The Alpha's Forbidden Pact

CHAPTER 12: OUT OF THE DARK

I left the building without speaking to anyone.

The folder stayed pressed against my chest under my jacket the entire ride down the elevator. Julian did not try to stop me. He only watched from the doorway as the doors closed between us. The last thing I saw was his face, stripped of every careful mask he usually wore.

Outside, the afternoon light felt too bright. People moved along the sidewalk in ordinary clusters, talking, laughing, checking their phones. None of them knew that the file under my arm held the last hours of my parents’ lives. None of them knew that the man upstairs had been fourteen years old when he watched them die.

I started walking.

I did not choose a direction. I only needed the motion. The safehouse was the right place to go. The smart place. The place where Kade and Theo and Damaris would demand answers and try to manage whatever storm I was about to bring home. I could not face that yet. Not while the photograph of my mother still burned behind my eyes. Not while Julian’s voice still sat in my ears, low and rough, admitting he had been there.

So I walked.

Blocks passed. The glass towers of the financial district gave way to older streets with narrower sidewalks and deeper doorways. I kept my head down and my pace steady. My thoughts would not stay in order. They kept circling the same images. My mother’s face in the photograph. The handwritten note. She is alive. Protect at all costs. The way Julian had looked when he said he never stopped seeing that night.

A car horn sounded somewhere behind me. I flinched and kept moving.

I should have been watching my surroundings. That was the first rule. Always know who is near you. Always know the exits. Kade had drilled it into me since I was small. Today the rule slipped. The file and the confession took up too much space inside my head. By the time I noticed the shift in the air, it was already too late.

The street had got quieter.

I slowed.

Two men stood at the mouth of the alley I had just passed. They were not looking at phones or talking to each other. They were looking at me. Further up the block, another figure leaned against a parked car with his arms crossed, eyes fixed in my direction. Across the street, a fourth man stopped walking the moment I did.

My pulse climbed hard and fast.

I turned as if I had remembered something in the opposite direction and started back the way I had come. The two men at the alley stepped out into the open. They did not rush. They only matched my pace, closing the distance without making it obvious to anyone else on the street.

Wolves. I could feel it in the way they moved. In the way the air itself seemed to tighten around them.

I cut across the street at the next light. One of the men followed. The one by the car pushed off and fell into steps half a block behind. They were herding me and not attacking. Not yet. Just tightening the circle until there would be nowhere left to go.

My hand tightened on the folder under my jacket. Running would only confirm I knew what they were. Walking into a public place might buy time, but the nearest café was still two blocks away and the men were already closer than that.

I reached a narrow side street and turned into it without slowing. Brick walls rose on both sides. A single metal door halfway down sat locked and dark. At the far end, the street opened again onto a busier road. If I could reach it…

A shape stepped out of a recessed doorway ten feet in front of me.

I stopped hard.

The man was taller than the others. Broad through the shoulders. Dark hair pushed back from a face that looked like it had been in more than one fight and had not always lost. He wore a black jacket over a plain shirt and stood with the loose readiness of someone who did not need to prove anything. His eyes found mine and held them.

The men behind me slowed, then stopped. They did not come closer. They only waited.

The stranger in front of me spoke first. His voice was low and calm, almost conversational.

“You are a long way from safe ground, Sinclair.”

My blood went cold at the sound of my real name in a stranger’s mouth.

“I do not know you,” I said.

“No. But I know you.” He tilted his head slightly, studying me without blinking. “Ivy. Last of the old blood. The girl the Council has been hunting in secret for eighteen years while pretending she might already be dead.”

I took one step back. The men behind me shifted. I was boxed in.

“What do you want?”

“Right now? To keep them from putting their hands on you.” He glanced past my shoulder at the men who had followed me. Something in his expression made two of them look away. “They were not sent by me. They were sent by people who would prefer you never reach the Reclaiming Moon alive.”

“And you are different.”

“I am Cassius Drake.” He said the name like it should mean something. When I did not react, a faint edge of something almost like amusement crossed his face. “You really have been kept in the dark. The Five never told you about the rogue packs, did they?”

I said nothing. My mind raced through every exit I could still see. There were none.

Cassius took one step closer. Not threatening. Simply closing the space so his next words would not carry to the men behind me.

“The people who killed your parents are still giving orders,” he said quietly. “Some of them sit in Council seats. Some of them smile at Damaris at meeting tables and ask about his health. The Five have been lying to you about how deep that rot goes. And about how the pact that binds them actually works.”

My breath caught.

“What about the pact?”

He studied me for a moment longer. Then he smiled, small and sharp.

“Not here. Not with an audience.” His eyes flicked once more to the men waiting behind me. “You have a choice, Ivy. Stay on this street and find out what those four were ordered to do to you. Or walk with me and hear the parts of your own story no one else has been willing to tell.”

Behind me, one of the men took a single step forward.

Cassius did not look away from my face.

“Decide,” he said. “Quickly.”