Chapter 28 #2
I see it then. All of it at once. Derek holding Gabriel as my brother wept over Annie’s death.
The morning we found Gabriel. The four years Derek was gone.
Derek standing in my kitchen two weeks ago with that crooked half-smile, drumming his fingers on my counter, telling me Coach was a Council candidate.
He has been lying to me since the day he came home.
He has been lying to me since the day my brother died.
I reach for my phone.
Miranda.
My fingers are clumsy on the screen. I have two missed calls from Linda. I tap her name and lift the phone to my ear. It rings and rings and goes to voicemail.
“Coach.”
“What?”
“He just took Miranda home. He’s at the house. Ethan is at the house.”
Coach is already moving.
We make it to the house in twenty minutes from Coach’s office. Coach is on his phone the entire drive, calling enforcers, calling Brody, calling Samuel, his voice short and clipped. Mobilize. Now. The Wolfe estate. Bring full kit.
When we tear up the drive, the front door is open. The porch lamps are on. I am out of the car before it has fully stopped and inside the foyer in three strides.
The kitchen is empty, and the dining room is dark. I move through the rooms calling their names, my voice climbing with every empty space.
“Miranda? Ethan?”
Linda is on the ground, a few feet from us. Coach immediately checks her and looks up, his expression tense. “We need to get a healer here now. Go check upstairs.”
He’s already barking orders into his phone as I head upstairs, fear a bitter taste on my tongue. As I leap up the stairs, I try Miranda’s phone and then Derek’s. I didn’t expect him to pick up, but it still frustrates me.
No one is upstairs.
My fear intensifies. Where is my son? Where’s my mate?
I check Miranda’s bedside drawer where the dagger sits when she isn’t wearing it. Empty. I close my eyes. Thank heaven for small mercies.
“Grayson!”
Coach’s shout has me rushing downstairs where he’s holding a note in his hand. “I found this on the ground.”
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.
The world goes red at the edges.
“Coach.”
He comes around the island. “What does she say?”
“She went with him.” My voice is not mine. “She went with Derek to find Ethan.”
He reads the note over my shoulder. His jaw locks.
“Then that means she doesn’t know,” I murmur.
My wolf is too much on the surface. It wants to come out. It wants to hunt for the people who’ve taken my family. But my wolf is all instincts. I need to use my head.
“Derek’s car is still here, so they left on foot,” Coach says grimly. “He’s not wearing any scent neutralizer, so we can track him.”
“So either Derek has nothing to do with this or he wanted us to follow him,” I say, my jaw tight.
“He didn’t call either of us, so I wouldn’t say he’s got no involvement.” Coach looks toward the trees. “But he could be leading us away from Ethan as well.”
“The trackers,” I say suddenly. “I had trackers sewed into all of Ethan’s clothes the day after the shooting.” I pull out my phone and open the app.
The map opens. A blue dot pulses at the edge of the screen, off in the trees at the far edge of the estate land. The dot is not moving. I stare at it, and the ground tilts beneath me as I recognize the spot.
“I know where that is. The ancestral home’s ruins.” The breath goes out of me. “Gabriel and Derek used to love playing out there as boys. They practically lived in those walls.”
Coach is on the phone again. “Samuel, mobilize the team and arrange for a standby healer, the old Wolfe ruins past the back of the estate. Move now.”
The laundry box by the back wall is stocked, and I grab two pairs of pants, throwing one to Coach.
We’re out across the lawn toward the tree line.
The shift takes me between one stride and the next, bone and muscle resetting on the move, the pants gone with the change.
Coach’s wolf falls in at my flank. The estate map is burned into me from a lifetime on this land, and the tracker reading sits behind my eyes like a pin on it.
I don’t need a road. I need the straight line through the trees, and I take it.
The ruins are Derek’s ground. He knows every standing wall, every gap in them, somewhere he can move and I can’t. This might be my land, but this was his and Gabriel’s place.
The clearing opens ahead of us, the gutted main house black against the dark, its lone chimney standing over the wreck of everything else.
The tracker put them here. My nose takes me the rest of the way.
Ethan’s scent threads through the cold first, then Miranda’s underneath it, and my chest seizes on the copper edge running through hers.
Blood. I cut past the main house, past the first roofless outbuilding, to the smaller one huddled behind it, the scent thickening with every stride.
I shift back hard at the door, dragging the spare pants on with shaking hands, because I cannot go through it on four legs and reach her fast enough on two.
I am about to push it open when a scream tears out of the building.
Miranda.
I hit the door, and it splinters off its frame. My heart is slamming against my ribs, my blood roaring loudly enough to drown out everything, and the second I’m through, the room stops me cold.
Vanessa is crumpled at the base of the back wall, her neck twisted too far, her open eyes fixed on nothing.
A small, unconscious wolf on the ground. His chest is moving, and that fills me with relief.
Miranda pinned on her back beneath an enormous dark wolf, his jaws inches from her throat, blood running freely down the right side of his face from an eye that is no longer there.
“GET OFF MY MATE.”
I am not aware of closing the distance. I am across the room, hitting him with my full weight. Derek goes off her in a tangle of fur and limbs, slamming into the opposite wall.
I drop to my knees next to Miranda. Her chest is moving. Her breathing is wet.
“Look at me. Sweetheart. Look at me.”
Her eyes find mine, and there is a small twitch of her mouth that tries to be a smile and does not make it.
I cannot tell what color her shirt is supposed to be.
Her hand reaches sideways across the concrete toward Ethan.
The boy makes a small sound, curling toward her until her fingers close around his front paw.
Coach has come into the room behind me. I hear his sharp inhale at the sight on the floor. He moves past us toward the wolf slumped against the wall.
Derek shifts back. He pushes himself up with his arm, one hand pressed over the ruin of his right eye, blood running down between his fingers and his bare chest heaving. He looks at me, then at Coach, and his easy half-smile pulls into place even through the pain.
“She attacked me.” His voice is rough but level. “I was helping her. She got the knife into me before I could stop her. I had to defend myself.”
“Like you helped Annie?”