Chapter 252

Agnes

The tracking device sitting on the table seemed to stare up at me, mocking me. Every drop of blood in my body ran cold at the sight of it—a far cry from the usual heat that overtook me during moments of distress.

It was inside the small dinosaur keychain that Elijah had brought home for Thea after that conference all those weeks ago. The gift that someone had intentionally given Elijah for her.

Had someone been tracking our daughter on purpose? If so, why?

No. I knew why. I knew it in my bones, as sure as I knew up from down and right from left. This whole thing reeked of my stepmother.

“We would never do such a thing,” Elijah said quickly. “Richard, I swear to you, we had no idea. The dinosaur—I got it during the conference in your territory a couple of months ago. I didn’t even buy it.”

Richard’s eyes narrowed. “Explain.”

Elijah glanced at me, but I was too stunned to speak. He went on, “I was at the hotel bar one evening after the meetings. This man approached me. He was… friendly, and seemed harmless. He said he had heard about how Olivia had mistreated Thea, and he wanted to give Thea a gift. He said it was a good luck charm.”

“And you just took it?” Richard asked, his upper lip curling slightly.

“I know, I know. I’m so fucking stupid.” Elijah’s jaw clenched. “I didn’t think twice about it. He seemed genuine, and it just seemed like a trinket. I gave it to Thea when I got home, and she loved it. She had it on her backpack for weeks before…”

Before we’d visited Richard’s territory. Before Elise had died. Before everything had gone to shit.

My stomach churned. Someone had been tracking Thea for months. Watching where she went, when she was alone, when she was vulnerable.

“Goddess,” I breathed, sinking onto a chair behind me. “They’ve been tracking her, Elijah. They’ve been watching our daughter.”

Elijah’s face paled even further, although I had a feeling the implications had hit him already. Richard glanced back and forth between the two of us for a moment, then sighed. “I believe you didn’t know about the tracker. Neither of you has ever given me any reason to mistrust you, which was why I came here to speak with you privately about it before making any assumptions.”

He hesitated, then added, “But who is this ‘they’ you referred to?”

Elijah and I exchanged a glance. We’d kept so many secrets, tried to protect ourselves and Thea by staying quiet. But that hadn’t worked. Lena had still gotten in. James was still dead. And now someone had been tracking our daughter for months.

No more keeping secrets. It was time to act.

“There’s something we need to tell you,” I said slowly.

Richard folded his arms across his chest and waited.

I took a deep breath. “I’m a fire elemental. My abilities manifested a few months ago, while my wolf was slowly awakening from a curse. We’ve been hiding it, trying to keep Thea safe, because there’s a good chance she inherited the genes. Thea is my biological daughter—not Olivia’s.”

Richard’s eyebrows rose slightly, but he didn’t interrupt.

“It’s a long story, but according to Olivia, my stepmother runs something called Elemental Enterprises,” I continued. “On the surface, it’s just DNA testing centers. But underneath… they’re kidnapping elementals. Experimenting on them. Trying to breed an army of them who can be controlled with something called the Lunaris Stone.”

Finally, everything tumbled out—I told him everything we’d learned over the past months, the underground facility, my stepmother’s plan to use the Lunaris Stone to control elementals and make herself immortal. I told him about Lena’s betrayal, how she’d been working for my stepmother all along, how she’d stolen the stone and killed James.

“They want Thea because if she has the fire gene, combined with Elijah’s Alpha genes, she’d be incredibly powerful,” I finished. “I’m not sure why Lena didn’t take Thea the night she took the stone, too, but for some reason she didn’t.”

Truthfully, that had been on my mind a lot lately. Lena could have taken Thea—she was trusted by us, and Thea would have followed her to the edge of the earth if Lena had a good reason. Lena knew Thea was my biological daughter and she knew that I had fire elemental abilities.

But she had only taken the stone.

Did that mean she intended to come back for us at some point? I wasn’t sure. A tiny voice in the back of my head whispered that she had left us alone because, at some point during her temporary employment, perhaps she had started to care about us.

But I knew that wasn’t true. Lena didn’t care about anybody.

She was evil.

Richard was silent for a long moment, processing everything we’d told him. Elijah, who had moved to stand beside me at some point, placed his hand on my shoulder and gave it a squeeze. I hardly felt it.

When Richard finally spoke, his voice was low and controlled. “Elise, during her brief moments of clarity, sometimes spoke of being trapped underground.”

My breath lodged, and I exchanged another look with Elijah.

“Sometimes, late at night, she would wake me up with her rambling,” Richard went on quietly. “She would have these episodes where she’d stare at her hands with wide eyes, whispering, ‘They took my power. Twisted it.’”

Oh, Goddess. No.

“At the time, I thought she meant she’d been trapped in a cave system, perhaps. That the darkness and isolation had affected her mind.” Richard’s hands clenched into fists. “But now…”

He looked at me, and my stomach dropped. I knew what he was thinking. The same terrible possibility that was screaming through my mind.

“Before Elise died,” I said quietly, “that night when you found me leaving her room.... She looked at my hands and said that I have ‘the gift’. As if she knew. And right before she collapsed, when she saw Lena at the banquet…” I swallowed hard. “She looked absolutely terrified. Like she’d seen a ghost.”

Richard’s face had gone pale.

“I’ve been wondering if Lena did something to her,” I admitted. “If maybe she caused Elise’s death somehow. I wondered if they recognized each other, perhaps from the facility.”

The implication hit us all like a slap to the face. If Elise had been taken by Elemental Enterprises, if she’d been one of their victims…

“Elise might have been an elemental,” Elijah said softly. “That’s why they took her.”

Richard’s expression cracked for just a moment, raw pain flashing across his features before he controlled it again. “She never displayed any abilities to my knowledge. Not before she disappeared, not after. But perhaps she simply hid it well.” The idea that his wife may have kept something so big from him seemed to hurt him deeply.

I swallowed around the hard lump that had formed in my throat. “Olivia and Dr. Rose said they were experimenting, trying to breed elementals with powerful wolves. If they discovered Elise was infertile…”

I couldn’t finish the sentence. The thought was too horrible. Had they broken her mind and released her when she was no longer useful to their breeding program? Or had she somehow escaped?

“The tracker,” Elijah went on. “If someone gave it to me in your territory, specifically targeting Thea…”

“They wanted to know when she’d be vulnerable,” I muttered. “Or maybe they were waiting for the right opportunity. Lena showing up when she did, getting into our house, gaining our trust—it all happened shortly after you got that keychain.”

My mind raced. The conference in Richard’s territory. The tracker. Henry and Krystal.

“Richard,” I said slowly, “everything points to—”

“To my territory,” Richard finished grimly. “Do you think this… this facility might be hidden right under my nose?”

I couldn’t speak. Even Elijah went stiff beside me, and Richard’s face turned ashen from the very thought.

For a moment, the three of us just sat there in silence. If it was true that the new Elemental Enterprises facility was located in Richard’s territory, then that meant we had potentially walked right over it multiple times when we were looking for the stone.

And Lena had used us to find it. No wonder she knew the area so well. Because she had been sent by her superiors to look for the stone many times in that very area. And they had built the facility nearby, in the deep wilderness, where no one would find it—all so they could be close to the stone’s potential location.

Richard’s expression hardened then, settling into something cold and determined.

“We must find that facility,” he said. “At all costs.”