Ryan's POV
The Foster warehouse squatted at the edge of the river district like a corpse that refused to rot. Three stories of corrugated metal and broken windows, the kind of building that had outlived its usefulness decades ago but was too expensive to demolish and too worthless to renovate. The city had forgotten about it. Which made it perfect for the kind of meeting where people might die.
I parked my car four blocks away, in a grocery store lot where security cameras were angled toward the entrance and would not catch my face. Another lesson from my father, who had survived as an Alpha by being paranoid about details that seemed small until they got you killed. Never let anyone track your vehicle. Never let anyone know your routes. Always have three ways out of any situation.
The walk to the warehouse took me through streets that smelled like fish guts and industrial runoff. This part of Blackridge existed in the gap between gentrification and abandonment, too ugly for developers to care about, too functional for the city to condemn. A few homeless people had set up camps under highway overpasses, their shopping carts loaded with possessions that probably meant nothing to anyone but them. They did not look at me as I passed. In neighborhoods like this, you survived by not seeing things.
I reached the warehouse at eight fifty, ten minutes early. The building loomed against the darkening sky, its silhouette jagged with broken architecture. No lights showed in the windows. No sounds carried from inside. But I knew Blake was already there, had probably been there for an hour, scoping the location, making sure I had not brought backup or set up an ambush.
The main entrance was a loading dock with a rusted metal door hanging half off its hinges. I approached slowly, my hands visible and empty, my body language as non threatening as I could make it while still maintaining enough tension to react if things went sideways.
The door groaned when I pushed it, metal scraping against concrete in a sound that set my teeth on edge. Inside, the warehouse was a cathedral of industrial decay. Moonlight filtered through holes in the roof, creating islands of illumination in an ocean of shadow. Old machinery sat abandoned in corners, their purposes forgotten, their metal bodies slowly surrendering to rust. The concrete floor was stained with oil and chemicals and other substances I chose not to identify.
Blake stood in the center of the space, exactly where the moonlight hit strongest. Strategic positioning. She wanted me to see her clearly while she remained backlit, her features harder to read. She was not alone. Three other wolves flanked her in a loose semicircle, two men and one woman, all of them with the kind of stillness that came from absolute confidence in their ability to hurt people.
I recognized one of the men from pack gatherings. Marcus something. He had a reputation for asking questions with his fists and not caring much about the answers. The woman I did not know, but she had scars running down the left side of her face, three parallel lines that could only have come from claws. Someone had tried to kill her and failed. That made her more dangerous than the men, in my experience. People who survived murder attempts tended to be very good at preventing second attempts.
"Ryan Kane." Blake's voice carried across the empty space, not loud but projected with the kind of control that suggested training. Military maybe, or martial arts. "You look like your father. Same build. Same way of standing like you are ready to run but trying to pretend you are not."
I stopped about twenty feet away from her, close enough to talk without shouting, far enough that I had a chance to dodge if someone decided to throw the first punch. "My father talked about your family before he died. Said your grandmother was one of the smartest pack leaders he had ever met. Said she made hard decisions that kept her people alive when other packs fell apart."
Blake's expression did not change, but something flickered in her eyes. Surprise maybe, or suspicion. "My grandmother says your father got her husband killed over a construction contract. Says he pushed into our territory, started fights he could not finish, then abandoned his allies when things got bloody."
"That is one version of what happened," I said carefully. "I have read my father's side of the story. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, complicated and messy, the way truth usually is when people are fighting over resources and territory."
"Why are you here, Ryan?" Blake shifted her weight slightly, a movement so small that most people would not notice it. But I noticed. She was preparing, muscle memory taking over, her body getting ready for violence even if her mind had not decided yet. "Victor said you found something in the surveillance code. Said you have information about who is killing our people. So talk. Tell me why I should trust anything you say when your system is hunting us."
I pulled out my phone slowly, making sure everyone could see my hands, making sure nobody thought I was reaching for a weapon. "I found modifications in the code. Recognition protocols designed to identify supernatural beings through biometric markers. Heat signature, bone density, healing rates, movement patterns. Someone weaponized my surveillance system without my knowledge."
I pulled up the code on my screen, showed it to Blake. She moved closer, her pack members moving with her like a coordinated organism. She studied the screen, her eyes scanning the lines of code with more comprehension than I expected. Not many people outside the tech world could read programming languages, but Blake apparently could.
"This is military grade," she said quietly. "Pattern recognition algorithms that should not exist outside classified government databases. Whoever modified your system has resources beyond a private security company."
"It gets worse." I swiped to the next screen, showed her the IP trace I had run, the path that led back to the pharmaceutical plant on the edge of the industrial district. "The modifications came from here. A facility that public records say is abandoned, but satellite images show active operations. Power consumption records show usage consistent with running laboratories and server farms."
Blake looked up from the phone, her eyes meeting mine directly. In the moonlight, I could see her pupils dilate slightly, her wolf responding to information the human side was still processing. "You traced this back to a specific location?"
"More than that." I took a breath, committed to the path I had chosen. "My father found this facility five years ago. He was tracking a missing pack member, followed the trail to this building, and saw them bringing in cages with werewolves inside. Werewolves that were trapped in partial transformation, broken somehow, turned into something that was not quite human and not quite wolf."
The warehouse fell silent. Even the ambient sounds of the city seemed to fade, as if the universe was holding its breath waiting to see what happened next.
"Your father never reported this," Blake said, her voice gone very soft in the way that meant danger. "Never brought this to the pack council. Never warned anyone officially."
"He tried. Nobody believed him. They said he was paranoid, that grief was making him see conspiracies. One week after he started pushing for an investigation, a steel beam fell on him at a construction site. The official report said mechanical failure. Accident. Bad luck."
I pulled up the photographs of my father's notes on my phone, the pages covered in his frantic handwriting, and showed them to Blake. "These are his notes from the weeks before he died. Documentation of what he saw. Warnings about the facility. And a message to me, written the day before the accident, saying that if anything happened to him, it meant he was right and they had killed him."
Blake took the phone from my hand, her fingers brushing mine briefly. She scrolled through the images, reading quickly, her expression getting tighter with each page. Behind her, the scarred woman moved closer, reading over Blake's shoulder.
"Claire," Blake said without looking up, "what do you think?"
The scarred woman studied the notes carefully. "The handwriting is consistent. The details are specific. Either Ryan's father actually saw this, or someone went to elaborate lengths to create a fake conspiracy five years in advance of needing it." She looked at me, her eyes cold and evaluating. "Occam's razor suggests a simpler explanation. He saw something real."
Marcus, the angry looking one, made a sound of disgust. "Or this is a trap. Kane brings us pretty evidence, gets us to trust him, then leads us into an ambush at this facility. We all die, problems solved, nobody left to ask questions about the hunting system."
"If I wanted you dead," I said, turning to face Marcus directly, "I would have just given the system your exact location and let it do the work. The surveillance network knows where every registered pack member lives. Know your routines, your habits, your weaknesses. I could eliminate Blake's entire pack without leaving my apartment."
Marcus took a step forward, his shoulders bunching with the beginning of transformation. Blake held up one hand, a gesture that stopped him mid motion like she had yanked an invisible leash.
"He is right," Blake said, her voice cutting through the tension. "If Ryan wanted us dead, he had easier ways to accomplish it. The fact that he is here, showing us evidence, giving us a target, suggests he wants something else." She looked at me, her expression unreadable. "What do you want, Ryan Kane? What is your actual goal in all this?"
I thought about lying, about dressing up my motivations in noble language about justice and protecting the innocent. But Blake would smell the deception. Werewolves always could tell when someone was lying, something about heart rate and pheromones and micro expressions that we picked up instinctively.
So I told her the truth.
"I want to stop hating myself for building the weapon that is killing us. I want to find the people who turned my work into a murder machine and make them pay for it. I want to understand why my father died, what he was trying to stop, whether his death meant anything or if he just wasted his life chasing shadows." I paused, feeling my wolf stir beneath my skin. "And I want to make sure that when I die, it is for a reason. That I did not just survive and hide and accomplish nothing with the time I had."
Blake studied me for a long moment, and I had the uncomfortable sensation of being dissected, of having every secret and fear laid bare under her gaze. Finally, she nodded, a single sharp movement.
"My grandmother is dying. Cancer. The doctors give her three months, maybe less. Before she goes, I want to give her the truth about what happened to her husband. Want her to know whether your father was really the enemy, or whether we were all being played." Blake handed my phone back. "So here is what is going to happen. We are going to that facility tonight. We are going to find out what they are doing inside it. And if we survive, we are going to burn it to the ground with everyone responsible still inside."
"Tonight?" I had expected planning, preparation, maybe a few days to scout the location and gather intelligence. "We do not know what kind of security they have, how many people are inside, what defenses they have set up."
"Which is exactly why we go tonight, before they realize we are coming." Blake turned to her pack. "Claire, Marcus, gather the others. Full assault gear. We leave in one hour." She looked back at me. "Can you bypass electronic security? Cameras, locks, alarm systems?"
"Yes. That is what I do."
"Then you are coming with us. You get us inside quietly. We find the prisoners if there are any. We find the data. We find the people running this operation. And then we end this." Blake's expression was hard as iron. "One way or another, this ends tonight."
I should have argued. Should have pointed out all the ways this could go catastrophically wrong. Should have insisted on more planning, more backup, more everything.
But she was right. Every hour we waited was another hour for them to relocate, to destroy evidence, to disappear like smoke. If we wanted answers, if we wanted to stop this before more people died, we had to move fast and hit hard.
"I need to get some equipment from my apartment," I said. "Tools for bypassing security systems. Give me forty five minutes."
Blake nodded. "We met at the construction site two blocks from the facility. Eleven thirty. Do not be late, Kane. And do not make me regret trusting you."
She turned and walked toward a door I had not noticed at the far end of the warehouse, her pack following like shadows. Within seconds, they had vanished into the darkness, moving with the kind of silence that came from a lifetime of hunting.
I stood alone in the empty warehouse, moonlight painting everything in shades of silver and gray, and wondered if I had just agreed to a rescue mission or a suicide pact.
My phone buzzed. A text from Victor: "Heard you are meeting Blake. Try not to get killed. We need you for the midnight gathering. Also, I am sending two of my people to watch the facility perimeter tonight. James and Sophia. They will not interfere unless you specifically call for help."
I typed back: "How did you know about tonight?"
His response came immediately: "I am four hundred years old, Ryan. I know everything that happens in this city. Be careful. The people running that facility have been operating in secret for years. They will not surrender easily."
I pocketed my phone and headed for the exit, my mind already running through the equipment I would need, the tools that would get us past electronic locks and security systems. I had maybe forty minutes to prepare for the most dangerous thing I had ever done.
As I walked back through the dark streets toward my car, I thought about my father's last message. Your blood is important. More important than you know.
Whatever that meant, I would find out tonight. In a facility where supernatural beings disappeared into cages. Where my father's warnings had led to his death. Where the truth waited like a predator in the dar
kness, patient and hungry and absolutely unforgiving.
I just hoped I was ready for what I would find.