[Rhys’ POV]
The pack hall smells like lilies and grief, both equally performative. Someone draped white cloth over the medical table where my brother lies cleaned and arranged with more care than he showed a living thing in twenty-eight years of breathing.
Wolves weep around me—elders murmuring prayers, young members standing rigid with shock. Everyone mourning the golden firstborn who remembered names and made every wolf believe they mattered.
I knew a different version. The boy who broke three of my ribs at fourteen and told our father I fell from a tree, who stood at my bedside with a glass of water and a face so concerned that Father called him thoughtful—a good brother, a natural caretaker.
I was fourteen, breathing copper, watching my brother earn applause for the performance of caring about the wreckage he caused.
After that he got smarter—stopped using fists on me and started using words on everyone else. Quiet concerns to elders about my stability. Jokes at gatherings about the loner brother.
Twenty years of careful whispers, and by the time he was done, wolves stepped aside when I walked past—not from respect, but from the unease he'd planted in them like seeds.
I wait for something to arrive. Grief, guilt, satisfaction—any would serve. What comes is silence, flat and practical, like a room swept clean after a long tenancy.
He got the heir's position. I got the perimeter. Now he's dead, and the path to Alpha is open for the first time in my life. I keep that thought behind my teeth where it belongs.
Elder Marsh grips my arm. "He was taken too soon, Rhys. If there's anything at all the council can offer you and your father during this time—"
"Your presence is enough, Elder." I ease my arm free with a nod that means nothing and carries the exact shape of gratitude. "Thank you for being here tonight."
Marsh moves on, satisfied. Twenty years of practice—every interaction a quiet transaction, cast and reel, give them what they'll swallow whole.
Father enters through the main doors and crosses to the table. He looks at the body the way a man appraises a broken tool and turns to me without touching his son's hand.
"Go to the flat." His voice carries the same administrative cadence it does in council sessions. "Assess the scene and find out what happened."
"Anyone with me on site?" I already know the answer. Father doesn't share information before he's had the chance to shape it.
"Alone. No one sees it before I do." His eyes haven't left Callum's face, but the looking holds nothing soft. "Report directly to me."
"Yes, sir." I take my coat and walk out before the hall notices neither of us reached for the body.
The flat tells the story this pack refuses to read. Kitchen table overturned, two chairs shattered against the far wall, plaster dust coating every surface like dirty snow beneath the smell of blood and whiskey.
I move through the wreckage the way I read ground on patrol—methodical, patient, letting the room speak before I do. Cabinet doors hang from broken hinges and glass crunches where a mug hit tile hard enough to starburst the grout.
A dent in the hallway plaster catches me. Body-shaped, shoulder height, painted over at least twice—layers visible where fresh cracks split through years of careful repair.
This wall had been broken and patched methodically, repeatedly—the way you service damage you expect to keep producing. The violence in this apartment didn't start tonight, and Callum wasn't the one absorbing it.
The bathroom is small—cracked mirror, single toothbrush, and behind the sink, fallen to the floor is a pregnancy test showing two pink lines under fluorescent light. My brother's mate—small, quiet, always knitting things nobody wore—pregnant. I pocket the test, check the flat once more, and drive back.
Father and Elder Voss wait in the study. I set the test on the desk between them and deliver my report—damage patterns, blood, the knife lodged in the kitchen floor, walls repaired so many times the plaster reads like sediment.
Father barely registers the evidence of years of violence. His focus narrows to the test like everything else in the room has gone dark.
"A wolf of her rank could not overpower a full-blooded Alpha." Voss picks it up with the careful reverence she reserves for old texts. "Not under any normal circumstances."
"Then what circumstances explain this?" Father’s jaw is tight enough that the words barely clear his teeth.
"Early pregnancy creates a raw bond—unregulated, volatile." Voss sets the test down. "If the child carries old blood, prophecy blood, that surge would explain how she walked out of that flat alive."
"Prophecy blood." Father repeats it slowly, tasting the shape of what the word purchases. "You're certain, Voss?"
"It's the only explanation that fits." She turns to me. "You saw the flat, Rhys. She's half his size. Without something extraordinary moving through her body, she doesn't leave that room."
"She left it breathing and moving fast." I keep my voice clinical. "Coat missing from the hook, phone, but nothing else taken. No personal items. She didn't pack—she grabbed and ran."
"Ran where?" Father’s fingers press flat on the desk, and something rearranges behind his eyes. "A woman like that doesn't disappear alone."
"The killing reads reactive—improvised, not premeditated. But the exit was clean." I offer accuracy because accuracy is the only currency this family ever allowed me to trade in.
"And if this is prophecy blood?" Father’s voice drops to something quieter, which in him means more dangerous. "An heir this line hasn't produced in generations?"
"Then the child changes everything for the pack." Voss finishes it for him. "Strategically, genetically, politically. Everything."
Father stands. Whatever he wore as grief reshapes behind his eyes into something more functional—purpose, acquisition, the look he brings to territory negotiations where the outcome exists before the conversation starts.
"Find her. Bring back that child. That heir belongs to this bloodline." His hand lifts from the desk the way a gavel lifts after sentencing. "The pack's future depends on it."
"The child is what matters here," Voss adds—a footnote dressed as scripture—and I nod because nodding is what the dutiful second son does when his father decides the world's shape.
"I'll need tracking resources and a small team—three, no more." I hold his gaze, steady, obedient—a role worn so long its seams have vanished into skin.
"Take what you need." He waves one hand. "Go." Dismissed—the way you return a tool to the drawer after use, ready for the next task that requires something functional.
I walk the corridor at my usual pace. The study door clicks behind me and their voices continue without me, and I don't need to hear the rest—the mathematics are simple.
A prophecy child. An Adler heir carrying power this bloodline hasn't produced in generations. When that child walks into the pack hall, every elder weeping tonight will kneel for it—an infant crowned over the second son who kept their borders while they worshipped the one who broke his wife against the hallway plaster.
I will find Nell and the child. And what I bring back will be a tragedy—a fugitive who ran too far, a pregnancy the road couldn't sustain. Accidents find people who disappear, and no one will question the hand holding the pen.
My room is dark and cold. The bedside drawer opens to a fold of green fabric I've kept for three years—dark wool, stitches so precise they seem mechanical until you hold them close and notice the variations that mean human hands.
I bring the scarf to my face. Her scent sits faint under wool and cedar. I fold it into my coat pocket—practical, needed for tracking—and my thumb crosses the stitches once before letting go.
Practical. Nothing more. I tell myself that twice.