Chapter 134 CHAPTER 135: The Shadow Network

Chapter 134 CHAPTER 135: The Shadow Network


ZANE'S POV

I couldn't bring myself to close the tabs. Every time I reached for the power button, something pulled my hand back. A name. A date. Another thread that begged to be followed.

I had been at this for almost six hours straight. The clock on the wall had ticked past midnight a long time ago, and my back ached from hunching over the desk, and the half empty water bottle beside my keyboard had gone warm. None of that mattered. What mattered was the face on my screen. The man I had followed out of the service hallway on the night of the hockey victory. The man who had spoken about Aria like she was cargo.

I finally managed to identify him.

The discovery sat heavy in my chest, not like relief, but like swallowing a stone. Because the man wasn't a random criminal or some ordinary pack member. He belonged to a group that operated quietly between different packs, a network that most people never even heard about. Their name appeared in a handful of leaked intelligence reports, always in the margins, always half redacted. But those who knew about them understood they were dangerous in a way that didn't announce itself. They were silent. Efficient. Patient.

"Who are you looking at so late?" my roommate muttered from across the room, rolling over in his bed.

"Go back to sleep," I whispered, keeping my eyes fixed on the monitor.

Sleep was a luxury I couldn't afford right now. Not when every new file I opened confirmed something worse than the last. The group had connections to illegal activities throughout werewolf territories. Their name appeared in reports involving trafficking, disappearances, and secret dealings between powerful packs. These weren't the kind of men who showed up at high school dances or followed teenage girls because some jealous cheerleader paid them a few hundred dollars. They didn't deal in petty grudges or local bullying.

They targeted individuals with rare bloodlines, unusual abilities, or something valuable that other people wanted. And they had been circling Aria like wolves around a campfire, waiting for the flames to die down.

"This is completely insane," I muttered to myself, scrolling down through a list of encrypted dossiers and restricted database files.

The deeper I investigated, the worse the information became. Every file I cracked open revealed another layer, another connection, another name crossed out of a registry that should have been permanent. I found transaction logs listing payments in the hundreds of thousands for retrieval operations. I found coded messages discussing assets in terms that made my skin crawl. And woven through all of it, like a dark thread stitched through every document, was a pattern that kept pointing in the same direction.

Toward Aria.

"Why Aria?" I whispered aloud, the question echoing quietly in the empty room.

The fact that they were paying attention to her made no sense. That was exactly what terrified me. As far as everyone knew, she was a wolf less omega who spent most of her life being ignored and underestimated. She lived in a cramped apartment. She wore cheap clothes. She ate lunch alone in the back of the cafeteria before the Steel brothers dragged her into their orbit. She was the kind of girl the world stepped over without looking down.

Yet these people, these cold, methodical professionals with satellite tracking and encrypted communications, were spending real money to watch her. Not Bianca, not the Steel Pack heirs, not the children of council members. Her. A girl without a wolf.

"She doesn't even have a wolf," I thought, my mind racing back to the things she had told me, the way she looked so vulnerable and stressed out when she tried to act tough in front of the school. She would lift her chin and square her shoulders and speak with this fierce, defiant voice, and you could almost believe she wasn't afraid. Almost. But her eyes always gave her away. There was something behind them, something tired and bruised and ancient, like a girl who had been running her whole life without ever knowing what she was running from.

The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that somebody knew something about Aria that the rest of us didn't. There had to be information hidden somewhere, buried deep beneath years of false names and relocated addresses, and whatever it was seemed important enough to attract the most dangerous people in the territory.

I opened another folder, this one containing local records and historical pack migration logs. I started cross referencing dates, names, and locations, drawing invisible lines between data points that shouldn't have been connected but kept intersecting like roads leading to the same abandoned house.

My phone buzzed loudly against the desk, making me jump so hard my knee slammed into the underside of the drawer.

It was a text message from an unknown number.

Drop the investigation, Zane. You are playing in waters way too deep for a high school hockey player.

I stared at the screen. The glow of the words burned into my retinas, and for a long, awful moment, I forgot how to swallow. My throat was completely dry. My hands were cold. They knew my name. They knew what I was doing. They had my phone number.

They were watching me too.

The fear hit me first, quick and sharp, like stepping on broken glass. It shot up through the soles of my feet and spread through my legs and locked my knees in place and made the room feel very, very small. For about thirty seconds, I sat perfectly still, staring at that message, and all I could think about was how easy it would be to close the laptop, delete the files, change my number, and pretend none of this ever happened.

Then I thought about Aria.

I thought about her standing in that cafeteria, confessing to me with shaking hands, and me turning my back on her like she was nothing. I thought about her face after the kidnapping, the bruises on her arms, the way she flinched at loud noises for a week straight. I thought about her training alone in the gym at three in the morning because she was too afraid to sleep and too proud to ask for help.

I deleted the message and went back to my laptop.

When I finally finished going through everything I had gathered, I was left with more questions than answers. My notes filled three pages, front and back, covered in arrows and question marks and names I couldn't yet connect. But one thing was becoming impossible to ignore.

Whatever secret surrounded Aria didn't start recently. It wasn't connected only to Bianca, the brothers, or school drama. The signs pointed much further back. Years before the championship. Years before the kidnapping. Years before anybody at school even knew her name.

I closed the browser tabs, shutting down the computer so the room went dark except for the faint amber light of the streetlamps outside my window. My reflection stared back at me in the black screen, pale and hollow eyed and determined.

Somewhere in Aria's past was a truth that people had been hiding for a very long time. And I was going to find it, even if they came after me next.