They Erased My Name. Now Every Alpha Kneels to Me Chapter 09

They Erased My Name. Now Every Alpha Kneels to Me Chapter 09 – The Missing Person File

Nothing was taken.

That’s what made it terrifying.

Juno’s team swept every room. No forced entry. Nothing moved, nothing stolen. No cash gone. No weapons gone.

“They weren’t robbing us,” Faye said. “They were looking for something.”

“For what?”

I already knew. I just didn’t want to say it out loud.

I put us on rotating watch, ordered that nobody leaves the wing alone, and went to report it – and walked straight into Kade Locke in the stairwell at six in the morning, in a t-shirt, holding two coffees.

“One of these is for you,” he said. “I was going to leave it at your door like a coward.”

“Somebody’s been inside my wing.”

He set the coffees down on the step. “Since when?”

“Ten days. Maybe two weeks. No entry damage.”

“Then it’s someone with a key or someone with training,” he said. “I’ll pull my own people’s movement logs. All of

them. Including mine.”

That surprised me. “You’ll flag yourself?”

“I’ll flag myself.” He met my eyes. “You had a corridor full of my unit thinking garbage about your women and I hadn’t noticed. I’d rather be embarrassed than useless.”

“Marry him,” Nyx said.

“Shut up.”

“Sorry?” said Locke.

“Nothing. Internal management issue.”

He handed me the coffee. Our fingers touched for about a second and a half, and I thought about the oath, and about how the oath very specifically permits exactly one exception, and then I thought about how I was a girl whose own fated mate had publicly cut her loose in front of four hundred people, and who had absolutely no business wanting

anything from anyone.

“I’ve been here four years,” he said. “Nobody’s ever closed a case in ninety minutes. Nobody’s ever knocked out a Commander in front of the King. Who are you, Wren Ashgrove?”

“Nobody,” I said. “Ask my parents.”

I meant it as a joke. It came out flat and ugly, and he heard it.

He didn’t push. That’s the thing about Kade Locke I keep failing to get over. He picked up his coffee, walked me to the top of the stairs, and said quietly, “For the record, Commander. Whoever taught you that you were nobody was lying to

you.”

Then Monday came, and the council, and everything cracked open.

The King opened with the Redmarch-Hollowbrook resolution. Six Commanders got to hear, in detail, how the girl they’d been calling he for a year had closed the file they’d failed twice.

Then Director Hale slid a thin blue folder down the table to me.

“New intake. Missing person, filed by a founding bloodline. High priority. They’ve offered the Crown an obscene

amount of money.”

“How long missing?”

“Thirteen months,” Hale said. “Reported eleven days ago.”

Something in my chest went very still.

“Thirteen months missing,” I repeated. “Reported eleven days ago.”

“That’s what I said.”

“Why the delay?”

Hale shifted. “The filing family claims she was living on their estate and they, ah. Failed to observe her departure.”

Every Commander at that table laughed.

I did not.

I opened the folder.

There’s a specific sound a room makes when everyone in it realizes something at once and nobody wants to be first

to speak.

Photograph clipped to the corner. A girl in a green dress, hair down to her waist, not smiling. Taken at a pack council

dinner thirteen months ago.

ASHGROVE, WREN ELEANOR. Age 17 at time of disappearance. Sole daughter of Alpha Rhodes and Luna Isolde

Ashgrove.

Reward for information: eight figures.

Attached: personal statement from the family.

I turned the page.

My mother’s handwriting. I’d know it anywhere. She writes her W’s like little waves.

To whoever finds her –

Her name is Wren. She turned eighteen on the eleventh, not the fourth, and I let her celebrate the wrong day her entire life because I was too proud to admit a mistake.

She takes her coffee with too much sugar. She hates pink. She sleeps on her left side. She answered my questions for seventeen years and I stopped answering hers for one, and I did it on purpose, and it was the worst decision of my life, and I cannot tell you why in this letter because the reason is the same thing that will get her killed.

Please. If she is alive, do not tell anyone you have found her.

Tell me. Only me.

– I. Ashgrove

My hands were completely steady. I have no idea how.

Seven Commanders were watching my face. The King was watching my face. Kade Locke had gone rigid across the

table.

“Commander Ashgrove,” the King said gently. “Is there something you’d like to tell this room?”

I closed the folder.

“Yes, Your Majesty,” I said. “This one’s mine.”