4
Declan’s POV
The antique shop door swung open with a low, weighty groan, and the accumulated smell of decades rolled out to meet me — old wood, dust, varnish, something metallic I couldn’t name.
The owner barely looked up from the counter until I held up the transaction record Nolan had pulled.
Then he got to his feet fast, like he’d been waiting for exactly this.
“Over here.”
He led me to a glass display case against the far wall.
Inside, lying on black velvet like it was something precious, was the chain.
My heartbeat stopped.
One beat.
Two.
Six years.
I knew every groove in that silver, every worn line in the wolf-fang engraving.
The Voss family crest, passed down through four generations of alphas.
The exact spot where I’d fumbled with the clasp that night, hands clumsy with whiskey, pressing it into a hand I couldn’t find again.
I reached for the case before I caught myself, fingers hovering just above the glass.
“When did she sell it?”
“Three months ago.” The owner’s voice pitched low, the tone of a man who knew he’d been sitting on something important.
“She came in wanting cash, quick.
No paperwork, no questions.
Said she needed it gone same day.”
“Same day.”
“That’s right.
In a hurry.” He shook his head.
“Woman was in a hurry.
And she was in a hurry about a piece like *this* — two thousand, I paid, and she didn’t even haggle.
That’s how you know someone wants something gone.”
I stared at the chain.
She’d had it for six years.
And now, suddenly, she was desperate to get rid of it.
*Why now?*
Twenty minutes later, I was in the Range Rover, David’s texted address on the phone screen.
Celeste Warren.
The name sat in my mouth like something I didn’t want to taste.
She was the one whose fingerprints were on that sale.
She was the one who’d held my family’s heirloom and handed it to a stranger for cash.
If she’d had the chain, she’d been in room 302.
Or she’d somehow gotten hold of it from someone who had.
Dante sat very still inside me, listening.
Waiting.
Her apartment building was respectable.
Clean lobby, muted colors, the kind of building where nobody asked questions.
I found her unit on the third floor and knocked.
Silence.
But I heard her heartbeat through the door.
It spiked the moment my knuckles hit the wood — a clear, unmistakable lurch.
Then a breath, deliberately slowed, deliberately evened out.
*She’s steadying herself.
She knew I was coming.*
The door opened.
She was small, delicate, light-chestnut hair falling to her shoulders.
Pale violet-gray eyes, the kind that catch light and change with it.
She looked up at me, took in my height, my build, my face — and something flickered across her eyes the instant they found mine.
Recognition.
Or maybe just readiness.
The look of someone who’d rehearsed this conversation a hundred times in her head.
“Iron Ridge’s Alpha heir,” I said.
Not a greeting.
“The silver chain.
Where did you get it, and why did you sell it?”
Her eyes welled up.
*Perfectly* timed.
The kind of welling that happens exactly when the speaker wants it to.
“I’ve been waiting six years,” she said, voice trembling in that specific way that’s just audible enough to be noticed.
“Waiting for someone to come looking for it.
Waiting for *you*.”
She stepped back, gesturing me inside.
“Please.
Come in.
I’ll explain.”
The apartment was clean, tasteful, nothing personal out on display.
She led me to a small wooden box on the coffee table and opened it with careful fingers.
Inside were photographs.
Pinewood Lodge exterior.
A corridor I recognized from that night.
A door with the room number 302 on the plate.
The same number I’d never forgotten, no matter how hard I’d tried.
Dante paced inside my chest, slow and restless, like a wolf circling something it didn’t trust.
The scent of that night came back to me before I could stop it.
Not the way Celeste’s apartment smelled — clean, ordinary.
The memory was different.
It wasn’t a smell I could file away like a pack marker.
It was something else entirely.
A presence.
As if moonlight had taken human form and stood in a dark room beside me, certain and wild and utterly unlike anything I’d catalogued in twenty-eight years.
Celeste’s own scent, even from across the room, was just…
normal.
Ordinary, traceable, pack-born.
Nothing about it reached the place in me that had gone dark and silent six years ago.
I looked down at her photographs, then back up at her.
“You’re sure,” I said.
My voice came out low.
“It was you.
In room 302.”
Her chin trembled.
A tear escaped her eye.
Then another.
They tracked down her cheeks with exact, careful placement — one on each side, like a set piece.
“It was me,” she whispered.
“I know I shouldn’t have sold it.
But I had no other choice… I was in a bad place, Declan.
Money, family, everything at once.
I couldn’t keep something that valuable — I’d have been a target.
I tried to sell it to the right people.
I kept hoping someone would trace it back to you.”
The words came out clean, rehearsed, each one landing exactly where she wanted it.
And the thing that bothered me most was the part of me that wanted to believe her.
Six years.
Every dead end, every wrong turn, every morning I woke up half-convinced I’d imagined the whole thing.
I’d been carrying the weight of that night alone for so long that I’d started to doubt my own memory.
*Maybe I remembered wrong.* The thought slid in, quiet and seductive.
*Maybe the whiskey did it.
Maybe I was so far gone that night that my senses distorted her into something she never was.*
The evidence was right there, laid out in front of me.
The photographs.
The confession.
The chain, finally found, finally accounted for.
Six years of searching, and I finally had somewhere to let it rest.
Dante let out a low, mournful whine.