CHAPTER 4
1116 Words
ZANE
I threw my phone across my study before my father even finished his sentence.
It hit the wall and cracked, but his voice kept coming through the speaker, tinny and sharp, from where it landed on the floor.
"...if that contract falls apart, Zane, we lose the north ridge. Twenty years of planning, gone, because you could not keep one girl happy on her own wedding day."
"I'll find her," I said, picking the phone back up, my voice flat and calm even though my hand was shaking. "Tonight."
"You'd better. The Hale signature on that contract is the only thing that makes the Ridgewood transfer legal. No bride, no signature. No signature, no land. Do you understand me?"
"I understand."
"And Zane. Whatever happened in that storage room, fix it quietly. If word gets out that the Hale girl ran from her own wedding, every Alpha in this region will smell weakness on us. Find her, marry her, and make sure she never embarrasses this family again."
He hung up before I could answer.
I stood there for a long moment, looking at the cracked screen in my hand, then set it down carefully on my desk like nothing had happened. Outside my window, the rain had not stopped. Headlights moved across the front gates as the last of the guests were sent home, told that Scarlett had taken ill, a small lie that would not hold for long. Below, in the courtyard, two of my security teams were already loading into cars, radios crackling, dogs straining against their leads.
Two hundred guests, half of them Alphas from packs that mattered, had just watched my wedding collapse before the first dance. By tomorrow morning, every pack in three territories would know my bride was missing on her wedding night. I could survive almost anything except looking weak, and right now, weak was exactly what I looked like.
The door opened behind me.
"Zane?"
Ivy stood in the doorway, still in her maid of honor dress, mascara streaked down her face. She looked smaller than she had an hour ago, when she had been pressed against the wall with my hands on her waist.
"What do you want?" I asked, not turning around.
"I just... I thought, now that she knows about us, maybe..." Her voice trailed off, hopeful, like a child waiting to be told she had been good.
I almost laughed.
"Maybe what, Ivy? Maybe I marry you instead?"
"You said you loved me," she whispered.
"I said a lot of things." I finally turned to look at her, and whatever she saw on my face made her flinch. "Ivy, sweetheart, you were never the plan. You were something to do while I waited for the wedding I actually needed."
"That's all I was to you?" Her voice cracked. "Two years, Zane."
"Two years of you sneaking into storage rooms because you couldn't stand watching me belong to your sister. Don't pretend you didn't know exactly what this was."
Her mouth opened, then closed. Tears spilled over, but I had no patience left for them tonight.
"Go home," I said. "Clean yourself up before your father sees you like this and starts asking questions neither of us wants answered."
She left without another word, and I almost felt nothing watching her go. Almost.
The truth was, I had never cared about Scarlett Hale, not the way a man is supposed to care about the woman he is marrying. She was kind, and pretty, and easy to be around, and none of that mattered even slightly compared to what her last name was worth on a piece of paper.
The Hale bloodline carried an old claim, older than the Wilder name itself, tied to a stretch of land called Ridgewood. My father had taken that land from another family eight years ago through contracts and clever lawyers, but the claim underneath it had never fully transferred. Only a Hale signature, given freely as part of a marriage bond, could close that gap forever. That was the entire reason this wedding existed. Everything else, the flowers, the toasts, the ring, was just decoration over a business deal worth more than most packs would see in a hundred years.
And I had let my own stupidity, and an hour with Ivy, put all of it at risk.
A knock at the door pulled me out of my thoughts.
"Come in."
One of my security captains stepped inside, soaked from the storm, his face grim.
"Sir. We found her car."
"And Scarlett?"
"Not in it. The driver's door was torn off, sir. Not cut. Torn. Like something ripped it open with bare hands." He hesitated. "There were tracks leading away from the wreck. Wolf tracks. Big ones."
My jaw tightened. "Rogue?"
"No, sir. The prints were too clean, too controlled for a rogue. Whoever it was, they walked calm and steady, even carrying weight." He paused again, and I could tell he did not want to say the next part. "We also found this near the tree line."
He held out his hand. In his palm sat a single dark feather, the kind worn on formal pack cuffs, embroidered with a small crest I had not seen in person for eight years, but would recognize anywhere.
Two wolves circling a broken crown.
The Raines crest.
My vision tunneled, every other thought in my head burning away at once. Of all the packs in this region, of all the men who could have been walking that road tonight, it had to be him. Axel Raines. The one man whose family I had personally watched lose everything, the one man who had spent eight years building himself back up just to spite my father's name.
If Axel Raines had his hands on Scarlett, this was not an accident.
He knew exactly who she was. He knew exactly what she was worth.
And he had just taken the one thing standing between me and Ridgewood.
Eight years ago, my father destroyed his family quietly, with paperwork and lawyers, while the rest of the world looked away. I would not be that careful.
I picked my cracked phone back up and dialed my father's number again, my voice steady and cold in a way that made even my own security captain take a step back.
"Get every tracker we have moving toward Raines territory tonight," I said. "I don't care what it costs or who gets hurt. If Axel Raines thinks he can hide my fiancée under his roof and walk away from this, he's about to learn exactly why people still tell stories about what my family did to his."
- Writer
