Chapter 88: NOBODY HURTS HER UNDER MY WATCH.
Chapter 89
Ren
I sat there with the phone still pressed to my ear long after the line had gone dead, Neve’s words still fresh.
In the last few days I’d watched my sister turn into someone I didn’t recognise, and I still couldn’t work out how much of that was my fault.
I lowered the phone slowly and stared out through the windscreen at nothing in particular, forcing myself to actually think instead of just reacting.
She wouldn’t go back to him. Every instinct in me rejected that idea before I’d even finished considering it.
I’d seen her face the one time his name came up between us, the flinch she couldn’t quite hide, the way her whole body had gone rigid like something in her was still bracing for a blow that hadn’t landed in years. People didn’t run back into that. Not after clawing their way out of it.
So if it wasn’t that, then what.
Maybe she’d just needed quiet, I told myself, gripping the wheel, trying to talk myself down off the ledge my wolf had been circling for two days straight.
Maybe she’d taken Theo somewhere out of the city for a few days, switched her phone off, given herself room to breathe after everything with Neve.
That would explain the silence. It wouldn’t explain the company, though. She’d built that thing back up from nothing with her own hands.
She wouldn’t leave it unattended, not for grief, nor for anger.
But maybe I should just give her some time, wait till tomorrow to know what to do.
I didn’t sleep a wink, I lay awake listening for a heartbeat that never came.
By morning I’d almost talked myself into believing I was overreacting, that I’d give it one more day before doing anything drastic.
I was walking back from a meeting downtown.
I was supposed to go to my apartment but then I decided to get something from the mall.
I was still refreshing her number like an idiot, when I felt a small hand grab hold of my trouser leg.
I looked down expecting a child that just wanted to say hi, but my heart stopped dead in my chest.
"Uncle Ren!"
Theo stood there grinning up at me like the whole world hadn’t just come apart at the seams.
Lumi. She was back.
My head snapped up, already searching behind him.
But she was no where to be found. I raised a confused brow, why was he here himself? Where was Lumi?
A young woman stood a few feet back, a canvas bag over one shoulder, watching me with an expression caught somewhere between relief and nerves.
I didn’t know her but I knew without doubt that she knew me and she was here with Theo.
Why was she here and not Lumi? Every part of me went defensive at once.
"Where’s Neve," I said, stepping between her and Theo without meaning to.
"What are you doing with him?" She blinked, startled, one hand scratching nervously at the back of her neck, opening her mouth and closing it again.
"You need to start talking." She glanced round at the mall, clearly not willing to say it out in the open.
"Follow me." I led them to a bench along the side of the building, Theo trotting between us, backpack bouncing, entirely unbothered.
Once we sat, it came out of her fast.
"I’m Priya. Lumi’s friend. Lumi dropped him off two days ago, said she had somewhere urgent to be and would be back that evening." Her hands twisted together.
"She never came back. I’ve called her several times but, nothing. I didn’t know what else to do."
"Two days," I said, and something in my chest went very still.
I knew something wasn’t right, I should have listened to my wolf. Maybe I would have found her.
"I keep wondering," she said, quieter now, glancing at Theo, "if she meant to disappear. If she dropped him off on purpose." I shook my head before she’d finished.
"Neve wouldn’t do that." I said it with more certainty than I felt.
Priya nodded, not quite convinced. "What do I do?"
"Keep him a little longer. Just till I sort this. Whatever you need, I’ll cover it."
"You don’t have to..."
"I want to." I stood.
She caught my hand in both of hers, eyes filling.
"Please. Please bring her back."
"I’ll bring her back," I said.
Then I crouched down to Theo, pressed a kiss to the top of his head, and told him, low, just for him,
"I’ll bring your mum back to you. I promise."
I had my phone out before I’d even reached the car.
"Darren." My voice came out harder than I meant it, but there wasn’t room left in me for softening anything.
"I need every man we’ve got. Search the hills, the old safehouses, anywhere within an hour of the city. Leave nothing untouched, do you hear me. Nothing."
"On it," he said, and I heard him already moving, already barking orders down the line before I’d hung up.
I drove first to the places I could think of myself.
The hills outside town where pack members sometimes went to clear their heads.
A quiet bed and breakfast she’d mentioned once in passing, months ago, somewhere she’d said she’d like to take Theo someday.
Nothing. No trace of her anywhere, no scent old or new, nothing but dead ends stacking up one after another until my hands had started shaking on the wheel.
I went to the hotel last, some mid-range place near the highway I only knew about because Darren had traced her card to it two days prior.
The woman behind the desk recognised the description before I’d even finished giving it.
"She went out two days ago," she said, tapping through something on her screen.
"Left with her son but never came back for the rest of her things...we still have a bag of hers in the back, actually, if you’re looking for her."
"Two days," I said again, the words starting to feel like something stuck in my throat.
"That’s the last we saw of her."
I stood in that lobby a moment longer than I needed to, forcing my mind to work the problem the way I’d trained myself to work any problem, without letting the fear get ahead of the facts.
She’d left and dropped Theo with Priya sometime after that.
Darren texted through a partial trace a few minutes later, patched together from a mix of camera footage and whatever else he’d managed to pull, and when the location came through I actually stopped walking.
I stood there in the car park staring at the pin on my screen, and for a long moment I didn’t move at all.
Her mother’s house.
I almost dismissed it outright. She’d spent years running from that address, from everything tied up in it.
She wouldn’t set foot near that place, not willingly, not after everything I knew she carried about it, the kind of grief she kept so tightly locked down.
And she wasn’t desperate. She had a company, money of her own, a dozen better options than crawling back to a house full of ghosts. There was no reason on earth for her to go there.
Except the trace said she had.
I didn’t spend another second arguing with myself. I got in the car and drove, faster than I should have, faster than the roads allowed, my wolf pushing hard against my ribs the whole way there like he already knew something I didn’t.
The building sat at the end of a quiet street, gates rusted, ivy climbing up one side of the brickwork like it had been left to itself for years.
Nothing about it looked disturbed. No fresh tyre tracks in the gravel, no broken lock, nothing that would tell an ordinary man that anyone had been near the place in a decade.
But I wasn’t an ordinary man.
The second I stepped through the gate, it hit me. Faint, but unmistakable. Her scent, threading through the damp and the dust, fresh enough that my whole body went taut at the edge of it.
She’d been here. But her car wasn’t here, which means she came around but has left.
The hair rise along my arms, something that didn’t belong. A scent laid down after hers, careful, deliberate, like someone had walked through afterward trying to smother the trail she’d left behind.
Someone had been here after her. Someone who hadn’t wanted it known that she had.
Now the question was, did the person come after she left. Or did the person meet her here.
Did they leave together? Or did they leave separately?
Did the person have a hand in her disappearance?
What was going on? Where would she be? Was she fine?
I stood there in the doorway of that house with every instinct in me screaming at once.
But if I know something like the back of my palm. It is that, I was going to find my mate. Wherever she was. Nobody hurts her under my watch.