“Pull up everything from my brother’s death.” The words emerged without conscious decision. “Every file, every photo, every witness statement.”
“Sir…we have already done that…Ren asked…” Carlton started to protest, but I cut him off with a look that probably showed too much of the wolf.
“Everything. Again. And a thousand times over if I ask for it.”
Back at the compound, the security office had transformed into a war room. Screens covered every wall, displaying footage from the night that had destroyed everything. Carlton’s team worked with grim efficiency, pulling files that should have been sealed forever.
The security chief stood before a massive display showing the compound’s layout. Red markers indicated camera positions, each one numbered and time-stamped. “Every camera in the residential wing went dark between midnight and roughly until after we presented her at court. Professional work, because it was not just deleted but overwritten with blank feeds.”
Those timestamps made my blood freeze. The exact window my nightmares always took place in. The hours I supposedly spent sleeping off the exhaustion of claiming my mate, dead to the world while my brother died.
“How?” Ren studied the footage, his expression troubled. “Our security system has multiple redundancies. It would take someone with administrator access...”
My hands shook as I clicked through the files. Crime scene photos I’d avoided for three months now filled the screens. Laziel’s body from every angle, the wounds mapped and measured. The blood spatter patterns. The claw marks that had torn through flesh and bone with terrifying efficiency.
“The angle’s wrong.” The observation came from one of Carlton’s technicians, a young woman who probably wished she’d called in sick today. “These wounds... the attacker was taller than the victim. Ms. Thornback is five-four. Laziel was six-one.”
Physics. Simple, undeniable physics that we’d ignored in our rush to judgment. An omega Rhea’s size would have had to attack from below, leaving distinctly different wound patterns. Unless she’d been levitating, these strikes came from someone at least a few inches taller.
I gripped the desk hard enough to leave indentations in the wood, fighting the surge of nausea that accompanied realization. Every piece of evidence that had seemed so damning three months ago now pointed in a different direction. Toward someone with the height, the strength, the access, and the motive to kill a prince.
“I need air.” The words came out strangled.
I made it to my office before the change ripped through me. Clothes shredded as my body shifted, bones breaking and reforming in the space between heartbeats. The wolf emerged ragged and desperate, immediately howling for its lost mate.
Screw protocols. Screw dignity. I burst through the office doors and ran.
The compound’s grounds blurred past as I pushed my wolf body to its limits. Other pack members scattered from my path, recognizing an alpha on the edge of feral. My wolf didn’t care about their fear or respect. He wanted answers. He wanted her.
Her old room at the Thornback house had been sealed since that night, yellow tape crisscrossing the door. I shifted back to human form, not bothering with clothes as I tore through the barriers. The space still smelled of death and violence, but underneath...
Fresh scent. Recent. Maybe a week old at most.
I prowled the room on all fours, nose to the ground despite my human form. There, by the window. The scent was stronger here, mixed with something else. Desperation. And... tears?Someone had been here, someone who’d cried while looking out at grounds they could never properly return to.
My fingers found grooves in the windowsill. Claw marks, but not from that night. These were fresh, the wood still pale where it had been gouged. I compared them to my own hand, extended my claws to match. Too small to be mine. Too delicate to be Laziel’s.
The implications crashed over me in waves. If Rhea was innocent, and every instinct now screamed she was, then I’d destroyed us both for nothing. Worse than nothing. For a lie that had protected the real killer.
But who? Who had the access, the motive, the ability to stage such a perfect frame job?
I stared out the window Rhea had touched, trying to imagine what she had been thinking the night of the murder. She was out there somewhere, bearing scars I’d carved into her throat, living with the knowledge that her mate had chosen everyone else over her. If she was even still alive.
The Thornbacks’ careful deflection suggested she was, but strange territories didn’t forgive weakness. And a scarred omega without pack protection? That was the definition of vulnerable.
I shifted back to wolf form and ran deeper into the woods, following phantom scents and chasing shadows. Somewhere out there, Rhea was hiding. From me, from the pack, from the truth neither of us could escape. But I’d find her. I had to.
18
— • —
Rhea
Damon was the same as he was that night, powerful, overwhelming, consumed by need for me. We were back in his room, that massive bed with sheets that whispered wealth with every movement. His hands moved with devastating certainty, relearning paths they’d mapped just once but remembered perfectly. He didn’t speak of betrayal or murder. He spoke only in touches, in the drag of callused palms over sensitized skin, in the heat of his mouth against my pulse point.
The room smelled of cedar and rain, his scent that had once meant safety. He moved above me with the controlled power of an apex predator choosing gentleness, each thrust a claim, each kiss a brand. My body responded without the weight of knowledge, without the burden of after. Just pure response to pure need, the way we’d been before the world crashed down.
“You’re mine, Rhea. Always mine.” Damon’s voice rumbled through my body, that particular register that bypassed thought and went straight to my core. His teeth found my throat, not to tear away but to mark deeper, to claim harder, to ensure I never forgot who I belonged to.
