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I frown. “Recognize the car?”

He shakes his head as we walk out to stand in front of the house, braced for another attack. Inside, the pack is waking up, woken by the sound of the approaching vehicle.

Feet away, I spot the driver and passenger and relax a little. Not completely. They wouldn’t be speeding unless something was wrong.

My dad cuts the engine and flings open the door, leaping out. “They’re after Aerin.”

Ivy scrambles out as he’s speaking. “We drove all night to get here. We have to?—”

“They took her,” I interrupt. “She’s gone.”

He stares at me, then he curses. “Fuck.”

“Youknew,” I growl.

“Why’d you think we raced here to get to you if we didn’t know something was going to hit you?” He curses again, slamming the door shut and stalking toward me.

Ivy follows with less door slamming.

“Why do they want Aerin?” I ask.

My dad shakes his head, eyes dark and, unless I’m mistaken, a hint of guilt stirring in them, an unfamiliar emotion from him. It jacks up my alarm even higher.

“What is it?” I prompt when he doesn’t speak. “What aren’t you telling me?”

5

AERIN

Aman with short black hair and steel-gray eyes opens my car door with a smile.

He’s handsome, and would be more so without the fine network of scars crisscrossing his face. It’s rare for a shifter to be as scarred as this man is. Whatever injury he sustained must have nearly killed him. “Aerin? A pleasure.”

It isn’t in my nature to run, but there’s a coldness in his gaze that makes me want to.

I don’t return his smile. “Why did you kidnap me?”

Because Shane can’t have been working alone. Things were happening in Winter Lake even before Shane turned up. It was no coincidence that someone lured Mack, Bennett, and the others to the Winter Lake Hotel and Shane was there to grab me.

They are in this together.

He grasps my arm and helps me out of the car, slamming my door shut. I have a feeling if I told him I wanted to stay right where I am, he wouldn’t care.

Keeping a tight grip on my arm, he walks me toward the farmhouse with a covered front porch that he emerged from moments before. “My name is Franklin Raleigh.”

The impact of that name is like lightning piercing me from the top of my head to the soles of my feet, freezing me in place. “Raleigh?”

Franklin continues to propel me along with a manacle like grip.

His smile widens as he flicks a rapid glance at Shane. “I see he left a few things a surprise.”

“The Raleighs are dead,” I tell him.

The house we step into is new. It doesn’t have a new smell to it, but the wood shines, and the fact other similar, but smaller buildings just like this farmhouse are going up, makes me think this building was also built within the last few months.

Whoever these people are have chosen to rebuild where the Raleighs once called home. And this man says he is a Raleigh?

I want to discount it as lies, but Mack survived, so did his dad, and so did Colton. If they lived, then what’s to say they weren’t more Raleighs around than any of us ever realized?

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