CHAPTER 6

KAYE'S POV

I wake up warm for the first time in three days, and that is so disorienting, that for a moment I cannot figure out where I am. The basement room was always cold, the thin blanket doing nothing against the chill that seeped up through the concrete floor. But this bed is soft and I am buried under what feels like six blankets and there is actual heat coming from a vent somewhere nearby.

My eyes open slowly, fighting against exhaustion that has soaked into my bones. The ceiling above me is not water-stained concrete but clean white drywall. There is a window to my left with actual curtains, not just a tiny rectangle near the ceiling that shows nothing but grass and fence posts. Daylight streams through the glass, weak winter sun that still manages to feel warm on my face.

This is not the basement.

My wolf surges forward in immediate panic. Wrong room, wrong place, deeper in territory, danger danger danger. I try to sit up but my body does not want to cooperate. Everything aches in a distant way, like the pain is there but wrapped in cotton. My wrists throb with a steady pulse that matches my heartbeat. The ankle cuff is still locked around my leg, the silver still poisoning me slowly, but someone has wrapped clean bandages around where it chafes.

"You are awake."

I turn my head too fast and the room spins. Ethan sits in a chair by the window, backlit by sunlight so I cannot see his face clearly at first. He is wearing different clothes than the last time I saw him, jeans and a dark henley instead of the button-down shirt from before. His hair looks like he has been running his hands through it repeatedly. He looks tired.

"Where am I?" My voice comes out rough, barely more than a whisper. My throat hurts like I was screaming.

"Guest room on the second floor." He does not move from the chair, just watches me with an expression I cannot read. "You have been unconscious for eighteen hours."

Eighteen hours. I was in the freezer and then nothing and now I am here in a room that is definitely not a servant's quarters. My wolf is going insane, convinced we have been moved deeper into the packhouse as some kind of trap, that being on the second floor means we are surrounded by wolves on all sides with no escape route.

"Why?" I manage to ask.

"Why what?"

"Why am I here? Why not the medical wing or," I hesitate, "or back in the basement?"

Ethan's jaw tightens. "Because someone tried to kill you in my packhouse and until I figure out who, you are staying where I can keep an eye on you."

The mate bond pulses between us, stronger than it has been before. I can feel his emotions more clearly now, anger and guilt and something that might be concern all tangled together. He is not blocking me out the way he usually does. Either he is too tired to maintain the walls or he has decided there is no point.

"Miriam," I say. "It was Miriam. She locked me in there."

"I know." His voice is flat, emotionless, but I can feel the rage underneath through the bond. "She has been removed from pack lands permanently. She is lucky I did not kill her."

I should probably feel some satisfaction about that but I just feel hollow. Miriam hated me for good reason. She lost three sons in the fire. If I believed someone's father had killed my children, I would probably want them dead too.

"The others," I start, then stop because I do not know how to finish that sentence.

"The others what?"

"The other kitchen workers. They knew what she was doing. They let it happen."

"They claim they did not know the door would lock." Ethan shifts in his chair, leaning forward so his face comes out of the shadows. He looks exhausted, dark circles under his eyes, his mouth set in a grim line. "They claim Miriam acted alone. I do not believe them but I cannot prove otherwise."

Of course they would claim ignorance. No one in this pack is going to admit they wanted me dead. They will just quietly hope someone else finishes the job.

"You said someone tried to kill me." I force myself to sit up properly despite my body's protests. The blankets fall away and I realize I am wearing a clean t-shirt that is definitely not mine, too big and smelling faintly of pine and smoke. Ethan's scent. Someone changed my clothes while I was unconscious. "You think it was more than just Miriam being cruel?"

"I know it was more." Ethan stands and walks to the dresser. He picks up something small and black and brings it over, holding it out so I can see. It is a camera, tiny and professional-looking, the kind that records everything and transmits it somewhere. "I found this hidden in my bedroom. Military-grade surveillance equipment, not something a pack member would have access to or know how to use."

My stomach drops. "Someone was watching you?"

"Watching us. It was pointed at the bed where I had you while Sarah worked on bringing your temperature back up." His expression darkens. "Someone knew you would be brought to me if you were hurt badly enough. Someone was waiting to see what I would do."

"But why?" Nothing about this makes sense. "Why would anyone care about what you do with me? I am just a prisoner, the daughter of—"

"That is what I am trying to figure out." Ethan sits on the edge of the bed, close enough that I can feel his body heat, and my wolf does something complicated between wanting to move closer and wanting to run. "I need you to think carefully, Kaye. Do you have enemies beyond the obvious ones? Anyone who might want you dead for reasons that have nothing to do with your father?"

I almost laugh except nothing about this is funny. "I have been running for six years. I do not have friends, let alone enemies. I work cash jobs, I never stay anywhere longer than two months, I do not talk to people. There is no one."

"What about before? Before you ran, when you were still in college?"

"I was eighteen and studying pre-law and running track. My life was classes and practice and occasionally going to parties I did not want to be at because my roommate dragged me. I was not important enough to have enemies."

Ethan studies my face like he is trying to determine if I am lying. The mate bond pulses and I feel him testing it, pushing curiosity through the connection to see if I push back with deception. I do not because I am telling the truth. My life before the fire was boring and normal and completely unremarkable.

"Your father then," Ethan says. "Did he have enemies in the supernatural world beyond Blackwater?"

"Every Alpha has enemies. Territory disputes, political disagreements, wolves who think they should be in charge. But nothing serious enough that someone would—" I stop because a memory surfaces, sharp and unexpected.

"What?" Ethan leans forward, his attention laser-focused. "You remembered something."

"I do not know if it means anything."

"Tell me anyway."

I close my eyes and try to pull the memory into focus. "The night before the fires, my father called me. It was late, past midnight, and he never called that late unless something was wrong. He sounded, I do not know, worried maybe. Stressed. He asked me if I was okay, if anyone had been following me, if I had noticed anything strange."

"Did you?"

"No. I thought he was being paranoid. He was always worried about me being away at college, thought something would happen to me if I was not home where he could protect me." My throat tightens with the memory of his voice, the last time I heard him alive. "I told him I was fine and asked what was wrong. He said there was a situation he was handling and he just wanted to make sure I was safe."

"A situation," Ethan repeats. "Did he say what kind of situation?"

"No. But he said something else, right before he hung up. He said if anything happened to him, if things went wrong, I should run and not trust anyone. Not the Council, not other Alphas, no one. He said to remember the name Tulip and find someone who could tell me what it meant."

The temperature in the room drops several degrees. I open my eyes and Ethan is staring at me with an expression I cannot interpret, something between shock and horror and grim understanding.

"Tulip," he says quietly.

"Yes. Does that mean something to you?"

Ethan stands abruptly and walks to the window, his back to me, tension radiating through every line of his body. The mate bond is suddenly chaotic, his emotions too tangled for me to separate. Fear, I think. Anger definitely. And underneath it all, something that feels like dread.

"Ethan?" I push the blankets aside and try to stand but my legs shake and I have to grab the headboard to keep from falling. "What is Tulip? Why does that name matter?"

He does not turn around. "How much do you know about what really happened six years ago? About how the fires started?"

"I know what everyone knows. My father supposedly ordered an attack on Blackwater, your pack burned, then someone retaliated and burned Moonstone the same night. Two hundred wolves died. I came home to find my entire pack dead and a warrant for my arrest."

"That is the official story."

"What is the unofficial one?"

Ethan finally turns to face me and the look in his eyes makes my wolf whimper and press herself flat. "The unofficial story is that both packs were dead before the fires started. The bodies were burned to hide the evidence, to make it look like arson instead of what it really was."

"Which was what?"

"Plague." The word hangs in the air between us like poison. "A supernatural plague designed to kill wolves by liquefying their internal organs from the inside. Both packs were infected through contaminated water supplies. The fires were set afterward to destroy the evidence and make it look like a territorial war gone wrong."

I cannot breathe. Cannot process what he is saying. "That is impossible. Plagues do not, we would have heard, there would have been—"

"The Council covered it up. They told everyone it was arson because that was easier to understand than admitting someone had developed a bioweapon that could wipe out entire packs in a matter of days." Ethan's hands clench into fists. "I have spent six years thinking your father ordered the attack that killed my parents. But what if I was wrong? What if your father was trying to stop something worse and whoever created the plague decided to eliminate both packs as a demonstration?"

"You think Tulip created the plague."

"I think Tulip is a name that keeps appearing in places it should not. Whispers from other Alphas about experiments on wolves, illegal research, scientists who ask too many questions about pack genetics." He looks at me with something that might be pity. "If your father was involved with someone named Tulip, if he knew something about a plague, that changes everything."

My legs give out and I sit down hard on the bed. The room is spinning again but this time it has nothing to do with hypothermia and everything to do with the fact that my entire understanding of the past six years just shattered into pieces.

"My father would not work with someone who made bioweapons," I hear myself say, but my voice sounds distant, unconvincing even to my own ears. "He was Alpha. He protected his pack. He would never—"

"Unless he thought he was protecting you." Ethan sits back down in the chair, his elbows on his knees, looking at me with an intensity that makes it hard to maintain eye contact. "You said he called you the night before the fires and told you to run if anything happened to him. What if he knew something bad was coming? What if he was trying to get you away from whatever he had gotten involved in?"

"Then why not tell me? Why not warn everyone?"

"Because maybe he could not. Maybe whatever deal he made, whoever he was working with, they had leverage. They had something he cared about more than his pack."

Me. He means me. My father would have sacrificed anything to keep me safe, I know that. But would he have sacrificed his entire pack? Would he have let two hundred wolves die to save one person?

The mate bond pulses and I feel Ethan's certainty through it, his grim acceptance that parents do terrible things for their children. He would know. He became Alpha at nineteen and spent six years rebuilding a pack from ashes because his parents died and left him no choice.

"The camera," I say, forcing my brain to work through the panic. "If someone is watching you, watching us, maybe they are connected to whoever created the plague. Maybe Tulip is still out there and still experimenting."

"That is what I am afraid of." Ethan stands again, restless energy making him pace. "The surveillance equipment was placed recently, within the past week. Someone in my pack is working for whoever is behind this. Someone helped Miriam lock you in that freezer, either to kill you or to force me to save you and see how I reacted."

"A test," I say slowly. "They were testing whether the mate bond would override your hatred of me."

"And I failed their test by saving you." He stops pacing and looks at me. "Which means whoever is watching now knows that I care about keeping you alive whether I want to or not. That makes you a vulnerability. That makes you a target."

The room suddenly feels too small, the walls pressing in. I am trapped in a packhouse with two hundred wolves who hate me, wearing an ankle cuff that will kill me if I try to leave, and now apparently I am also a target for whoever developed a supernatural plague that killed my entire family.

"What do we do?" I ask, because I have no idea how to process this or fix it or even understand what this means.

Ethan's expression hardens into something that reminds me why he is Alpha, why two hundred wolves follow him despite his age. "We find out who is watching. We find out what they want. And then we make sure they regret ever setting foot in my territory."

The mate bond thrums with his determination and underneath it, buried but present, something that might be protectiveness. Not for his pack this time.

For me.