The Captain's Forbidden Mate

Episode 6: THINGS THAT DON’T ADD UP

COLE

I told myself I wasn’t checking on her.

I told myself a lot of things that week.

But when Noah mentioned casually, too casually, dropping it in between like it was nothing, that half the Ridgeview pack had been at a party Friday night, and that a girl matching Lena’s description had walked in on Damien’s arm, I was in my truck before I finished processing the sentence. I didn’t even grab a jacket. I just went.

“Where are you going?” Noah called after me, spoon still in his hand.

“Nowhere,” I said, which was a lie, because I drove straight past her dorm three times before I made myself stop, engine idling at the curb like some kind of criminal casing a house.

She was fine. I could see her shadow moving behind her curtains, alive, unhurt, probably furious if she knew I was sitting outside like some kind of stalker. I made myself leave before I did something even worst, like knocking on her door at midnight with no good reason to give her.

Noah texted me twice while I sat there, first a string of question marks and then, when I didn’t answer, a single line that landed harder than it should have: You know this isn’t how it’s supposed to work, right? You’re supposed to talk to her. Not haunt her sidewalk. I didn’t reply to that either. There wasn’t a version of the truth I could send back that didn’t sound insane — that some wild part of me had decided her safety was my responsibility the second her scent hit my nose in a hallway a month ago, and that no amount of arguing with it in my own head had made a dent.

It didn’t stop the wolf from pacing under my skin the entire drive home, restless in a way I hadn’t felt since I was a kid losing control of my first shift.

Mate near danger, it kept saying, over and over, an ugly animal rhythm I couldn’t shut off no matter how many times I told it she wasn’t mine, that I hadn’t accepted anything, that this was still a thing I could walk away from if I just held out a little longer. She’d walked into Ridgeview territory on her own. That wasn’t dangerous. That was just — stupid. Reckless. Very, very Lena, from what little I already knew of her.

I hated how much I already knew that about her.

Back at the apartment, I couldn’t sleep, so I did the thing I’d been avoiding since the moment her wrist touched mine in that hallway a month ago, the thing that felt like crossing a line I couldn’t uncross.

I looked her up.

Northcrest’s registrar wasn’t hard to get into, a pack contact who worked in IT owed me a favor from freshman year, back when I’d covered for a mistake that would’ve gotten him fired. It took ten minutes to pull her full file. Lena Marie Hale. Nineteen. Full scholarship, need-based. Parents deceased, car accident, six years ago. No siblings. Foster care until she aged out at eighteen.

Ordinary. Human. Tragic in the unremarkable way most human lives were tragic. I read it twice, feeling something twist in my chest that had no business being there.

Except.

Her birth certificate listed a mother’s maiden name I didn’t recognize at first. Corwin. I stared at it for a long time before the memory surfaced, an old pack ledger my father kept locked in his study, names of bloodlines wiped out during the war two generations back. Families that had sided against the Silverclaws. Families my grandfather had made an example of, in ways nobody in my house liked to talk about.

Corwin had been one of them.

I pulled up an old scanned copy of the ledger my father thought I’d never found, flipping through names I’d only ever seen once, years ago, when I was too young to understand what I was looking at. The Corwins had held territory two states over, good land, contested land, land the Silverclaws had wanted for three generations before they finally took it. The entry for the m******e itself was clinical, almost bureaucratic, a handful of sentences about “territorial resolution” that made no mention of the fact that it meant an entire bloodline had been erased in a single night.

I told myself it was a coincidence. Common enough surname. Nothing more. People shared last names all the time; it didn’t mean anything.

But my wolf didn’t believe in coincidences, and neither, if I was honest with myself, did I.

I was still staring at the screen, my coffee gone cold beside me, when my phone buzzed. A text from an unknown number, sent from inside Ridgeview’s own territory, based on the tower ping, Noah’s app flagged a second later.

Careful with your reporter, Arden. She smells like old ghosts. Might want to ask her what she really is before someone else does.

No name. No number I recognized.

I called Noah into the kitchen and showed him the screen without a word. He read it twice, the same way I had, then looked up at me with an expression I didn’t like, not surprise, exactly. Recognition.

“That’s a Ridgeview burner pattern,” he said quietly. “Ten digits, no area code overlap with anything local. My cousin used to run intel for the border patrols before he transferred packs. This isn’t some rando messing with you, Cole. Somebody over there wanted you to have this. Which means somebody over there wants you distracted, or wants you exactly this paranoid, or…” He stopped himself, jaw tightening.

“Or wants me to go looking,” I finished for him. “Wants me to confirm what they already think they know.”

“Yeah.” Noah set the phone down like it had gone cold in his hand. “So the question is whether you play dumb or you play along. Because either way, they’re already three moves ahead of us on this, and I don’t like not knowing why.”

I didn’t have an answer for that. I sat there in the dark for a long time after he went back to bed, the phone’s glow the only light in the room, that message burning a hole through everything I thought I understood about the girl I was supposed to be forgetting.