Ryan's POV
I did not go back to the office. Instead, I took the subway to my apartment in the old part of town where rent was cheap because the buildings were falling apart and nobody fixed anything unless it was actively on fire. The train rattled through tunnels that smelled like metal and electricity, packed with people who swayed together like kelp in an ocean current, everyone staring at their phones, lost in private digital worlds.
A camera watched from the corner of the subway car. I watched it back.
How many supernatural beings had this camera flagged already today? How many vampires are riding to their day jobs in windowless offices? How many witches headed to their positions in banking and finance? How many werewolves like me, trying to pass as human, trying to survive in a city that would destroy them if it knew the truth?
The database was building itself right now. Learning. Categorizing. Preparing for whatever came next.
My stop arrived. I pushed through the crowd, took the stairs two at a time, emerged into afternoon sunlight that felt too bright after the subway darkness. My neighborhood looked tired, worn down, like a boxer who had taken too many hits but refused to fall. Corner stores with barred windows. Apartment buildings with peeling paint. Small parks where grass gave up trying to grow and just accepted being dirt.
I climbed three flights of stairs to my apartment, key already in hand before I reached the door. Inside, the space was exactly as I had left it that morning. One bedroom. One bathroom. A kitchen barely large enough for one person to stand in. The whole place could fit inside my coworkers' suburban living rooms with space left over. But it was mine. Private. Safe.
Or it had been safe. Now I was not certain anywhere was safe.
I went straight to my bedroom, shoved my bed aside with the enhanced strength that came with my wolf nature, and pried up the loose floorboard in the corner. The metal box sat in the dusty darkness beneath, untouched since the day I placed it there five years ago, right after my father's funeral.
The box was not locked. My father had never believed in locks. He said determined people would break them, and trustworthy people did not need them. Inside were the accumulated pieces of his life. Construction contracts with pack scent marks pressed into the paper. Photographs of werewolves in human form, standing proud in front of buildings they had raised from concrete and steel. Letters written in his messy handwriting, words that slanted right like they were running toward something.
And underneath everything else, the folder marked with a red X.
I lifted it out carefully, my hands steadier now than they had been at the coffee shop. The pages inside were newer than the rest, crisp and white, covered in my father's handwriting but more frantic, more urgent. Notes about something he had discovered in the months before his death.
I spread the pages across my bedroom floor and started reading, really reading this time, not just skimming like I had done years ago when grief made everything blur together.
My father had been following a lead on a missing pack member. Thomas Wright, a young wolf who worked construction, who had not shown up for his shift one morning and had not answered his phone. His apartment was empty but not packed, as if he had left intending to return. My father, acting as pack Alpha, had done what Alphas do. He hunted.
The trail led him to the industrial district, to a building that public records said was an abandoned pharmaceutical manufacturing plant. But my father watched that building for three nights, and on the third night, he saw something that changed everything.
A truck arrived at two a.m., unmarked, no company logo. Men in plain clothes unloaded a cage from the back. Inside the cage, something moved. Something that was not quite human and not quite animal. Something caught between forms, trapped in the painful middle ground of transformation.
My father knew that posture, that twisted shape. He had seen it before in young werewolves who had not learned control yet, who shifted involuntarily under stress or fear. But this was different. The thing in the cage was not young. I was not learning. Was broken somehow, damaged, its transformation locked in place like a door jammed halfway open.
He had written in large letters, underlined three times: THEY ARE MAKING THEM.
Making werewolves. Or making something that looked like werewolves but was wrong, corrupted, turned into weapons or experiments or proof that supernatural beings were dangerous and needed to be eliminated.
My father had tried to tell the other pack leaders. Tried to warn the vampire clans and witch covens. But nobody believed him. They said he was paranoid, that grief over losing a pack member was making him see conspiracies where none existed. They told him to stop spreading fear, stop causing trouble, stop making wild accusations without evidence.
One week later, a steel beam fell on him at a construction site. The crane operator said it was mechanical failure. The safety inspector said it was an accident. The insurance company paid out the claim without question.
My father's last note, written the day before he died, said: "If you are reading this, Ryan, I was right and they got me. The facility is real. The danger is real. Your blood is important. More important than you know. Alpha bloodlines are pure, unchanged for generations. That purity is what they want. That purity is what they need to perfect whatever they are creating. Protect yourself. Trust no one. Find the truth. Stop them. I love you, son."
I sat on my bedroom floor surrounded by my dead father's warnings, and something inside me shifted. Not my wolf. Something deeper. Some fundamental understanding of who I was and what I had inherited.
My father had died trying to expose a conspiracy that nobody believed existed. Had died alone, dismissed as paranoid, his warnings ignored. And now, five years later, I had accidentally given that same conspiracy the perfect tool to finish what they started. A surveillance system that could identify and track every supernatural being in the city. A weapon disguised as public safety.
I pulled out my phone and looked at Blake's message again. Foster warehouse, nine p.m.
Blake's pack was missing two members. Her people were disappearing into the same darkness that had swallowed Thomas Wright five years ago. She did not know about my father's notes, did not know that he had tried to warn people about the facility. She probably thought my father was just another Alpha who cared more about territory than about pack welfare.
But she deserved to know the truth. Deserved to see these notes, to understand that the threat we faced was older and more organized than a simple surveillance system gone wrong. This was planned. Coordinated. Years in the making.
My phone rang, making me jump. My boss, Mr. Patterson. I stared at his name on the screen, my thumb hovering over the decline button. If I did not answer, he would know something was wrong. If I did answer, I would have to lie, and lying was getting harder every minute I spent away from the office.
I answered. "Hey, Mr. Patterson."
"Ryan, where the hell are you?" His voice was sharp, annoyed in the way of managers who thought their authority extended beyond office walls. "You left three hours ago and never came back. We have the investor meeting in an hour and I need you here to present the new recognition protocols."
Recognition protocols. The same code that had killed Victor's people. The same algorithm hunting supernatural beings across the city.
"I am sick," I said, letting my voice go rough and weak. "Food poisoning or something. Been in the bathroom all afternoon. I don't think I can make the meeting."
Patterson sighed, long and dramatic. "This is terrible timing, Ryan. The investors specifically want to hear about the advanced biometric features, the ones that can identify unusual behavior patterns in crowds. They are talking about expanding the system to six more cities. This is a huge deal."
Six more cities. Six more hunting grounds. Whatever group was behind this was not content with just Blackridge. They wanted to scale up, wanted to turn every major city into a trap where supernatural beings could not hide.
"Send me the presentation file," I said. "I will write up notes you can use. Technical explanations for each feature. You can present it yourself."
"Fine," Patterson said, not happy but accepting. "But you better be back tomorrow, Ryan. We are going into crunch time on the next update and I need my best programmer actually present."
He hung up. I sat in the silence of my apartment, listening to the building settle around me, old wood and older pipes making sounds like ghosts walking through walls.
The next update. There would be another update, more features, more capabilities added to the hunting algorithm. Unless I stopped it. Unless I found the people behind this and burned their operation to the ground.
I looked at the time. Four thirty p.m. Four and a half hours until I met Blake at the warehouse. Four and a half hours to prepare for a conversation with someone who might hate me enough to kill me just for carrying my father's name.
But I had something she needed. Information. Evidence. Proof that this conspiracy existed, that it had been operating for years, that it had killed before and would kill again unless we stopped it together.
I carefully gathered my father's notes, photographed every page with my phone, then put the originals back in the metal box and slid it under the floor. The bed went back into place, hiding the evidence. If something happened to me tonight, if Blake decided vengeance was more important than alliance, at least the digital copies would survive. I set up an automated email to send to Victor at midnight if I did not manually cancel it. Insurance.
Then I started preparing for the meeting. Changed into dark clothes that would not show dirt or blood. Packed a small backpack with tools I might need. Not weapons, I could not bring weapons to meet Blake, she would smell the aggression and respond accordingly. But tools for breaking and entering, for bypassing electronic locks, for accessing computer systems without authorization.
Because after I talked to Blake, after I convinced her to work with me instead of killing me, we were going to need to break into that research facility. We're going to need to find out exactly what they were doing to supernatural beings behind those locked doors. We're going to need to gather evidence concrete enough that the other pack leaders and clan leaders and coven leaders could not dismiss as paranoia or conspiracy theory.
My wolf stirred under my skin, restless and eager. It knew action was coming. Knew the waiting was almost over. Knew that tonight we would stop
hiding and start hunting.
I just hoped we survived long enough to make a difference.