Annabella
Chapter twenty-six
I’d kissed Sam Shaw less than an hour ago, asked him to prove my father was a monster, and now I was stress-eating my way through my fifth sandwich like it was a competitive sport.
My wolf didn’t care about the looming emotional apocalypse.
She was riding high from the run, practically purring with satisfaction, her joy a warm hum beneath my ribs that made everything else feel slightly surreal.
My human brain, meanwhile, had moved past spiraling and into full crisis management.
Sam had called Derek while we walked back.
Derek, Gideon Calloway, and a human member of their team were on their way.
Whatever they were bringing, it was bad. People didn’t assemble a whole briefing team for good news.
I tore off another bite of sandwich. My body demanded fuel after the Shift—calories burned through faster than I could replace them—but my hands were steadier when they were busy.
Idle hands meant thinking, and thinking meant replaying the moment I’d said, “Show me what you have on Simon,” and wondering if I’d just detonated my own life.
Sam leaned against the wall across the room, arms folded, watching me with a careful expression that was clearly costing him effort.
Every few seconds his weight shifted, like he wanted to come closer and kept catching himself.
I thought I could feel him through the bond, a tickle of awareness that was a low, steady current of protectiveness threaded with something heavier.
Dread, maybe. Like he knew what was coming.
My eyes flicked to the door. One exit behind me, windows on two sides. If this went sideways, I could be through the glass before—
Stop it, my wolf chided. Safe here.
I knew that. I did. But old habits had kept me alive this long, and I wasn’t about to retire them over one good afternoon.
The crunch of tires on the driveway made me tense. Three sets of footsteps. Two light, confident—wolves. One quicker, slightly uneven like whoever it was couldn’t walk in a straight line.
Sam straightened but didn’t move toward me. “You sure you don’t want Mina and Zeke here for this?”
I shook my head. “Show me what you’ve got, and after I’ll take it to them, but whatever it is, I think it’ll be better coming from me.”
Sam studied me for a moment, then nodded just as Derek walked in carrying a hard-shell case.
They weren’t identical but he looked like Sam.
Of course he did—twins—but the resemblance hit me differently up close.
Same jaw, same build, but where Sam moved with that deceptive looseness that hid how fast he could strike, Derek was economy of motion.
Nothing wasted. Every step placed with a precision that said military louder than any uniform could.
His scent was Sam’s but colder, sharper, more moss and stone where Sam was woodsmoke and chocolate.
His eyes found me and held. There was no warmth in the assessment, but no hostility either. Just a soldier cataloging the terrain. I wondered if he saw Sofia when he looked at me. We shared blood, after all. But if he made the connection, he didn’t show it.
Gideon followed with a laptop and thumb drive.
My chest squeezed at the sight of him. Gideon Calloway.
The Council operative who’d thrown me in the Kennel, but also the one who’d helped break me out.
The last time I’d seen him, I’d been half-conscious in his backseat, bleeding through my prison jumpsuit while he complained about his upholstery.
I’d been sure I was hallucinating the rescue right up until the moment Sofia’s face appeared at the car door and I heard her say my name.
He caught my eye and gave me a nod—brief, no-nonsense.
His theatrical energy was dialed back, which told me more about the seriousness of what was coming than anything else.
The third man was unfamiliar. Human; his scent confirmed it immediately, no wolf underneath, just coffee and a chemical-sweet smell like energy drinks and overheated electronics.
Skinny, with crooked lime-green glasses perched on his nose and hazelnut hair that looked like it had lost a fight with static electricity.
He carried two laptops stacked under one arm.
“Those sandwiches up for grabs?” he asked, already reaching for the platter.
Not intimidated by a room full of werewolves. Not even slightly. He’d walked in like he owned the table and everything on it. One of the humans embedded in this Pack, then. Comfortable enough to take liberties.
I pushed the platter toward him. “Go ahead.”
“Thanks,” he said, grabbing two. “Please tell me there are energy drinks.”
“There’s coffee,” Sam offered.
“Coffee? You should rinse your mouth out. Coffee is what you drink when you want to pretend you’re functional. Energy drinks are what you drink when you actually need to be functional.”
“There’s beer in the fridge,” Derek said.
The human shot Derek a glare, grabbed another sandwich, and sat down, opening his laptop one-handed. “I’ll suffer.”
Comfortable enough with the Shaw brothers to give them shit, and confident enough to do it without checking to see if anyone minded. I filed that away.
“Annabella, you know Gideon. This is Waylen Jones.”
“Waylen the Wizard,” the human corrected, shoving his lime-green glasses up his nose. He gestured at his laptops with a sandwich still in hand. “Best hacker in this hemisphere, but I’m humble, so I won’t brag.”
“You literally just bragged,” Derek said flatly.
“That? That was a statement of fact, not bragging. There’s a difference.” Waylen turned to me, his hands already moving restlessly across the keyboard even while he talked. “You’re the one who was running the memory wipe operations on Council members, no?”
I hesitated. The question hit a bruise I hadn’t expected. Three months ago, I would have owned that without flinching. Now the words tasted different. “I was.”
“Intellectually curious operation, I’ll give you that.
Custom spellwork combined with targeted extraction…
That takes skill.” He tilted his head, studying me like I was a particularly interesting piece of code he wanted to reverse-engineer.
“Also monumentally fucked up, but skill’s skill in my book. ”
“Waylen,” Sam said, with an edge.
“What? I’m complimenting her technical abilities while acknowledging the ethical nightmare.
It’s called nuance, Shaw. You should look it up sometime.
” He turned back to his laptop, fingers tapping rapidly.
“Now, can we get to the part where I show her how deep this conspiracy goes? Because I’ve been sitting on this intel for weeks and I am dying to walk someone through my superior digital detective work. ”
“Soon,” Derek said, moving to the head of the table. “She needs the background first.”
Waylen opened his mouth—probably to argue—but something in Derek’s expression shut it again. He grabbed another sandwich instead and slouched back with an exaggerated wave for Derek to continue.
I reached for my silver streak without thinking, then caught myself and dropped my hand to the table. Whatever was coming, I’d face it with my hands still.
Derek set a case on the table and opened it. Inside were three external hard drives with evidence labels and a stack of printed photographs. “Sam said you wanted to know about Webster and his connections. We’ve been building this case for months.”
He pulled out a photograph and placed it in front of me.
“You know who Victor Kane is?”
I didn’t need to pick up the photo. “Sure. He visited me in the Kennel.”
The temperature in the room dropped.
Sam pushed off the wall. “He what?”
“Showed up at my cell. Told me my hybrid physiology was ‘unprecedented’ and he intended to run ‘controlled testing’ on me when he got back from Council business.” I kept my voice flat, clinical.
The same way Kane had delivered the information to me.
“Called me a subject. Said science requires sacrifice.”
Sam’s scent changed, something sharp and hot cutting through the room. Through the bond, I got a trickle of his fury, but it felt like it was a living thing, barely leashed. “At what point were you planning to mention that Victor Kane personally visited your cell and threatened to dissect you?”
“It didn’t come up.”
“It didn’t—” Sam cut himself off. Took a breath. “Annabella.”
“What? You want me to give you a full itinerary of everyone who stopped by to threaten me? Because I’ll need a longer table and a lot more sandwiches.” I gestured at the empty platter. “The guards took turns. Kane showed up once. I had bigger problems.”
“You had bigger problems,” Sam repeated, “than the man who wanted to use you as a lab rat.”
“He took a number. There was a queue.”
Sam looked at Derek like are you hearing this? Derek’s mouth flicked up at the edges; barely, but it was there.
“We’re circling back to this later,” Sam said, pointing at me. “In detail.”
“Can’t wait. Kane also had his own people inside,” I added, steering us back to useful territory. “They had been brought in, and the regular guards were not happy about it.”
Sam’s eyes sharpened. “That tracks with what we’ve found. He’s been placing operatives inside Council institutions for months.”
Derek slid the second photo across: a younger Kane in military fatigues, surrounded by soldiers. “This is Kane when he was military. Special operations. I hunted him when I was in Echo Command.”
My fingers stilled on the photo. “Hunted him?”
“He went rogue. Took a lot of men and women with him who felt hard done by with Shifters in the forces.” A muscle ticked in Derek’s jaw, and his hand pressed flat against the table.
“Kane set up an ambush and good soldiers died. I thought we got him in an airstrike after that, but Kane just went underground.” He said it like a status report.
Flat and controlled. But I could read the cost of that control in the whiteness of his knuckles.
“About a year ago, he resurfaced. Gained influence, claimed he’d been proven right—that Shifters were a dangerous aberration of nature.
Ripper attacks escalating, ripple chaos in the cities.
The human government turned to him for advice, and now he’s sitting on the Wolf Council. ”
“Why would the Council allow someone like that?”
“They didn’t have a choice,” Gideon said. “With the Council being portrayed as having clearly lost control of the situation, human governments threatened war. The Council offered a seat for one human representative. The humans nominated Kane.”
“And the Council couldn’t refuse without triggering the very war they were trying to prevent,” Derek added. “So now he’s on the inside, using his Council seat to sabotage us from within.”
A human with a vendetta against Shifters, embedded in the governing body meant to protect them. That was bad. But I’d known the Council was compromised; it was half the reason I’d spent years fighting against it.
What I didn’t understand yet was why they were telling me.
“Now?” Waylen asked, practically vibrating.
Derek sighed but nodded.
Waylen spun his laptop around with the satisfaction of a magician revealing the final trick. Financial records filled the screen, complex webs of transactions, highlighted paths showing money flowing between accounts.
“We’ve been tracking Kane’s financials. He’s been funneling Council emergency funds—money meant for ripple victims—into shell companies.
The money bounces through dozens of accounts, different jurisdictions, fake consulting firms.” His fingers traced the pathways on screen.
“Took me three weeks to crack the pattern, but it all ends up in the same places.” He highlighted several company names.
I leaned forward, scanning the screen.
The names registered one at a time.
Ashworth Holdings.
Meridian Therapeutics.
Solace Foundation.
Something about them seemed familiar. Had I seen these names before? Were they on a report I’d read? I couldn’t bring up the memory.
“Simon Webster,” Sam said from beside me, “is on the board or listed as owner on all of them.”
The room tilted. Just for a second.
I forced myself to sit straight. To think. “That doesn’t mean anything. Not unless you have proof those companies aren’t supporting ripple victims.”
“They’re not,” Derek said. “We verified. The addresses are fake. The clinics don’t exist. The money goes in, gets laundered, and half funds Webster’s operations. The other half goes back to Kane.”
“No.” The word came out sharp enough to cut. “Simon hates ripple. He would never take funds away from victims of it—”
“Annabella,” Sam said. “Look at the financial records—”
“Financial records can be faked!” I was on my feet, chair scraping back. “The Council lied about Simon before. This is exactly what he warned me you’d do: frame him, make him look like the villain, discredit him so no one would believe the truth about Council corruption—”
I stopped.
Because something was crawling up from the back of my mind. Something I’d noticed and filed away and refused to examine, because examining it would have meant asking questions I wasn’t ready to ask.
Kane’s guard. In Adarcan.
Not a regular Ironhide. Brennan, one of Kane’s people, had walked to my cell in the middle of the night and slid a white envelope through the bars. A letter. On thick, expensive paper. In Simon’s handwriting.
What would one of Kane’s guards be doing running errands for Simon?
I’d thought that, lying on the concrete floor with blood on my hands and Simon’s words telling me I’d failed him.
I’d noticed the connection, and then I’d been too broken, too desperate, too busy trying not to die to follow the thread.
But the thread was still there. Kane’s man.
Simon’s letter. Hand-delivered, like a personal favor between allies.
My legs felt weak. I sat down hard.
“In Adarcan,” I said. My voice sounded strange to my own ears.
“One of Kane’s guards delivered a letter to my cell from Simon.
” I stared at the financial records on Waylen’s screen.
“I noticed it at the time. Wondered why one of Kane’s people would be carrying messages for Simon.
But I was—” Broken. Bleeding. Barely conscious. “—dealing with other things.”
“What did the letter say?” Sam asked. His anger had banked into something colder, more focused.
“That I’d failed him. That my capture had compromised months of planning. That he was disappointed in me.” I said the words like they were nothing, like they hadn’t taken me apart in that cell.
“Man writes like a performance review,” Waylen muttered.
Despite everything, a sound came out of me that was almost a laugh.
I’d had the proof in my hands. Lying in a prison cell, I’d held evidence that Kane and Simon were connected, and I’d been too loyal—too trained—to see it for what it was.
My hands were shaking, so I pressed them flat against the table.
“Keep going,” I said.