Chapter 19 - Cade
The room is full of predators, but Mara is the only one who looks like she might actually eat someone alive.
She’s wearing her clothes like armor today, with tight black jeans, boots, and a jacket that could conceal any number of weapons—this is the girl who survived her parents’ deaths and got closer to the hunters than anyone else we know.
I know this is a big deal to her; she’s going to lay out everything she’s learned over years of tracking the hunters, all the information she risked her life to gather.
She wants to be taken seriously because she’s not willing to give up her revenge, and I’m right behind her.
The diner is on lockdown for today’s meeting, and when she enters the main room, the entire table falls silent; they know how important this is. Mara doesn’t flinch from the scrutiny; instead, she sets her laptop on the table with a deliberateness that draws all eyes.
I take her in from across the room, watching the line of her shoulders, the steely set of her jaw. There’s something electric about her right now, like she’s running on pure adrenaline.
Brooks is the first to break the tension, grinning. “Is the clicker really necessary?” he says, pointing at the presentation remote she’s palmed like a weapon.
Mara’s face is pure deadpan. “You want to try and take it from me?”
The room erupts in a ripple of laughter, but even the ones who think they’re in on the joke, like Alder, Kaiden, and even Grey, keep their hands away from the table.
It’s been a week since the attack, the blood, the hospital bed.
A week since Mara almost died in my arms, since I tore a hunter’s throat out for touching her.
She should still be healing, but instead she’s been up every morning before me, trying to remember every detail she ever learned about the hunters, hunched over research, cross-referencing names and supply lists and truck manifests and whatever else she can scrape from the dark web.
She barely sleeps. She barely eats. I can’t decide if I’m proud of her or if I want to lock her in a room until she remembers she’s not made of steel.
Willow and Kit flank her, both looking tired, too, but determined.
Kit’s got her notepad open with her own notes.
Willow sets up three glass bottles of water, each lined up just so, and gives Mara a little nod.
They’ve been working together all week, the three of them, and it’s clear that Mara’s not just the guest star today. She’s the main event.
Rowan stands at the far end of the room, arms folded, his face unreadable. He’s good at that, but I can tell he’s actually worried. Not about the data, but about where it’s going to lead us.
Mara clicks the remote, and the first slide flashes up on the screen. It’s a map showing the western states overlaid with a constellation of red and yellow pins, each labeled with a date, a company, and a casualty count.
“Every hunter supply shipment over the last five years, and they go back even further, showing the European link has been longstanding,” she says, voice steady, “plus what you already had from the alliance’s own records.
I scrubbed the transport manifests for phony names, cross-referenced against business registrations, and I can tell you at least four routes bring in stuff directly from Europe.
” She lets that settle, eyes sweeping the table like she’s daring anyone to challenge her.
“Every single one of these is run by a shell company, usually registered to a fake address in the Netherlands, Paris, or the UK, but shipments are coming in across the western states, and the actual trucks are coming out of hubs in Idaho, Montana, and here.” She clicks again, and the map zooms to our valley, the routes tracing the mountain passes in neon blue.
“Each time a new compound went up, the Order didn’t just ship in weapons.
They brought in cases of medical supplies, most of it off the books.
You might have thought it was for patching up after raids, but these aren’t wound kits or trauma gear.
We think they’re…hormones and gene therapy kits, because of where they originate.
Stuff you need a medical license to buy, but none of these companies have a doctor on staff. So, you know what that means.”
I watch the room; half the alphas are blinking in confusion, but Brooks gets there first. “They’re running experiments,” he says, voice low, “not just on shifters, but on their own people. Or on…” He glances at Mara, his face going carefully blank.
“On omegas,” Mara confirms, not even blinking. I watch as she hands the clicker off to Willow, who thanks her and then starts explaining what their research has led them to believe.
I listen intently as Mara’s information is linked with the alliance's intelligence, and a horrifying picture emerges. Willow keeps her voice gentle, but it cuts through the room anyway. “We’re now pretty sure the Order’s been running some kind of operation aimed at omegas for a very long time.
They’re pinpointing rare omega triggers in the blood, using gene therapy to force an activation.
” She gestures at the wall of data. “We don’t know how long they’ve been at this, but they know what they’re looking for now.
Mara’s results must have been a breakthrough, even though it didn’t go entirely to plan; our research shows they were frighteningly close. ”
Kit pipes up. “They’re finding more like her, right? Human-born, but with omega traits?”
Willow nods. “That’s the theory. They can trigger dormant omegas from a distance; anyone with a whiff of the gene is a candidate.
I think that’s what the ‘vitamins’ were for.
If they’d kept her longer, finetuned what they were giving her, she might have started affecting every alpha in a hundred-mile radius. ”
There’s a shuffling at the table. Kaiden and Brooks both look at Mara with a new mix of awe and wariness, like she’s a lit match in a fireworks factory.
I see Mara notices it, too. She shrugs, but there’s a faint pink high in her cheeks.
“I never wanted to be anyone’s experiment,” she says, voice flat.
“But I guess it’s better to know than to just be a pawn. ”
My head is buzzing. I think of the quiet way Mara’s heat felt unnatural, the panic I’d felt when I realized how much I needed her, and how, after, I’d felt more like myself than I ever had.
It was like she’d burned off the bullshit, left me with only the truth.
I’d realized then that my feelings for her were so much more than the heat, but looking back, it was far more intense than I’d imagined possible.
But the Order hadn’t been able to predict that outcome. They thought making me desperate would make me weak. Instead, it made me sharper, more focused. More dangerous.
Alder leans forward. “What’s the endgame here? If they can trigger omegas like this, what’s it get them?”
Mara is the one who answers. “It gets them chaos. It gets them a generation of shifters who can’t control themselves, who can’t focus on anything but the nearest omega.
It gets them a lot of dead alphas and maybe a lot of dead packs.
And if they’re refining it, eventually they can sell it as a weapon across the world.
Like a bioweapon for wolves. They weren’t expecting Cade to show up when he did, but they obviously hoped they’d primed me for use.
Handing me over saved their asses and gave them the opportunity to see what happened next.
But they couldn’t have anticipated my bond with Cade, or the fact that my omega nature would only make him stronger, not weaker.
But their science was right. Willow’s research shows how close they really are to turning out genetics against us.
They’re dangerously close to perfecting this… ”
The room goes silent. I feel the weight of every eye as they turn to me. Because, as much as I don’t want to admit it, I’m the first alpha to feel a version of all this. I can only imagine what will happen if they refine the medication and really amp it up.
I clear my throat; the words are thick. “So, what do we do?”
Mara’s eyes flick to me, then away. “We find where they’re making this stuff. We burn it down. We send a message that they can’t play God with our genetics.”
Willow nods, but she’s already flipping through the next slide. “We have one possible location,” she says. “It’s not a main lab, but it’s a distribution site. Remote, but not inaccessible.”
I’m impressed watching Mara command the room, watching her drop fact after fact with a precision that makes even Rowan blink.
I feel the pride swelling in my chest as I watch on.
She’s so locked in, she doesn’t notice the way Kaiden starts to take notes, or how even Alder leans closer, all the usual bravado gone, replaced by sincere curiosity and respect.
Willow passes Mara the clicker again, and she moves to the next slide, a grainy satellite image blown up on the screen.
“Site’s here,” she says, “old mining town on the edge of the central Idaho range. They’ve been running it as a timber operation for decades, but there’s a secondary building buried in the hillside.
” She glances down at her notes. “We’ve got evidence of at least six shipments going in from Europe in the last quarter.
All labeled as forestry equipment or medical tech. ”
Brooks whistles low. “That’s gotta be the place.”
Mara nods. “It’s remote enough they won’t expect a hard hit, but close enough to the main road that if we move fast, we can block their egress.
We’ll need to go in heavy, and we’ll need to go in soon.
” Rowan’s already sketching on a legal pad, drawing lines and arrows.
I know him well enough to spot the way his eyes flick to Mara every time she speaks, as if he’s trying to decode how she’s gotten this far ahead of the rest of us.
She’s running on nothing but caffeine and willpower, but it’s becoming very clear how she infiltrated the hunters all on her own; she’s damn impressive.
“They’ll have security, but they’re not expecting us to know the building exists.
If we hit the back side, through the old logging road, we can get within two hundred meters before they’ll spot us.
” She looks across the table, and for the first time all morning, I see her hesitate.
“But there’s a risk. If they realize who’s coming, they’ll burn the whole place to the ground.
They’re not sentimental about research.”
I catch the faintest tremor in her voice. She’s scared. Not for herself, but for the information, for the idea that it could all vanish before we get what we need. I want to walk over and put my hands on her shoulders, ground her, remind her she’s not doing this alone anymore.
So I just say, “We go at dawn. We take out the guards, get inside, and pull every hard drive and sample we can find. We blow the rest.”
Brooks grins. “Knew there was a reason I liked you, Wilder.”
Willow clicks off the projector, and the room goes from war council to aftermath in a single blink.
The alphas stand, stretching, murmuring to themselves.
I watch Mara gather her notes with hands that only shake a little, and I realize I’ve never wanted anyone as badly as I want her in this exact moment.
I wait for the meeting to wrap and people to start drifting off to refill their coffees and mull over everything that has been said.
I know I’m going to need to go over certain bits again, because this is making my head hurt.
I go straight up to Mara and pull her into my arms; she immediately softens, and I can feel the tension physically leaving her body. I know what this meant to her.
Turning, I see Rowan approach, his eyes on Mara. “I don’t want to overstep, but I took another look at your parents’ case,” he says, “and I found something you’ll want to see.”
Mara’s head snaps up. “What did you find?”
Willow spreads out a sheaf of papers, tapping a page with a list of names.
“We came across this when we were looking for possible donor matches in the old Order records. At first, it seemed like noise, just random names, some crossed out, some not. But I think these are your parents?” She points to the second and third names on the list, and I see Mara’s last name typed in block letters.
Mara stares at it, lips pressed tight. “That’s them. That’s my mom and dad.”
Rowan says, “They’re not the only ones. Every name on this list is dead, except two.” He waits, letting that land. “And what’s more, the dates line up with major shipments. My guess is that this is a kill list. Someone was cleaning house, but leaving just enough alive to keep the project running.”
Mara is very still. “You think my parents were working with them?”
Willow shakes her head. “I think it’s possible that they knew your lineage, perhaps tried to keep their own nature hidden, but they got too close to the hunters when they started shipping through their company.
They might not have even known what was happening until it was too late.
But someone wanted them gone. And the two left on this list… they might still be out there.”
Rowan leans closer, voice gentler than I’ve ever heard him speak to anyone except Willow. “If you want them, Mara, we’ll help you hunt them down. We’ll figure out their story, and yours.”
The words hit me somewhere deep. Rowan isn’t just offering comfort. He’s offering a weapon. He’s offering a pack. Mara glances at me, and I feel her gratitude through our bond; it's like a golden thread pulling us even closer together.
She nods. “Thank you both,” she says, fighting to keep her voice neutral. “Revenge is all I’ve ever wanted, and now I see that it’s even bigger than me, bigger than my family. I hope we can take them all down.”
Rowan smiles, and I catch a glimpse of the teeth that mark him as different from the rest of us. “With your help, Mara, I know we’re even closer to that happening.”
“And most importantly, you’ve done enough for today,” I tell her. She nods, and I see the emotion in her eyes.
The cool mountain air hits us as soon as we step outside. I pull her closer, glad to be away from the well-meaning alliance for a moment. I rest my chin on the top of her head, breathing in her scent. “They’d be proud,” I tell her, “that you’ve fought so hard for them, and for yourself.”
I feel the slight tremble of her shoulders as she gives in to the pain for a moment before sniffling. “I think they’d be proud that I’ve let myself be happy,” she says, glancing up at me. “I think that’s what they’d want most of all.”
I smile and lean down to kiss her before pulling her toward the truck. Before she gets in, she turns to me and grins. “I’m absolutely still going to get my revenge, though.”