Chapter 27 #2
He sets it to his ear. I watch his face while it rings on his end, the small frown, the slow shake of his head. “That’s his voicemail.” He switches to another name, waits through a long pause. “Coach isn’t answering either. Neither of them is.”
He stops and pauses for a moment. “We don’t need a phone. I’ve got his scent off the open window.” Derek’s already moving for the stairs. “A wolf beats a screen every time. Come on.”
I follow him down. Linda hasn’t moved, the blood creeping wider, her chest barely lifting.
“We can’t leave her like this.”
“Already handled.” Derek lifts the phone, says a few low words I don’t catch, and ends the call. “Sera’s coming for her. I told her to keep at Coach and Grayson till one of them picks up.” His hand settles warm on my good shoulder. “We have to move. Every second we stand here, his trail thins.”
Everything the nurse in me has is screaming to stay and hold her head together. But help is on its way, and the only chance Ethan has right now is me.
“Ten seconds.” I grab a pen off the counter, tear a sheet from the notepad on the fridge, and scrawl it fast.
Grayson. Tried to call you. Derek couldn’t reach Coach or you. Linda was attacked and someone took Ethan. Derek’s tracking them. Going with him now.
I pin it under the coffee mug Grayson uses every morning, dead center on the island where he can’t miss it. I take one last look at her chest, lifting and falling slower than it should, before I make myself turn from her.
At the door, my hand drops to the small of my back, finding, through the coat lining, the sheath that’s ridden against my spine for a week. The dagger.
If anything ever happens. If anyone comes for you and I’m not there. You go for the eyes. You go for the throat. You don’t hesitate.
He explained it to me the next morning, his voice serious.
I haven’t taken it off since.
The trail runs off the property through the trees, then onto a service road cutting behind the back of the estate.
Derek lopes ahead of me, head down, nose lifting into the air every few yards, his pace dialed just slow enough that I can stay with him.
My shoulder shrieks every time my boots hit the dirt.
I don’t slow. The cold scrapes my lungs raw, and I keep my eyes on the pale blur of Derek’s back, since losing him now means losing Ethan.
Twenty minutes in, we break from the trees, and the ground opens into a clearing. Derek slows, and I follow the line of his gaze to what’s set back at the far edge of it.
It was a house once. A grand one. I can read that much even in ruin, even in the dark, the long, blackened spine of stone where a wall used to run, the empty sockets of windows, a chimney standing alone with nothing left around it.
The fire that took it was a long time ago.
Weeds have grown up waist-high through the charred beams, and ivy has climbed what little still stands.
Behind the main shell, two smaller outbuildings sag against each other, roofless, their doorways gaping black.
Derek stops at the clearing’s edge. Something in his shoulders has gone still.
“What is this place?”
“The old Wolfe house.” His voice drops. “The first one. Grayson’s great-grandparents built it before any of us were born.
It burned long before he and Gabriel came along.
” He lifts his face into the air and breathes in once, slowly.
“He’s here. But the trail snarls the moment it hits the stone. Too much old smoke baked into it.”
I sweep the ruin with my eyes. Three structures, as near as I can count, the gutted main house and the two outbuildings huddled behind it, every one of them black-mouthed and silent.
“We split it,” Derek says, already moving. “You take the outbuildings on the right. I’ll clear the main house and the far shed. We’ll cover the whole place in a third of the time.”
“No. We stay together.”
“He might be hurt, Miranda. There’s no faster way.” His eyes hold mine. “You find him, you scream. I’ll hear you anywhere on this ground.” A beat. “Gabriel and I practically lived out here as boys. I know every wall still standing.”
My pulse pounds in my ears. He’s right. I hate that he’s right. “Fine.” I nod.
He dips his chin once, then he’s gone, his outline melting around the side of the main house.
I take the right. The doorway is a black gap with no door left in it.
Inside, the air’s thick with old char and damp ash, the floor gritty with fallen masonry underfoot.
I work through it as quietly as I can, my good hand skimming the soot-stained wall to keep myself oriented.
The first room’s empty. The second gives me nothing either, just a collapsed beam and a puddle that catches what little light leaks in through the broken roof.
I push through a gap in the back wall onto a strip of weeds, an outbuilding I couldn’t see from the clearing. Light leaks out from under its door, and my breath catches.
I cross the gap at a half run, drop into a crouch beside the door, and listen. Two voices reach me through it. One is sharp and impatient, a stranger’s. The other comes small and slurred, fighting to wake.
“Mama.”
The word knocks the air clean out of me.
I ease the door open with my shoulder. It’s a converted storage room, bare concrete, a single bulb swinging off a chain.
Ethan’s slumped against the back wall in his pajamas, eyes half open and unfocused, his small body limp on the floor, his lips working around a sound he can’t quite find the strength for.
Vanessa stands over him.
She’s in jeans and a leather jacket, her pale hair scraped back into a hard ponytail, none of the magazine polish from the arena left on her. Her eyes are the cold, pale gray I remember. I’ve seen the set of her face exactly once before, the half-second before she swung her claws into my arm.
She looks up. Shock flares across her face, then drains into a thin smile. “You.”
“Step away from him.”
“How did you even find me?”
“Get away from him, Vanessa. Now.”
She tilts her head. “And what’ll you do, little nurse? You came alone. I can smell it on you.”
She can’t smell that. Derek’s across the ruin. She’s bluffing.
“What the hell is wrong with you?!” I hiss. “What did you do to him?”
Her smile stretches. “I knocked him around a little. He refused to behave. He’ll be fine.”
“He’s a kid!” I snap, terrified at the way Ethan’s head is lolling. “Get out of my way!”
I try to push past her, and she throws me to the wall. My back hits on impact, and I try not to groan.
“I’m getting really sick of everyone trying to tell me what to do. He’s my son. I created him. None of you have a say in what I do where he’s concerned.”
“Just because you gave birth to him doesn’t mean you can hurt him! You beat Linda half to death as well!”
“She wouldn’t let go of him, so I made her.
” Her eyes glitter under the bare bulb. “Everyone gets in my path. The old woman did, the boy does, you most of all. Grayson should never have thrown me out. He should’ve crawled back begging.
I handed him everything: the pack, the name, the legacy, the son, and he tossed me out for a child I never even wanted. ”
“You were cheating on him.”
“I wouldn’t have strayed if he’d been less of a disappointment. All that whining and moping. He never stopped!”
“His brother had just died,” I hiss.
“And?” Her voice drips contempt. “I had a newborn on my hip, a husband who couldn’t drag himself out of bed, a public calendar that never paused. I had to build a life for myself, Miranda. He gave me no other option.”
“You’re unbelievable.”
“I’m a realist.”
“You’re unbelievable. Your husband was burying his brother, and you blame him for ruining your social calendar? Do you even hear yourself?”
She steps over Ethan without looking down. A sound rips out of me before I can stop it.
“Don’t you dare act horrified. You’ve known him for what?
A few months. I was his wife for years. I know exactly what he is, exactly what he wants.
” Her smile comes slowly. “And let me tell you. Once I have Ethan back, he’ll never choose you.
You think you’re his. You’re a placeholder, easy and quiet, doing what you’re told while he licks his wounds.
The minute I tell him he can have the brat back if he gives me the mark, what do you think he’ll do? ”
My stomach turns over. “You’ve lost your mind.”
“I’m the mother of his child.”
“You’re not taking Ethan anywhere. And you’re not blackmailing Grayson into anything!”
I take one step toward her. My shoulder screams in protest.
I measure the room without moving my head.
Ethan sits crumpled against the back wall, six feet to my left, too far for me to reach before she does.
The bulb overhead throws the only light there is.
The door waits at my back, my single way out, useless with a four-year-old too drugged to stand.
Whatever happens in here, I’m on my own, one good arm and the dagger hidden at my back, the last card, if it comes to that.
Ethan stirs on the concrete, his lashes dragging up. He sees me, and his whole small face crumples around a sound that breaks something open in my chest.
“Mama.”
“I’m here, baby. Hold still for me, I’ve got you.”
I try not to think about what he just called me. Not right now.
Vanessa’s head whips toward him, her hand raised. “She is not your mother, you ungrateful little wretch!”
I’m between them before I’ve thought it through, every part of me narrowed to the sound her palm made against the child’s cheek.
I shove her back. “Don’t you dare touch him!”
“He’s my blood.” Her voice shakes now, rage stripping the polish off, the magazine face gone, raw fury staring back at me. “I’ll do whatever I please with what’s mine. I made him, I bore him, he belongs to me.”
“He doesn’t belong to anyone.”
“And you.” Her teeth bare. “You’ve been a splinter under my skin too long, human, and I’m done leaving it in.”