Chapter 212 I'll Kill Them
ELIJAH
Mark had walked into my house and taken my daughter and I had been downstairs writing letters while it happened.
I kept putting that fact down and picking it back up and it kept feeling the same way every time — not like panic, which surprised me, but like something that had gone very quiet and very certain inside my chest. The kind of certainty that has already decided the ending and is only working out the details.
Nobody outside of Adriana and Hazel knew yet. I was keeping it that way for as long as I could hold the line. The moment it spread, the fear spread with it and a frightened pack made noise and noise was the one thing Mark needed that I wasn’t going to give him.
Adriana hadn’t spoken to me since the courtyard. She was moving, working, asking the right questions, but every time I came close she found a reason to redirect. I couldn’t tell if she was holding herself together or coming apart somewhere I couldn’t see. Probably both.
Hazel found me outside the nursery with the bloodied blanket.
“I need you to smell it,” she said. No lead-up, no softening.
I looked at the blanket.
“I know.” Her voice was steady but her eyes weren’t. “But if it’s not her blood it changes how we move right now. We need to know.”
She was right. I took it from her and brought it to my face and went through it slowly, layer by layer, the way you learn to do when the answer matters too much to rush.
Lana’s scent was all over it. Warm and specific and entirely hers, the smell I had been memorizing since her first hour. I pushed past the surface of it, looking for anything underneath.
Just her.
“It’s hers.” My voice came out uneven and I let it. “But the volume is small for what the letter is claiming. This isn’t fatal blood loss. He cut her, enough to make it look like what he needed it to look like.” I handed it back. “She’s alive.”
Hazel let out a breath that had clearly been sitting in her chest for a while.
“Adriana said the same thing.”
“Then we’re both right and we move accordingly.” I straightened. “I want foot teams through the east woods. Full search teams, not standard patrols. Shift runners too so we cover ground faster. He cannot keep a newborn quiet indefinitely and he knows it. He won’t go deep. He’ll stay somewhere he can control movement and sound and still have an exit route.”
“Already sent two teams. Working on a third.”
“Double it. And I want contact from every team leader every thirty minutes whether or not they have something to report.” I started walking. “I’m also reaching out to neighboring Alphas. If he moves her across any border, I want to know the same hour it happens.”
I went to my office and spent the afternoon on letters. I kept it factual with clear description of Mark, last known location, what he was traveling with. Every Alpha within reasonable distance got one. I sent them by phone where I could and wrote the rest by hand for runners.
The words kept blurring at the edges after the second hour. I hadn’t slept in two days and my body was running on something other than rest, but sleep wasn’t something I was going to do until she was back in this house.
I was halfway through a letter to the Alpha of the Northern Ridge territory when the door opened hard and Leo walked in.
He closed it behind him. His jaw was set with the particular stubbornness he had inherited directly from his father, which meant he had made a decision and was not going to be talked out of it.
“Tell me what’s happening.”
“Leo—”
“Don’t.” He came to stand in front of the desk. “I’m not asking to be difficult. Everyone in this house is scared and nobody will say why, and you treating me like I can’t handle information isn’t protecting me, it’s just leaving me to imagine things that might be worse than the truth. So tell me.”
I put the pen down.
He was right. He had been right for a while, actually, and I’d been slow to catch up to it.
“Sit down.”
He sat.
“Your sister is missing. The man we had in custody escaped, and we believe he has her. Every team I have is searching right now and we are going to find her.”
He went very still. The kind of still that meant he was processing rather than shutting down.
“Is she—”
“Alive. I’m certain of it. She’s leveraged, which means she needs to stay alive for him to get what he wants. We’re going to bring her home.”
He nodded. Once, then again, slower, like he was getting his body to accept the information the way you ease into cold water.
“Mum came and spoke to us this morning,” he said. “She asked where we all were when she was feeding the baby and what order everything happened and when we left the room. She wrote everything down.”
“Did she say why?”
“No. She just asked and wrote and left. She said she had more questions for other people.”
Building a timeline. Cross-referencing it against the staff accounts and finding the discrepancies between them. Of course she was.
“You told her everything accurately?”
“Every detail I could remember.”
“Good. That was exactly right.” I stood. “Stay in your room tonight. Lock the door. If anyone other than me or Adriana or Hazel knocks, don’t open it.”
He nodded and left without pushing for more, which cost him something, I could see that. I made a note to sit with him properly once this was over.
I went outside. I spotted Adriana near the main gate from a distance — standing in front of one of the perimeter guards, phone in hand. The guard was shifting his weight, eyes moving, clearly uncomfortable. She said something and pointed down at his feet and he went completely still. She moved to the next guard and did the same thing. Then a third.
I watched from the driveway, staying behind the stone pillar near the path so she wouldn’t clock me and stop. She worked through three guards methodically, phone out the whole time, before she turned and walked back toward the house.
When I got back to my office there was a notepad sitting in the center of my desk.
Three names. Underneath them, in her handwriting: Their stories don’t add up. Question them. If I do it I’ll kill them.