“Coach.”
He nods. He knows where I am going.
“I want to show you something.” He turns the laptop on his desk around to face me. “The original CCTV from the school where Annie went for her interview was useless. Old system, lowresolution, mostly the gate and a sliver of the parking lot. We checked it four years ago. But there is a bodega across the street from the school. Their camera covers the sidewalk and the curb. Nobody checked it back then. They had no reason to. My tech people pulled the archive footage last week and finished cleaning a stretch this morning.”
He hits play.
The footage is grainy at best, washed-out gray with a timestamp ticking in the corner. The angle covers the bodega’s front step and a slice of the sidewalk that runs past the school gate across the road. After a few seconds, Annie walks out of the gate. She is in the brown coat she used to wear in the fall, her hair pulled into a low knot, her purse over one shoulder. She is checking her phone.
A man steps into the frame from the right. His face is tilted away from the camera. He says something to her. She looks up, smiles, and falls into step beside him. The two of them walk left toward the edge of the frame. The footage freezes the second before they leave it.
My heart is loud enough that I can hear it.
“You were right,” Coach says quietly. “She did not get there on her own.”
“It could be anyone,” I say desperately.
“Look at the sleeve, Grayson.”
I lean closer to the screen. The pixel resolution is terrible, but the patch on the upper arm of the man’s jacket is just clear enough to make out a circle, and inside the circle is a stylized W stitched in a darker thread.
The Silverpeak Wolves team insignia.
“Annie knew nobody on that team in those years,” Coach says, his voice very level, “except for you and Derek.”
I push back from the desk. “Derek never told me he saw her. He didn’t say—” My eyes return to the frozen footage, and I continue, “Why wouldn’t he tell—?”
“The reason the Council forcibly separates fated mates who have received a rejection for their human is because our kind can’t deny the desire to mark our fated mate. And if you’ve been refused and you mark your mate, they will die. And their death can drive the shifter insane. There’s a good chance that while Derek looked and acted normal, his sanity began to wither away.”
“He killed Annie,” I whisper, the shock too much for me.
Coach nods. “I believe that as well.”
I cover my mouth, trying to think past the shock of betrayal. “He was the last person to see Gabriel.”
Coach looks away, and my stomach twists. “You believe he killed my brother?”
“I don’t have any proof, but the suicide was too messy. I had my doubts back then, but I couldn’t figure it out.”
Everything in the room has pulled back, quiet and far away.
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.
