When we tear up the drive, the front door is open. The porch lamps are on. I am out of the car before it has fully stopped and inside the foyer in three strides.
The kitchen is empty, and the dining room is dark. I move through the rooms calling their names, my voice climbing with every empty space.
“Miranda? Ethan?”
Linda is on the ground, a few feet from us. Coach immediately checks her and looks up, his expression tense. “We need to get a healer here now. Go check upstairs.”
He’s already barking orders into his phone as I head upstairs, fear a bitter taste on my tongue. As I leap up the stairs, I try Miranda’s phone and then Derek’s. I didn’t expect him to pick up, but it still frustrates me.
No one is upstairs.
My fear intensifies. Where is my son? Where’s my mate?
I check Miranda’s bedside drawer where the dagger sits when she isn’t wearing it. Empty. I close my eyes. Thank heaven for small mercies.
“Grayson!”
Coach’s shout has me rushing downstairs where he’s holding a note in his hand. “I found this on the ground.”
Grayson. Tried to call you. Derek couldn’t reach Coach or you. Linda was attacked and someone took Ethan. Derek’s tracking them. Going with him now.
The world goes red at the edges.
“Coach.”
He comes around the island. “What does she say?”
“She went with him.” My voice is not mine. “She went with Derek to find Ethan.”
He reads the note over my shoulder. His jaw locks.
“Then that means she doesn’t know,” I murmur.
My wolf is too much on the surface. It wants to come out. It wants to hunt for the people who’ve taken my family. But my wolf is all instincts. I need to use my head.
“Derek’s car is still here, so they left on foot,” Coach says grimly. “He’s not wearing any scent neutralizer, so we can track him.”
“So either Derek has nothing to do with this or he wanted us to follow him,” I say, my jaw tight.
“He didn’t call either of us, so I wouldn’t say he’s got no involvement.” Coach looks toward the trees. “But he could be leading us away from Ethan as well.”
“The trackers,” I say suddenly. “I had trackers sewed into all of Ethan’s clothes the day after the shooting.” I pull out my phone and open the app.
The map opens. A blue dot pulses at the edge of the screen, off in the trees at the far edge of the estate land. The dot is not moving. I stare at it, and the ground tilts beneath me as I recognize the spot.
“I know where that is. The ancestral home’s ruins.” The breath goes out of me. “Gabriel and Derek used to love playing out there as boys. They practically lived in those walls.”
Coach is on the phone again. “Samuel, mobilize the team and arrange for a standby healer, the old Wolfe ruins past the back of the estate. Move now.”
The laundry box by the back wall is stocked, and I grab two pairs of pants, throwing one to Coach. We’re out across the lawn toward the tree line. The shift takes me between one stride andthe next, bone and muscle resetting on the move, the pants gone with the change. Coach’s wolf falls in at my flank. The estate map is burned into me from a lifetime on this land, and the tracker reading sits behind my eyes like a pin on it. I don’t need a road. I need the straight line through the trees, and I take it.
The ruins are Derek’s ground. He knows every standing wall, every gap in them, somewhere he can move and I can’t. This might be my land, but this was his and Gabriel’s place.
The clearing opens ahead of us, the gutted main house black against the dark, its lone chimney standing over the wreck of everything else. The tracker put them here. My nose takes me the rest of the way. Ethan’s scent threads through the cold first, then Miranda’s underneath it, and my chest seizes on the copper edge running through hers. Blood. I cut past the main house, past the first roofless outbuilding, to the smaller one huddled behind it, the scent thickening with every stride.
I shift back hard at the door, dragging the spare pants on with shaking hands, because I cannot go through it on four legs and reach her fast enough on two.
I am about to push it open when a scream tears out of the building.
