Page 73 of The Alpha’s Unclaimed Mate

He parts the dirt near her hand with the sticks, careful not to touch her, and I see the fingers curled tightly even now, locked around something small, a ring. Working the soil back, he lets it catch the light without lifting it free.

My whole body goes cold.

I know that ring. Ten years gone, and I’d still recognize it blind.

“That’s Daniel’s,” I breathe.

“I thought so.” Adrian sets the sticks down. “It seems like she yanked it off her attacker’s finger. That’s why I wanted you here.” The silence holds a beat. “It wasn’t on his body when we buried him. We looked.”

I stare at the signet pressed into a dead woman’s palm, three territories from where my brother bled out in his own home a decade ago. “How did it get here?”

Adrian has no answer. Rogues killed Daniel and Hannah. That’s what the investigation found all those years ago, a few of them craving bloodshed in their untamed minds, and they destroyed my family while leaving my sleeping niece untouched, a small mercy. But rogues don’t steal. They don’t keep trophies.

They kill, and they leave. They’re mindless creatures.

“If it was hunters,” I say slowly, “we’d have gone to war. You don’t kill a sitting alpha, even a temporary one, and walk away without consequences. The pack would have hunted them down.”

Adrian chooses his words with care. “I don’t want to drag up old wounds. But the state Daniel and Hannah were left in, all that tearing, it always read as our kind: claws, teeth, nothing a human hand does. We bought the rogue explanation easily, didn’t we?”

“What are you saying?” I narrow my eyes at him.

He rolls the sticks between his fingers. “Only that there are two ways this reads, and I don’t like either. First, the hunters have learned to kill with tooth and claw, which leaves the question of where a hunter gets either.” He nods at the grave. “Or the crew that put these two in the ground is the one that came for your brother. This girl got a grip on her attacker, and she tore that ring off his hand going down. Just look at the way she’s holding it.”

My hand drags down my face. “I don’t know what to think right now.”

“Do we take it to the alpha?”

“No.” The word’s out before Adrian finishes the question. “Not a word to him. We keep digging.” I straighten. “He brushed me off over Bella, and he’ll do the same here. I won’t give him the chance to bury this.”

I let out a breath, trying to calm down. “I want to know who actually worked Daniel’s case, who walked the house, who called it rogues, who signed it off. Then I want it opened again and kept quiet.”

Adrian lets out a long breath. “You’re asking me to reopen a killing the alpha closed himself and keep him blind to it. That’s not a small thing to hide.”

“We’ll find a way.” I look back at the grave. “We always do.”

He steps off toward the trees with his phone, keeping his voice under the wind. I stay crouched by the grave a while longer.

For ten years, I took the rogue story at face value because I was too grief-stricken, too angry to trust myself, so I let my uncle handle it. I stare down at the ring, my blood curdling inside me. This ring was what our father gave Daniel. I know how precious it was to him. He never once took it off.

My one mistake was not investigating the murders myself.

Pushing to my feet, I turn my back on the graves.

I need to find out what really happened that night. The bloodbath I walked into, why was a child spared when rogues don’t discriminate between the age of their victims? Why did the attackers take my brother’s ring?

Why were Daniel and Hannah murdered if it wasn’t rogues?

“Marcus?” Adrian steps toward me, his expression serious. “What do you want me to do now?”

I turn back to the gravesite where two teenagers lie together, their families unaware that they never ran off. “Inform the pack of the bodies. Keep it quiet. And in the meantime, get me Daniel and Hannah’s file, Adrian. Whatever happened back then, I want answers.”

Adrian nods.

As I shift to leave, my thoughts are filled with turmoil.

These two were killed with wolfsbane. My thumb and forefinger that had pressed against the bone rub together idly.

The proof is irrefutable.