THE UNMARKED HIER

Chapter 2: The Wolf With No Name

"Say it," Rhys said. "Whatever you're holding back, say it now."

Fenwick set a glass of water on the table between them, untouched. "Two nights ago, when I pulled you out of that water, I ran three separate scent trails trying to find where you'd gone under. All three came back empty. Not faint. Empty. Like you were never there."

"I was bleeding out. Maybe the water washed it away."

"Water doesn't wash away a wolf's scent, and you know that better than I do." Fenwick pulled a chair closer and sat facing him directly. "I've tracked wounded men through rivers, through fire, through three days of rain. Scent doesn't disappear. It fades. Yours isn't fading. It's gone."

Rhys stood up too fast, and his side pulled tight enough to make him grip the table.

"Then test it again," he said. "Right now."

Fenwick didn't argue. He stepped close, the way any wolf would to read another's scent at short range, close enough that Rhys could see the exact moment the test failed.

Fenwick's eyes narrowed, then went distant, searching for something that should have been there and wasn't.

"Nothing," Fenwick said. "Not weak. Not masked. Nothing."

"That doesn't happen."

"It happened to you."

Rhys turned away from him, pacing the small room, forcing his mind back to the fight at the dock, to Declan's voice giving the order, to Wade walking into the trees without looking back.

None of it made sense next to what Fenwick was telling him now, and yet somehow it all connected, like pieces of the same design he hadn't been meant to see.

"I need to get to my mother," Rhys said. "She'll believe me. She'll know it's really me."

"And how do you plan to prove that," Fenwick said, "when you can't be scented, and your own brother has already told the pack you're dead? You walk in there looking like a stranger wearing your face, and Declan calls you an impostor before you finish a sentence. He has three hours of loyalty built up already. You have nothing."

"I have the truth."

"The truth doesn't matter if no one can verify it," Fenwick said. "Not to a pack. You know how this works. Scent confirms bloodline. Bloodline confirms authority. Right now you don't have either, not in any way they can measure."

Rhys stopped pacing. The weight of it settled slowly, heavier the longer he sat with it. Fenwick was right, and hating that didn't make it less true.

"Then what am I supposed to do," Rhys said. "Hide. Forever."

"No," Fenwick said. "Disappear long enough to understand what happened to you, and long enough for Declan to believe he's safe. Men get careless when they think they've already won."

A sound came from outside, quiet, but wrong. Fenwick's head turned toward the window before Rhys even decided to.

"Someone's outside," Fenwick said.

"How many?"

"I don't know yet." Fenwick moved to the wall beside the window, staying out of the sightline. "This safehouse isn't supposed to exist on any pack registry. If someone found it this fast—"

Glass shattered on the far side of the room before he finished the sentence.

Two men came through the window in the same second, already moving, already reaching for Rhys before his feet found the floor.

Rhys caught the first one by the wrist and drove an elbow into his throat, using the man's own momentum to put him down hard.

"Fenwick, door!" Rhys shouted.

Fenwick was already there, blocking the second attacker from reaching the hallway, buying half a second Rhys used to grab the fallen man's weapon off the floor.

The third attacker came through the broken window last, slower, more careful, sizing up the room before committing.

"Declan wants confirmation," the man said. "Just confirmation. Nothing more."

"Confirmation of what," Rhys said, weapon raised.

"That you're really dead."

Rhys fired first. The shot landed on the man's shoulder, spinning him back through the window frame he'd just come through, and the second attacker used the distraction to lunge at Fenwick instead of Rhys.

Fenwick caught the man's arm and twisted hard enough to drop him, following it with a strike that put him down for good.

Silence again, except for their own breathing.

"They tracked me here," Fenwick said. "Not you. Me."

"How."

"I don't know yet. But if they know this location, they'll be back with more than three men next time." Fenwick was already moving toward a bag near the door, pulling out cash, papers, and a set of keys. "We need to be gone within the hour."

"Gone where."

"Out of the state. Somewhere your name means nothing and your face means less." Fenwick shoved the bag into Rhys's hands. "You're going to need a different name. A different history. Something no one in Thornecliff has ever heard."

Rhys looked down at the bag, then back at the broken window, at the blood already cooling on the floor from a fight that had started in his own family's safehouse.

"And if this thing," Rhys said, "whatever's happened to me, whatever took my scent, if it doesn't go away. If I have to live the rest of my life as someone else."

"Then you live long enough to come back and take everything Declan thinks he already won."

Rhys picked up the bag. "How long."

"However long it takes for the name Nash Ferro to mean something in this city," Fenwick said. "And for the name Rhys Callahan to mean nothing at all."

Rhys froze at the name, the one Fenwick had said like it was already decided, already chosen without him.

"You already picked a name for me."

"I picked a name for you three years ago," Fenwick said, "the day your father asked me what I'd do if something like this ever happened to his son."

Rhys stared at him. "My father knew this could happen to me?"

Fenwick's hand paused on the door.

"Your father didn't just know it could happen," he said. "He knew it had already happened once before. To someone else in this family. Someone nobody in Thornecliff is allowed to talk about.”