Jake left his car half a mile back, just as the message had instructed, and walked the rest of the way on foot with his heart slamming against his ribs.
The building the pin had led him to sat quiet and unremarkable at the edge of the human territory, the kind of place nobody would think to look twice at. He pushed the door open slowly, half expecting an ambush, half expecting to find someone waiting for him inside.
The room was empty. A single bulb hung from the ceiling, throwing a weak yellow light over bare walls. Jake stood in the doorway a moment, listening for any sound, any shift of breath that wasn’t his own, but there was nothing.
He pulled his phone out with unsteady fingers and read the message again, checking he’d got the address right, checking the time, checking anything that might give him some sense of control over what was happening to him.
That was when the door creaked open behind him.
Jake spun round so fast he nearly lost his footing, and the words died in his throat the second he saw who’d walked in. Derek. The Lycan King himself, with Kai trailing a step behind him, holding a folder and looking entirely too pleased with himself.
Jake’s mouth opened and closed twice before anything came out. He’d braced himself for a rival Alpha, a hired thug, maybe even Rolf trying to test his loyalty in some twisted way. He hadn’t, not for one second, expected the King.
"Your Majesty," he managed, dropping into a bow so quick and clumsy it was almost comical. "I don’t understand. What is this?"
"Sit down, Jake," Derek said, his voice calm in a way that somehow made it worse.
Jake didn’t move. "My family. If you know where they are, if you’ve done anything to them—"
"Nobody’s touched your family," Derek cut in, holding up a hand. "Give me the answers I want, and nothing happens to them. You have my word on that."
Jake’s jaw tightened. "Your word doesn’t mean much for a man who just threatened my wife’s life."
"That wasn’t me," Derek said simply. "That was Kai, making sure you’d actually show up."
Kai gave a small, unbothered shrug, like he’d done nothing worse than send a slightly aggressive message.
Jake still didn’t budge, his arms crossed tight over his chest, refusing to give an inch even as sweat gathered at his hairline. Kai finally sighed, pulled out a sheet of paper from the folder he was holding, and held it out.
"Maybe this will loosen your tongue."
Jake stared at him for a moment, then snatched it and unfolded it, his eyes scanning the page once, then again, as if reading it a second time might change what it said.
It was a DNA report. His name sat beside Scott’s, and beneath both of them, in plain print, sat the word that knocked the air clean out of his lungs.
Excluded.
He wasn’t Scott’s father.
"That’s not," Jake started, then stopped, his voice cracking. "That’s not possible."
"Rolf slept with your wife," Derek said, watching him closely. "Scott is his son. Your wife carried him and raised him as yours, and Rolf let her, because it suited him. Now he wants to hand the pack to that same boy."
Jake’s hand shook so badly the paper crumpled at the edges. He stared at it like it might rearrange itself into something less devastating if he just looked hard enough. Years of his life, an entire childhood he’d watched and loved and claimed as his own, undone by a single line of ink.
"Why would he," Jake whispered, more to himself than to either of them.
"Because he needed an heir," Kai said. "Makes it harder to question."
Jake sank down onto the edge of an old crate, his legs no longer willing to hold him upright.
"Protect your family," Kai said, his tone gentler now than Jake would have expected from someone who’d terrified him half to death an hour ago. "That’s all you have to do here. Tell us the truth, and we make sure nothing happens to them, not from Rolf, or from anyone."
Jake pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes for a long moment before he spoke again. "What do you want from me?"
Derek and Kai exchanged knowing glances, knowing they have got him."
"Tell us who is the real owner of Moonfang, and how we can gather undeniable evidence against Rolf."
Jake looked at both of them. "You don’t expect me to betray my Alpha because of this, do you? How am I sure that this isn’t even staged? How did you get our samples?"
Kai grinned. "There are many ways to kill a rat. You can find out for yourself."
Jake sighed, his shoulders slumping. His plan had been to make Scott Alpha, and then use his son’s influence to bring back the other family to the pack, without too much consequences, but finding out the boy wasn’t even his was devastating.
"The woman in those photographs. She’s my true mate," he finally said. "I never chose her over my wife out of anything but obligation. I had to marry her to keep the Beta position in my family. My true mate is an omega whom the pack wouldn’t accept for me. So, I ended up with Scott’s mother and hid my mate away from the eyes of the pack."
Nobody said anything for a moment. Even Kai had the decency to look almost sympathetic.
"And Moonfang," Derek said eventually. "Tell me about Moonfang."
Jake let out a long, shaky breath, like he’d been carrying the weight of it for years and was finally allowed to set it down.
"It was never Rolf’s father’s pack. The real Alpha was Claire’s father. Rolf’s father was his Beta, same as I am to Rolf now. Rolf married Claire to get close to the title, and when her father died under, let’s say, questionable circumstances, he seized it and buried everything that said otherwise."
He lifted his eyes. "I have the original documents. Pictures too, from the day the pack changed hands. I kept them and burned copies. I always knew I might need them one day."
"Bring them to the hearing," Derek said. "All of it."
Jake didn’t react, he only kept staring at the sheet in his hands.
Derek stepped closer, his voice dropping low and even. "Don’t play us, Jake. If you stand up in that hall and go quiet, if you decide loyalty to Rolf matters more than what’s true, you won’t like what happens next. Not to you, and not to the family you’re trying so hard to protect."
"I understand," Jake said quietly.
Once Jake had gone, Derek turned to Kai, watching the door swing shut behind him. "Keep an eye on him. I don’t trust Rolf not to sense something’s wrong before the hearing."
"On it," Kai said.
"And don’t say a word of this to Kira," Derek added, already picturing her face when it all came out in the open. "I want to surprise her."
Kai grinned. "You’re a soft old thing under all that scowling, you know that?"
Derek didn’t answer, but the corner of his mouth twitched all the same.
***
Present day...
Rolf staggered back a step, his composure cracking clean down the middle. His eyes landed on Jake, wide and betrayed, before something darker took over. With a snarl tearing out of his throat, he lunged.
Jake was ready for it. He caught Rolf mid-charge, and the two of them crashed into the floor, growling and snapping, years of buried resentment finally spilling out into fists and teeth.
The council dissolved into chaos around them, elders shouting, alphas surging forward to pull the two men apart before either could shift and turn the hearing into a bloodbath.
Off to the side, Kira watched it all unfold with her hand pressed over her mouth, a giggle slipping out despite herself.
"You did this," she said, turning to Derek, eyes shining with disbelief. "This whole thing. You planned it."
"A surprise," Derek said, slipping an arm around her waist. "For you."
"Oh, my goodness. Thank you!" she almost squealed. "Wow!"
Derek chuckled, squeezing her hand.
It took several long minutes and more than a few raised voices before the hall settled back into some semblance of order, Rolf and Jake wrenched apart and held at a distance by other alphas, both men breathing hard and glaring daggers at one another.
Rolf straightened his jacket, chin lifted, refusing to look anything less than defiant even with his lip split and bleeding. "Fine. Yes. Scott is my son. So what? That changes nothing. Moonfang still belongs to me."
"How could you do this to me?" Chloe’s voice cracked across the hall, sharp and furious, cutting straight through the murmuring crowd.
She rounded on her father, tears already spilling. "You knew he was your son and you let us get close? Let us think we could be together? What was your plan, exactly?"
Rolf’s expression didn’t so much as flicker. "You were never my daughter to begin with. A DNA test confirmed it recently. Your mother was already carrying you before I ever met her."
He said it flatly, like he was reading off a grocery list rather than shattering his daughter’s entire understanding of who she was. "When I found out, I needed the two of you to play mates. It was the only way to get Scott close enough to inherit the pack, and to take him away from Kira."
Kira chuckled. "Funny how much he fought to keep my inheritance away from me. Isn’t that diabolical?"
"You’re disgusting," Chloe spat, her voice trembling with something far past anger now. "I hope you die slow and screaming for what you’ve done."
She turned on her heel and stormed out of the hall without looking back.
Silence settled heavy in her wake. Kira stepped forward, her gaze fixed on Rolf, steady despite everything that had just unfolded in front of her.
"So," she said, tilting her head slightly. "Who’s laughing last now, Rolf?"