Page 116 of Alpha’s Possession

“We have video evidence!”

“From grainy footage where we can’t even make out their faces. Even you said it was strange that there was no footage of them exiting the parking lot.”

“It’s her car, the plates matched on the traffic cam.”

I shake my head. There is so much that doesn’t make sense about that day. Why did it take so long for someone to notice Hana’s body in the parking lot? And the tire marks where the car was found line up with it being run off the road, not Harlow running someone over. Yet every report had the same conclusion: Harlow’s guilt.

The authorities refused to let us get involved. We hired a private investigator to look into it, and while he said things didn’t add up, he couldn’t find anything to prove Harlow did or didn’t do it. All evidence pointed to Harlow, yet why would she kill Thane’s mother? She could have just taken the keys and run. Hana probably would have let her. She was non-confrontational by nature; she would have just let her go and then called us.

I just can’t picture Harlow cutting Hana’s throat so badly that her head barely remained attached to her body. Harlow looked so shocked when she stabbed Thane. She looked horrified at what she had done.

“I can’t believe you are questioning me on this when all evidence shows she did it,” Thane hisses at me before clutching his hair in frustration.

“You want someone to blame. You need justice for her death, but that doesn’t mean it was Harlow. Think, Thane. She was willing to let you command her to ask about it. Now, why would she agree to that if she is guilty?”

“Because she knows I wouldn’t. She knows I hate commanding you.”

“Yet you had no issue commanding her down in the Den or at work. She had every reason to assume you would do it, Thane,” I tell him, turning on my heel and moving toward the door.

“Rhen? Wait! You’re not leaving too, are you?”

“We’ll be at Elaine’s. She needs help unpacking anyway. She hasn’t gotten much done.”

“But you’re coming back here?” he asks, sounding almost desperate.

“Not while you can’t see past your fear of being wrong.”

“Being wrong?”

“Yes, Thane. Being wrong. That’s why you didn’t command her. Because if she’s innocent, all that anger you harbor for her will turn to guilt knowing the one person you’ve hated for all these years is the one person you should love,” I tell him before walking out, leaving him on his own.

Chapter Eighty-Seven

~Harlow~

I wished for this day for so long. To wake up from the nightmare where she no longer exists.

My other half.

A bond between sisters is sacred, but as twins, we are one and the same. Identical yet individual. We are more than blood. We are two halves of a whole.

For years, I thought she was dead; I grieved her, missed her, and wished more than anything to trade places with her, believing all this time that she was dead because I was too scared, too weak, to go with the pack that I was originally sold to.

She sacrificed herself for me, and that is a guilt no sibling wants to live with. I thought that I had lost the other half of my soul. That's what she is. But she was here all along.

“How are you here?” I murmur, unwilling to let her go just in case she vanishes, and I wake up in the Den to find this is all a dream—that my mind has finally broken and conjured all this just so I won’t be alone anymore.

Zara looks at Jake. “They knew I hadn’t bloomed, and they waited. Our scores were the same, Harlow,” she tells me when I hear a soft crying noise, making me look up at the ceiling.

“I will get him.”

“You already have a baby? I have a niece or nephew?” I ask her, watching the man move off the couch and toward the door.

“Yes, a nephew. His name is Mason. He is one year old,” she says, looking down at her belly. She lets go of my hands to protectively cradle her large bump.

“Would have had two by now, but our daughter was stillborn,” she murmurs, looking at Jake as if in apology.

“It wasn’t your fault.”