CHAPTER 9
BEFORE WE WERE BORN
MARCUS
Sage was already half asleep when I leaned over the bed.
I kissed her forehead slowly, as if I could put everything I wasn't saying into that kiss. She didn't stir much — just turned her face toward me. “I love you too, big guy,” she said as she drifted back off.
I stood there a second longer than I needed to.
Redmon was dead. That much was settled. What wasn't settled was going to keep me up regardless, so I might as well go be useful somewhere my brothers could see me.
I eased the door shut behind me and headed down the main corridor.
The compound was never truly silent.
Even after midnight, there was always movement somewhere. Patrols rotated through the perimeter. Security teams checked the gates. The Mystic Warriors never stopped moving.
Darius's office light was already on. Through the cracked door, I caught him pulling files from the cabinet and stacking them without checking the labels — he already knew which ones he wanted. He didn't glance up as I passed. Didn't need to.
A few doors farther down, Carter stood in the main kitchen stuffing protein bars, bottled water, and enough snacks to feed a small army into one of Mama Mara's canvas totes.
He glanced up.
"You'll want these."
It wasn't a question.
I nodded once and kept walking.
By the time I reached my office, the smell of fresh coffee was already drifting into the hallway.
Ty stood behind the counter, pouring four mugs without saying a word. He looked over his shoulder as I walked in.
"Took you long enough."
A corner of my mouth lifted despite the weight sitting on my chest.
None of us had called this meeting.
None of us had needed to do so.
They'd felt it the same way I had — in the air, in the silence after Redmon stopped breathing — and they'd started getting ready before I ever said a word.
I called the meeting to order just after midnight.
The four of us sat around the conference table. No one else. Ty leaned back in his chair, arms folded, watching me with that look that said he already knew this wasn't just about Redmon. Carter hadn't spoken since walking in. Darius set up his laptop and mirrored it to the projector screen.
I broke the silence.
"Redmon wasn't running that operation."
"We knew he had help," Ty said.
"I'm saying he wasn't even close to the top." I looked at each of them. "The markets. The collection program. The compound attack. None of that gets built by one man. Someone with real authority built the machine. Redmon was just the one willing to get his hands dirty."
"A Council member," Carter said.
"Higher," Darius answered without looking up. "Senior Council."
The room went quiet.
Darius stopped typing.
"Something's wrong."
Nobody answered.
We knew that tone.
It wasn't uncertainty. It was confirmation.
“These dates…” Darius stopped and looked at me.
"How far back?" I asked.
His fingers moved again.
"Further than I expected." We all stared at the screen. "I cross-referenced the Council archives with the collection records from Redmon's cabin. The pattern dates back more than thirty years."
Nobody said anything.
Thirty years. Before Sage. Before Destiny. Before any of us. Something cold settled in my chest.
"Sage's mother," I said.
Darius nodded.
"Dana."
Another nod.
"Both Green-Eyed Omegas. Both carrying strong elemental lineage."
Carter leaned forward. "They were building something."
"Or trying to stop it," I said.
Nobody argued. Gran's words moved through the back of my mind. The war is coming. Maybe it already had.
Darius fell silent once more, displaying a composed calm familiar to us from years of knowing him — not confusion or hesitation, but a deliberate calm. He had discovered something important and was contemplating how best to communicate it to everyone.
I let him work. Ty refilled the coffee. Carter stared at the table. I walked to the window because I needed somewhere to put the fire building in my chest before it burned through something it shouldn't.
Almost ten minutes passed.
"Marcus."
His voice was different. Quieter. I turned around.
"I think we've been asking the wrong question," he said. "It was never just about why they targeted Sage and Destiny." He turned the laptop so we could all see the screen. "The question is why they spent thirty years building an entire system to find women like them."
The archive appeared on the screen, showing bloodline classifications, projected elemental pairings, and numerous names — some crossed out, others marked as acquired or deceased, and some still pending.
And then, two-thirds of the way down the list —
Childs, Mara.
Green-Eyed Omega. Elemental lineage confirmed. Projected offspring: high probability of an elemental Alpha designation. Recommendation: acquire or eliminate the mate. Bloodline control pending.
I read it once.
Then again.
Not because I didn't understand it. Because I did, and my mind kept trying to find a different meaning in the words.
Our mother's name — her name before she was ours, before she married Pops, before any of us existed — was written into a Council file older than I was.
She had been a young woman trying to build a life, and somewhere, in a room she never knew about, someone had already written her name into a document and decided that her future wasn't hers to choose.
They had been watching her before she ever met our father.
Watching both of them.
"They weren't collecting random Omegas," Darius said. "They were identifying every bloodline capable of completing the Constellation."
"So Sage and Destiny —"
“Never the end goal." He finished my thought. "They're pieces of something much bigger."
I looked back at the screen. My mind pulled me somewhere else.
The training field came back so clearly I could almost smell the dirt.
I was sixteen, hot, frustrated, and convinced Pops was making me repeat the same movement just to prove he could.
I'd blocked, pivoted, and countered the exact sequence at least ten times that afternoon.
On the eleventh, I threw my hands in the air. "How many times are you going to make me do this?"
Pops didn't answer right away. He simply reset his stance and waited.
I groaned.
"I already know it."
"Do you?"
I frowned.
"Yes."
"Again."
I attacked. He corrected my footwork before I landed the second strike.
"Again."
I came faster.
He stepped inside my guard, swept my leg, and I landed flat on my back, staring up at the afternoon sky.
I stayed there.
"This is ridiculous."
Pops offered me his hand. "Get up."
I took it, brushing dirt from my shirt.
"You're wasting time. Nobody fights like this."
His expression didn't change. He didn't even blink, just kept his arms loose at his sides, patient in that way that used to make me angrier than any insult could have.
"The man who comes for your family will."
I laughed because I thought he was talking about rogues — some wandering wolf looking to prove himself against an Alpha's son, the kind of story every pack kid grew up hearing. It didn't occur to me he might mean something with a name, a file, thirty years of patience behind it.
"Then I'll beat him."
Pops adjusted my shoulders, turning me a fraction until my balance settled to where he wanted it. His hands were sure about it, the way they were sure about everything — no wasted movement, no second-guessing.
"Yes," he said. "Because you will be prepared."
He stepped back and looked at me the way he did after every correction, checking the line of me head to foot like I was something he was building rather than raising.
At sixteen, I thought he was speaking like every father who believed danger lived around every corner.
Standing in the war room with our mother's name staring back at me from a Council archive older than I was...
I finally understood.
He wasn't imagining an enemy. He already knew one existed.
Every lesson.
Every correction.
Every extra hour on that training field...None of it had been about making me a better fighter.
It had been about making sure that when this day finally came...
I was still standing.
Carter had been staring at the screen longer than any of us.
Nobody hurried him along. That alone should have been a sign. Carter filled silent moments the way others fill coffee mugs — automatically and continuously, as if his hands required something to do. Ten minutes of quiet from him should have been enough for a joke to follow, but it wasn't.
"If they're tracking bloodlines," he said slowly, thinking out loud, "then they aren't finished." He looked at me. "They found Sage." His gaze shifted to Ty. "They found Destiny." He looked down at the table. "Our mates are still out there."
He walked to the window. He didn't look at any of us. His reflection sat in the glass instead, faint against the dark outside, and he studied it as if it belonged to somebody else.
"My whole life..."
He let out a quiet laugh, but there wasn't a trace of humor in it.
"I always wondered what she'd be like." He shook his head once. "I figured she was somewhere living her life."
His shoulders rose with a slow breath. "Maybe she hates mornings. Maybe she loves animals. Maybe she can’t cook to save her life." Another hollow laugh escaped him. "Hell... maybe she laughs too loud."
He looked down at the ground outside. "I used to think we'd just... find each other one day." He paused. "I never stopped believing she was out there." His voice dropped. "I just never imagined somebody would be hunting her.”
Something tightened in my chest.
"I haven't even met her yet." He finally turned around.
His eyes found each of us before settling on Darius.
"If this list is real... if they're hunting the women who complete this Constellation..."
His jaw clenched. "They're already hunting mine."
No one rushed to reassure him. There wasn't anything to say. Because for the first time, this war wasn't just about protecting the women already standing beside us. It was about finding the ones who didn't even know they were being hunted.
Darius looked back at the screen.
"Every remaining bloodline," he said quietly.
Then he looked at Carter. "Our mates."
The room fell silent for a while. There was just the sound of coffee being sipped and Darius's fingers on the keyboard.
Ty was the first to speak.
"They came for Mama the night Pops was killed.” He paused. “He died protecting her, protecting us.” He looked at me.
“They didn’t know you would present Purple that day, brother.”
“None of us did,” I said, sitting back in the chair.
I thought back on all the attacks since Pops was killed, all around the times each of my brothers presented.
“They have been monitoring each of our presentations. Planned attacks. Not to kill but to retrieve information.”
Darius nodded, and the others understood without a word. They built the markets, took Dana, and took Sage's mother. They watched us grow, then came for Sage and Destiny. Thirty years have passed—same war, different people running it.
Our father hadn't died protecting the pack from a random attack.
He'd died while stopping a plan that had been in motion since before any of us were born.
That realization didn't come as fire. It came as the thing beneath fire — older, slower, the kind of cold that settles when the ground shifts and you realize you've been standing on the wrong thing your whole life.
For years, I'd believed becoming Alpha started the day Pops died. That grief handed me something I wasn't ready for, and I'd carried it because no one else could.
I was wrong.
Someone had decided what I represented before I drew my first breath. They saw what my parents could become together. They knew what their sons might one day become. And before I was born, someone looked at that future and decided it couldn't be allowed.
I hadn't inherited a title.
I'd inherited a war.
I looked at our mother's name one last time. I closed the laptop and pushed away from the table.
"They've spent thirty years hunting our family. They don't get another generation."
My voice was calm, but there was no room for misunderstanding.
"We protect every person under this roof. We find every hand behind this war."
I paused.
"And when we do..."
"They won't get a second chance to come for this family."
Nobody questioned it. Nobody needed convincing.
Four brothers. One table. One war.
This time, we were ready.