Chapter 28 Chapter 28
Chapter 28
DEREK
Within twenty minutes, my office had transformed into a war room. Every senior pack member who could be summoned on short notice was present—Marcus, Connor, Elena our intelligence specialist, James who handled our network of informants, and a dozen others. The humans who worked in my company had been quietly dismissed for an "emergency board meeting," leaving the top floor secure.
Maps of the western district covered every available surface. Red markers indicated abandoned buildings, blue showed known rival pack territories, yellow marked neutral zones. There were too many possibilities, too many places they could be holding her.
"Talk to me," I said, my hands braced on the desk as I stared at the largest map. "What do we know about the western district rogues?"
Elena stepped forward, tablet in hand. "We've been tracking increased activity for the past three months. At least fifteen wolves we can confirm, possibly more. They're organized, disciplined—not typical rogue behavior. Someone's leading them."
"Who?"
"Unknown. They've been careful to avoid direct confrontation, staying just outside our territory lines. The few scouts we've caught claimed to be lone wolves passing through." She swiped through images on her tablet. "But the pattern suggests otherwise. This was planned, Derek. They've been watching us, learning our routines, waiting for an opportunity."
An opportunity. Like my wife driving alone to meet my grandmother, in a predictable pattern, in a vehicle they could easily identify.
"The call mentioned the western district specifically," Marcus said. "They want us to cede territory. That means they have a base of operations there, somewhere they feel secure enough to make demands."
"Then we search every building until we find it," I growled.
"That's over two hundred structures," James interjected. "Warehouses, factories, old residential buildings. Even with our full pack, a thorough search would take days. Days we don't have if they're serious about their timeline."
Forty-eight hours. Selene had already been gone for nearly an hour. Forty-seven hours left.
I pulled out my phone and played back the footage Connor had captured. I'd watched it a dozen times already, each viewing making my wolf rage harder against my control. The way they'd rammed her car. The way she'd tumbled and crashed. The way they'd dragged her bleeding body from the wreckage without a shred of care.
My wife was human. Fragile. Her bones broke, her skin tore, her blood spilled. She didn't have accelerated healing like we did. Every injury they'd inflicted in that crash, every moment of rough handling afterward—it could be fatal.
The thought made something twist in my chest, a feeling I didn't want to examine too closely.
"What about the crash site?" I asked, forcing my focus back to actionable intelligence. "Did we recover anything?"
"Already sent a team," Connor confirmed. "They're combing through the wreckage now, looking for anything the kidnappers might have left behind. Hair, fabric, scent markers—anything we can use to track them."
Scent. That was the key. Werewolves could mask their visual appearance, could disguise their voices, but scent was harder to hide. Every wolf had a unique signature, and even a brief contact would leave traces.
"I need to go to the crash site," I said suddenly.
Marcus frowned. "Derek, we have people there—"
"I need to scent it myself. If there's any trace of which pack these wolves belong to, I'll recognize it." I was already moving toward the door. "You keep coordinating the search from here. Deploy teams to the most likely locations in the western district, but quietly. I don't want to spook them into moving her."
"And if they call again?" Elena asked.
"Stall. Tell them I'm considering their demands, that I need time to discuss with the pack. Buy me as many hours as you can."
I didn't wait for confirmation, just shifted my form as I strode down the hallway toward the elevator. My clothes tore as my body transformed, bones restructuring, muscles expanding, humanity giving way to my wolf. The transformation took seconds—smooth, practiced, painless from years of shifting.
By the time I reached the underground parking garage, I was fully wolf. Massive, dark-furred, eyes glowing with Alpha power. I could have driven, but my wolf form was faster, stronger, less constrained by human traffic laws.
I burst out of the parking garage into the midday sun and ran.
The city blurred around me as I moved, cutting through alleys and side streets with inhuman speed. Humans who caught glimpses of me would convince themselves they'd seen a large dog, their minds refusing to accept the impossible. It was one of the ways we stayed hidden—humanity's willful blindness to anything that didn't fit their understanding of the world.
The crash site was on Highway 47, about eight miles from my office. I covered the distance in less than fifteen minutes, arriving to find two of my pack members—both in human form—standing guard over the wreckage.
They bowed their heads in submission when they saw me approach. "Alpha."
I shifted back to human form, standing naked in the afternoon sun, and didn't care. Modesty was a human concern, and right now, I was more wolf than man.
"What have you found?" I asked, my voice rough from the shift.
The younger pack member—David, barely twenty and new to field work—gestured to evidence bags laid out on the ground. "Fabric fibers, probably from their clothes. Some hair samples we're not sure about yet. And this." He held up a bag containing a crushed phone.
Selene's phone. The one they'd destroyed.
I took the bag, staring at the shattered device. The screen was spiderwebbed with cracks, the case bent and broken. Had she been trying to call for help? Had she known what was happening before they took her?
"The car?" I asked.
"Completely totaled. From the damage pattern, we estimate she was going about sixty when they forced her off the road. The first impact was severe—the entire driver's side is crushed. Then it rolled at least three times before coming to rest." David's expression was grave. "Alpha, for a human to survive that kind of crash..."
"She survived," I said flatly, because the alternative was unacceptable. "I spoke to her during it. I heard her voice."