It’s clearly a teenager’s room. Or it was. Posters hang torn on the walls, their images faded beyond recognition. A lamp lies broken on the ground. The bed is undone, sheets twisted and half-dragged onto the floor. Deep gouges scar the wooden bed frame. Picture frames lie scattered on the floor, the glass shattered into glittering fragments.
I crouch and pick up the nearest photograph. It shows a girl, maybe sixteen, her smile bright and unguarded. She’s hugging a man, likely her father, both of them laughing at something beyond the camera’s frame.
My chest constricts.
“Which bodies were recovered from here?” Alpha Calloway appears in the doorway, his presence filling the small space.
I pull the official file, the one Father compiled eleven years ago, from my bag. My fingers flip through pages of documented deaths, locations, and recovered remains.
I frown. “None.”
“None?” Calloway’s eyebrows rise.
I check again, scanning every entry. Nothing about this house. Nothing about the man in the photograph or his daughter. And my father’s documentation is thorough to the point of obsession, every detail catalogued and cross-referenced.
“They must have missed this place,” I say, but uncertainty creeps into my voice.
“No.” Soren kneels by the bed. With a grunt of effort, he flips the mattress.
Dried blood stains the underside, brown and crusted with age.
My breath catches.
He moves to the carpet next, peeling it back from the corner. The wooden floor beneath is darkened with more blood, a large stain that speaks of violence and death.
“My best tracker,” Calloway says quietly. “His nose doesn’t lie.”
Soren shoves the bed frame aside with supernatural strength. Something white gleams against the wall.
A skull.
My pulse pounds in my ears as Soren picks it up carefully, turning it in his hands. He sniffs the skull, then the blood on the mattress, then the stain on the floor.
“It’s a match,” he says finally. “The skull belongs to whoever bled on the mattress. We have the blood of two people here, no one else.” He sets the skull down with disturbing gentleness. “Somebody went to great lengths to remove the bodies and hide the evidence. But they missed this.”
“Based on the size, the skull most likely belonged to the father,” Soren’s partner says. “But what happened to the girl?”
I can guess. My stomach flips, threatening to revolt.
Kira, Alpha Strand’s tracker from Silver Rock Pack, steps forward. She kneels by the mattress, inhaling slowly.
“Sexual activity,” she says, her voice clinical. “The father interrupted. Violence ensued.”
“The girl could have been with her lover,” Alpha Voss from the East Ridge Pack says, appearing behind Calloway. His expression is grave. “The father walks in, doesn’t approve, tries to stop them. Things escalate.”
Alpha Strand enters the room as well. He looks around, his gaze sweeping over the torn posters, the shattered frames. “Are there any pictures of a young male? Any trace of a boyfriend?”
I follow his gaze. The photographs I can see show thegirl with her father, with female friends. No young man. No evidence of a relationship.
“No,” I say quietly.
“In that case,” Calloway says, his voice hard, “it’s more likely that the father walked in on someone assaulting his daughter. He tried to protect her. The attacker killed him.”
“Given the level of violence required to start a massacre of this scale,” Strand adds, “a crime of that nature fits better than a lover’s quarrel.”
I return to the file, flipping through page after page. “It’s not documented here. None of this is.”
A loaded look, silent and damning, passes between the three alphas.
