“Your father claims he conducted a thorough investigation and left no stone unturned,” Calloway says carefully, “but it appears he was protecting someone.”
The implications slam into me like a truck. I can’t breathe for a moment. Father documented everything. Every dead body, every location, every minute detail. Except this house. Except the mediator and his daughter. The two people who should have been at the center of his investigation.
Which means he knew. He knew what happened here, and he chose to bury it.
I order two investigators to tear the rest of the house apart, searching for any trace of the unknown third person. The one who may have started the entire massacre.
The rest of us file outside. My mind spins, trying to reconcile what we’ve found today with the story I’ve always known. The story my father told me. The story Zion confirmed.
“The carnage seems to have started here and spread outward,” Kira observes, studying the pattern of destruction across the settlement.
My gut churns. I’ve been too loyal, too trusting, to see the holes in the story.
“How did your brother say the violence started?” Alpha Voss asks, his tone conversational but his eyes sharp.
I make myself answer. “Zion was here for a meeting. The hybrids didn’t want pure-blooded shifters involved in their community, despite what my father insisted upon as alpha of the pack. They attacked Zion and the soldiers he brought with him.”
“Where?” Voss tilts his head.
I blink. “What?”
“Where was the meeting?” His voice remains mild, but there’s steel underneath. “Who was it with? Who else witnessed it?”
My jaw tightens. The questions expose holes I’ve never examined before. “The meeting was with the mediator of the hybrids. There were no others present.”
Voss and Calloway exchange another knowing glance.
“So, the meeting was with the mediator hybrid,” Calloway says slowly, “but we’ve established that he was murdered in his daughter’s room, along with the girl. Do you see where we’re headed with this?”
I go still, and then the memory crashes over me.
That day, eleven years ago. I was young, barely seventeen, but I remember. The phone call from Zion. The panic in my father’s eyes. The way he didn’t bring Zion home afterward but took him somewhere else, a place I wasn’t allowed to know anything about.
All the soldiers Zion had brought with him for what was supposed to be a simple meeting were dead.
I can’t breathe.
Surely not.
The three alphas watch me, but they don’t push. Their silence is almost worse than accusations.
“Until our investigation is complete,” Voss says finally, “we won’t pass judgment. But Darius, you need to understand what this looks like.”
I can’t speak. Can’t move. My entire understanding of that day, of the massacre, of everything that came after, is disintegrating before my eyes.
“We’re sending two investigators to the closest settlement,” Alpha Strand adds. “To ask questions. See if anyone remembers anythingabout that day.”
I nod mechanically.
Strand takes a step closer to me, and a look of sympathy crosses his face. “Sometimes the hardest part of becoming alpha isn’t taking power. It’s discovering what that power was built on.”
His counsel settles over me like a shroud.
The three alphas walk away, leaving me standing outside the ruins of the dead man’s home, still holding the photograph of him with his murdered daughter.
I stare down at the picture. The girl is young, smiling. She looks sweet. Harmless. Like any normal teenager who had her whole life ahead of her. Who should have had that life.
“What about children? What if there’s a child somewhere who doesn’t even know what they are yet?”
