Declan’s POV
I was standing at the edge of Iron Ridge’s training ground, watching the mountains.
I didn’t let myself think about that night very often.
But some memories don’t wait for an invitation.
They have their own key, and they let themselves in whenever they feel like it.
Pinewood Lodge.
Six years ago.
The rogue attack that week had taken my best Beta — Marcus, who’d been at my side since we were twelve, who knew every one of my blind spots and never used them against me.
I stood at their graves and felt the weight of every decision that had led us to that hillside.
The whiskey after — I’d lost count of how many glasses.
I remembered the hallway tilting under my feet.
A door that wasn’t fully closed.
And then her.
Dante stirred in the back of my mind, low and restless, the way he always did when that memory surfaced.
Even now, six years later, he reacted to it.
Not with grief.
With something closer to *longing*, which was worse.
Her scent had been unlike anything I’d catalogued in twenty-eight years of living in this world.
Every werewolf carries layers — personal scent over pack scent, bloodline markers woven underneath.
From the time I was old enough to train, I’d learned to read those layers the way humans read faces.
You could tell pack origin, rank, even emotional state if you knew what to look for.
She had none of it.
No pack scent.
No bloodline marker.
Nothing I could file away and name.
What she had instead was something older.
Something that bypassed every system I’d been trained to use and went straight to Dante, who’d gone absolutely still the second we crossed into that room — and then made a sound I’d never heard from him before or since.
*Mine.*
Just that.
One word, certain as sunrise.
It made no sense then.
It makes no sense now.
A wolf without a pack scent shouldn’t exist.
A wolf without any traceable bloodline marker was either a ghost or an impossibility.
I’d spent six years turning that contradiction over in my mind and arriving at the same dead end every time.
I’d left in a hurry that morning — the rogue alert had pulled me out before dawn, duty dragging me back before I could think straight.
Before I left, I’d pressed my family’s silver chain into her hand.
The wolf-fang pendant that had passed through four generations of Iron Ridge alphas.
I told myself it was a thread.
Something she could use to find me, or I could use to trace her.
The chain disappeared along with her.
Six years.
Dozens of searches, all of them going nowhere.
Nolan following every lead I gave him, every one drying up before it went anywhere useful.
I’d started to wonder if I’d dreamed the whole thing — if grief and alcohol had constructed something my mind refused to let go of.
Dante never let me hold onto that theory for long.
“Alpha.”
Nolan’s footsteps were quiet as always.
I heard him anyway.
“We have a new lead on the chain.”
I turned around.
He was holding a folder, his expression carefully neutral in the way that meant the contents were significant.
Nolan had been my Beta for three years.
I’d learned to read his version of a poker face.
I took the folder and opened it.
A grainy surveillance still.
A transaction record.
And a name.
*Celeste Warren.*
“Three months ago,” Nolan said, “she sold it to an antique dealer in Portland.
Private sale, cash transaction.
The dealer flagged it because of the engraving — recognized the Iron Ridge mark.”
I stared at the name.
Celeste Warren.
I knew that name.
Not well, not personally, but I knew it — she’d recently been brought on as a liaison officer for the Alliance’s training program.
Young, well-connected, the kind of person who showed up at the right events and knew the right people.
The kind of person who would know what a silver wolf-fang pendant from an Alpha bloodline was worth.
“How did she get it?” My voice came out flat.
“That’s what I haven’t been able to confirm yet.” Nolan paused.
“But if she had the chain, then at some point she had access to the person who—”
“I know what it means.”
I closed the folder.
Six years.
Dead ends and wrong turns and mornings where I’d woken up half-convinced I was chasing a ghost.
And now, finally, a name.
A thread that was actually attached to something.
My hand stayed on the cover of the folder for a moment longer than necessary.
“This stays between us,” I said.
Nolan nodded once.
He understood without me explaining.
If my mother Renata caught wind that I was still running this search — that I’d been running it for six years, quietly, in parallel with every pack obligation she’d assigned me — the conversation that followed would be long and loud and would circle back to the same point it always did.
*Margaret gave her life for yours.
Her daughter is your responsibility.
That is where your attention belongs.*
I knew that.
I hadn’t forgotten it for a single day.
Margaret Cole had stepped between me and a rogue’s killing blow without hesitating.
The debt was real and it was heavy and I carried it the way you carry something you can never put down.
Her daughter Savannah was a name on a page — someone I owed a future to, someone I’d never met, someone who existed in my life as an obligation before she existed as a person.
How was I supposed to build a life with a stranger, when every part of me that mattered was still looking for someone else?
Dante shifted inside me, impatient, the same way he’d been impatient for six years every time I got close to an answer and then watched it dissolve.
Not this time.
I looked back at the mountains.
The snow on the peaks caught the early light and held it, white and clean and very still.
“Soon,” I said quietly.
To the mountains.
To Dante.
To the shadow that had been showing up in my dreams for six years without a face I could name.
“I’m going to find you.”