Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Grayson
The locker room is half the noise it usually is after a win.
Most of the boys have already cleared out for the press room, leaving Brody half-naked at his stall with a towel around his neck.
Samuel sits on a bench with his phone in his hand and a small frown that does not belong to a man whose team has just won by three.
“Coach wants you.”
I’m pulling on a fresh shirt. “Now?”
“In his office. He said pull you out of the press scrum if I had to.”
“He said if you had to?” I give him a doubtful look.
“Word for word.”
I drop my towel on the bench and head down the corridor, still buttoning my cuffs, the noise of the celebration getting fainter behind me with every step.
Coach’s office is at the end of the executive hallway.
Through the frosted glass, I can see him sitting behind the desk with the lamp on, even though he should be outside celebrating.
He looks up when I push the door open. The expression on his face is one I have seen exactly twice in my life.
Once was the night he came to pick me up from the hospital where my parents had been taken.
And the second time was the morning he told me Gabriel was dead.
I close the door behind me without being asked.
“What’s happened?”
“Sit down, Wolfe.”
“Coach—”
“Sit.”
I sit.
He pushes a small evidence bag across the desk toward me.
Inside, on a clean white card, is a thin necklace, the chain corroded green at the joins, the small pendant warped and stained but still recognizable.
I do not pick it up. I look at it through the plastic.
It takes a second for my brain to place it.
Then it does, and the room slides half a degree to the left.
“That looks like Derek’s mother’s necklace.”
“It is.”
“Why do you have it?”
He does not answer right away. He has both hands splayed on the desk in front of him, and I watch him while the silence pulls out long enough that I have to break it.
“Coach. Why do you have his mother’s necklace?”
“It was recovered from the body we found on your land two weeks ago. The forensics lab finished cleaning the personal effects yesterday. The lab sent the package over this morning. I recognized the pendant the second I opened the envelope.”
My lips part, but no sound comes out.
“You said the body was a human female who died mid-transformation,” I begin slowly. “Mid-mating mark. You said whoever marked her did it alone and whoever buried her did it alone.”
“Yes.”
“You also said,” I continue, my voice scraping low because I cannot let it climb, “that whoever buried her in that location had intimate knowledge of my territory. Because the spot was one a wolf would not stumble across by accident.”
“Yes.”
I look up from the necklace.
“What are you telling me, Coach?”
He holds my eyes. He does not blink, and I plead with him, my heart ripping itself apart, my voice hoarse. “You have to say it out loud, Coach. I won’t—I can’t—”
He closes his eyes briefly before opening them and saying, “I think the girl is Elisabeth Warner, Derek’s fated mate, the one he claimed to have sent away.”
The words sink somewhere below the level of language. I push back from the desk and stand up.
“That is not possible. Derek never had a fated mate. He would have told us. He would have told Gabriel. The two of them did not keep secrets from each other.”
“He kept this one.”
“Coach.”
“Sit down, Grayson, please.”
“No! No. You’re wrong on this. You’re wrong.”
He exhales slowly through his nose and rises to his own feet. He goes to the window, his back to me, his hands behind him. When he speaks again, his voice has gone very tired.
“Derek found his fated mate about a month before Gabriel found Annie. Her name was Elisabeth. She was human. He came to me in private before he went to the Council, asked my advice about petitioning her. He never told another living soul. Not Gabriel. Not you. He swore me to silence as alpha, and I held it because that was my obligation to him.”
“You knew.” I stare at him.
“I knew her name. I knew he loved her.”
My pulse is loud in my ears. “What happened?”
“He went to the Council and petitioned for permission to mate her. The Council denied it.”
“Why?”
He doesn’t answer.
“Coach. For what reason?”
He turns around. His eyes are steady on mine. “What I am about to tell you does not leave this room. Not to Miranda. Not to anyone. The Council did not disclose this, and they will execute every person in this conversation if it gets out under our names.”
I nod once.
“The Council requires every human mate candidate to undergo a confidential medical examination before approval is granted. The mate is never told the real reason for the examination. The shifter petitioner is never told it happens. Council healers assess whether the human can survive the transformation triggered by the mating mark.”
“They assess whether she will survive it.”
“It is violent, son. You know what Annie went through. With healers, with the petition approved, with a full support team in place. The change can still kill a human who is not constitutionally strong enough to come through it. The Council screens out the candidates whose biology will not hold.”
“And Derek’s mate was deemed too weak.”
“She was. They denied the petition. They cited the Accord as the reason. They never told him the real one.”
I stare at the wall behind Coach’s head. My mouth has gone dry. Four years of grief is sliding sideways into a place where it does not fit anymore, and I am scrambling to keep up with the angle.
“Why was none of this made public?”
“Because if it were public, the Council would lose every shifter who has ever lost a mate to denied approval. The whole system would burn down inside a year. They would rather every grieving wolf in our world blame politics than know their mate failed a medical assessment they were not told existed.”
“That is monstrous.”
“It is.”
“And you knew.”
“I knew. As the next candidate, I knew.”
I look at him. He does not flinch from it, letting me look at all of it.
The silence has been his for decades, kept in this office, across this desk from men whose families it broke, because his role demanded it.
I can see the weight of it in the set of his shoulders for the first time, and I do not know what to do with that.
The man who raised me has just told me he is the keeper of a secret that has gotten people killed.
“After the Council denied him, Derek came to me.” Coach’s voice has gone quieter.
“He said he was going to cut ties with her. Pay for her to go abroad, let her live out her life somewhere she could not be touched by our world. He gave her his mother’s necklace before she left, he told me.
He said he had moved on. I believed him. ”
“He was lying.”
“Clearly.”
I press the heels of my hands into my eyes for one second.
“He marked her without permission. He let her die. He buried her alone. Then he watched my brother get approved.”
“Yes.”
“Coach.”
He nods. He knows where I am going.
“I want to show you something.” He turns the laptop on his desk around to face me.
“The original CCTV from the school where Annie went for her interview was useless. Old system, low resolution, mostly the gate and a sliver of the parking lot. We checked it four years ago. But there is a bodega across the street from the school. Their camera covers the sidewalk and the curb. Nobody checked it back then. They had no reason to. My tech people pulled the archive footage last week and finished cleaning a stretch this morning.”
He hits play.
The footage is grainy at best, washed-out gray with a timestamp ticking in the corner.
The angle covers the bodega’s front step and a slice of the sidewalk that runs past the school gate across the road.
After a few seconds, Annie walks out of the gate.
She is in the brown coat she used to wear in the fall, her hair pulled into a low knot, her purse over one shoulder. She is checking her phone.
A man steps into the frame from the right. His face is tilted away from the camera. He says something to her. She looks up, smiles, and falls into step beside him. The two of them walk left toward the edge of the frame. The footage freezes the second before they leave it.
My heart is loud enough that I can hear it.
“You were right,” Coach says quietly. “She did not get there on her own.”
“It could be anyone,” I say desperately.
“Look at the sleeve, Grayson.”
I lean closer to the screen. The pixel resolution is terrible, but the patch on the upper arm of the man’s jacket is just clear enough to make out a circle, and inside the circle is a stylized W stitched in a darker thread.
The Silverpeak Wolves team insignia.
“Annie knew nobody on that team in those years,” Coach says, his voice very level, “except for you and Derek.”
I push back from the desk. “Derek never told me he saw her. He didn’t say—” My eyes return to the frozen footage, and I continue, “Why wouldn’t he tell—?”
“The reason the Council forcibly separates fated mates who have received a rejection for their human is because our kind can’t deny the desire to mark our fated mate.
And if you’ve been refused and you mark your mate, they will die.
And their death can drive the shifter insane.
There’s a good chance that while Derek looked and acted normal, his sanity began to wither away. ”
“He killed Annie,” I whisper, the shock too much for me.
Coach nods. “I believe that as well.”
I cover my mouth, trying to think past the shock of betrayal. “He was the last person to see Gabriel.”
Coach looks away, and my stomach twists. “You believe he killed my brother?”
“I don’t have any proof, but the suicide was too messy. I had my doubts back then, but I couldn’t figure it out.”
Everything in the room has pulled back, quiet and far away.