Chapter 1
Caden's POV
When Alpha Marcus called you into his office at seven in the morning, you did not ask questions. You showed up and you listened and you did whatever he decided because that was what it meant to be Beta of the Blackstone Pack. You were his second. His enforcer. The one he sent when the job needed to be done clean and fast and without a single loose end left behind.
I had held that rank for eight years. I had done jobs in five different states, handled threats that would have leveled most men, and never once walked out of Alpha Marcus's office feeling like I had been handed something I could not carry.
That morning was the first time.
He was standing at the window when I came in, which meant he had been up for a while, which meant whatever this was had been sitting with him. Alpha Marcus did not pace and he did not fidget but he stood at windows when something was complicated. I had known him long enough to read that.
He said sit down and I sat.
He pushed a folder across the desk without looking at me. The folder was thin. Three pages and a photograph.
He said her name was Nora Hale. I am twenty-eight years old. Former journalist. Eighteen months ago she was in the wrong place at exactly the wrong time and she saw something she was never meant to see. She did the right thing after. She testified. And the men she testified against walked free anyway because money and power and the right lawyers made the truth disappear. The prosecutor who was trying to rebuild the case turned up dead last month. New evidence is coming out now and when the trial reopens her name goes back to the top of a very dangerous list.
I said, "What does this have to do with the pack?"
Alpha Marcus turned from the window and looked at me. He had that look he got when he had already made the decision and was waiting for the conversation to catch up.
He said the syndicate behind all of it has been using our territory as a supply corridor for two years. I allowed it because open war is expensive and I pick my battles carefully. But when they move against a civilian woman who did nothing except tell the truth, that is not something I let happen in my territory. She is under pack protection now.
I said I understood that. I said how.
He said you are going in as her service dog.
I looked at him.
He said it again in case I had misheard. The Anchor Program is placing a wolf hybrid with her tomorrow morning. The paperwork is legitimate, the handler is legitimate, the placement is real. You are the dog. You go in and you stay close and you keep her alive until the trial is back on solid ground and the syndicate backs off.
I was his Beta. Eight years of enforcement work. I had shifted in the middle of firefights and came out the other side. I had handled the pack's worst problems in the dark when nobody else could. And Alpha Marcus was sitting across from me asking me to go live in a woman's apartment and pretend to be her service animal.
I said with all the respect I have for your judgment, which is a lot, this is the worst plan you have ever had.
He almost smiled. He noted. You leave tomorrow.
I picked up the folder.
I read the threat assessment first. The syndicate's reach was wider than I had known. Three confirmed contacts within two hours of Millbrook, the small town where she had just moved, where she thought she was invisible. The timeline was tight. They had found her address within seventy-two hours of her arrival, which meant they had resources we had underestimated.
I read the case history. What she had walked into on that pier. What she had done after. The months of testimony preparation, the trial, the collapse of it, the long quiet fall into a life made small and locked and afraid.
Then I turned to the photograph.
It was a professional shot, the kind journalists used. She was looking at the camera the way someone looks at it when they are used to being on the other side of it, curious and sharp and not performing anything for anyone.
My wolf moved.
Not the way it moved before a fight. Not the readiness I knew how to use. Something else entirely. Something that started low and spread outward slowly and did not stop when I asked it to. Like something in me had been looking for something for a long time and had just found it in a three-by-four photograph inside a mission folder.
I closed the folder.
Alpha Marcus was watching me the way he watched things he was waiting to understand.
He said, "Is there a problem?"
I said no.
He said Caden.
I said I will be ready by morning.
He let it go. He was Alpha because he knew when to press and when to wait, and he filed whatever he had just seen in my face under things to watch and said nothing more about it.
He said ten days minimum. Get her to the trial date. Keep her breathing and keep yourself shifted. She cannot know what you are.
I said I understood the parameters.
He said one more thing. He said she has been through enough. Whatever your wolf is doing right now you manage it. She is not a mission complication. She is a person who has been having a very bad eighteen months and she deserves to get through this in one piece. You are there to make sure that happens. Nothing else.
I looked at him.
I said I understood.
I drove to Millbrook that afternoon and checked into the motel on the edge of town and sat on the bed with the folder open and read everything about Nora Hale. Every article she had published before the pier. The full trial transcript. Her therapist's notes from the months after. The list of syndicate contacts and their last known movements.
I read all of it and I tried to read it the way I read every mission file, as information, as facts, as a set of problems to be solved, and my wolf pushed against me the whole time like something that had found a door and was not going to stop until someone opened it.
I closed the file at midnight.
I lay on the motel bed and looked at the ceiling and thought about Alpha Marcus saying she is a person who has been having a very bad eighteen months.
I thought about the photograph.
I told my wolf to stand down.
It did not stand down.
I looked at the ceiling for three more hours.
