck of a picnic scattered between them, a soccer ball gone still on the trampled ground.
Jessa watches the whole thing from the porch steps, a cup of juice she’s stopped drinking in one hand.
Mia spots me first. “He’s back!” She’s up off the grass and running before I clear the last of the trees, Bella a half-step behind. The two of them hit me at the waist together.
I catch them both, one arm around each, and I hold Mia every bit as tightly as Bella.
“What have you two been up to?” I ask, dropping a hand to Bella’s hair.
“Tomas and Cole played soccer,” Bella reports breathlessly. “We got to ride on their shoulders. I scored from way up high.”
Looking down at Mia, I put some iron into it. “You’re supposed to be taking it easy today.”
“I didn’t play.” She scowls up at me, indignant. “They did all the running. Bella and me just rode up top, steering.”
“She’s telling the truth,” Jessa calls from the porch. “I had eyes on them the whole time. Nobody so much as scraped a knee.”
Cole rolls onto his side and squints up at me. “Look who finally turned up, the man himself.” He elbows Tomas. “Runs a whole academy and still shows up late to everything.”
“Too important for the rest of us,” Tomas agrees, eyes shut.
“Keep it up.” I crouch and pluck the ball off the grass. “Twenty minutes on the pitch, right now. We’ll see who’s washed out.”
Cole groans. Tomas cracks one eye. “That’s abuse. We’re guests.”
“You’re freeloaders.” I drop the ball. “Did you two make her cook for you?”
Both of them straighten up fast.
“She offered,” Cole says.
“Volunteered,” Tomas puts in. “We tried to stop her.”
Jessa rolls her eyes behind them, and that decides it. I hook an arm around Tomas’s neck and haul him into a headlock before he can scramble clear.
“She’s not here to feed you,” I tell him, tightening my grip while he claws at my forearm.
“Cole, do something,” Tomas wheezes.
“Kick his ass, Marc.” Cole sits back on his hands, delighted. “Put him in the dirt.” He twists toward the girls.
“Uncle Marcus will win,” Bella announces. “He always wins.”
Cole holds out his hands. “Care to bet on that?”
Bella crosses her arms, dead serious. “I bet my doll that Uncle Marcus wins.”
Mia digs in her pocket and holds up a plastic hair clip. “I’ve got this.”
“Now that’s a serious wager.” Cole takes the clip and turns it over, whistling low, then pulls the cap off his own head. “I’ll see your clip and raise you the hat.”
Jessa’s off the porch and across the grass before he finishes. “Absolutely not. No gambling with the children.” She holds her hand out until Cole surrenders the clip and the cap both, then returns them to their owners. “Deal’s off.”
I release Tomas, who flops onto the grass rubbing his throat and cursing me without heat.
Jessa levels a look at the three of us that drops us squarely into the same age bracket as the girls.
She’s got a smudge of flour on one cheek, her hair sliding loose from where she pinned it this morning, and I have to stop myself from reaching to tuck it back.
She catches me watching her a beat too long, and she flushes before she looks away. Want tightens low in my gut. Even hollowed out by what I saw today, the urge to pull her in nearly wins.
“I’m taking the girls in to wash up.” She herds Mia and Bella toward the door with a hand on each small back. “There’s food left in the pot if you’re hungry. Try to act your age while I’m gone.”
They troop inside, the door banging shut behind them. The second it does, the grins slide off both my friends, and the yard goes still.