Get It 19

[Max’s POV]

Hope Donovan’s registration file is sixteen pages. I’ve read it eleven times, and the holes keep getting wider.

Transferred in fifteen years ago with her husband Callum Donovan—registered wolf, strong bloodline. His daughter should have manifested by puberty at the latest, and the probability of Callum’s genetics producing a wolfless child is near-impossible.

The origin pack on Hope’s registration is listed as Silver Creek. I searched the inter-pack database at two in the morning, then the archive index at four—not disbanded, not merged, not renamed.

Silver Creek doesn’t appear in a single registry going back forty years. A pack that by every measure was simply never there.

Hope arrived with a story nobody questioned because Callum’s word was enough. After he died she became a widow with a child, and sympathy bought her fourteen years of unbroken silence.

My wolf hasn’t settled since the heat—pacing, pulling toward a girl whose scent appeared for hours and vanished like something confiscated. A girl whose body is falling apart in ways that suggest intervention, not nature.

Every configuration I build from what I know—the heat, the pull, the fabricated background—leads back to the same woman. She is downstairs right now, arranging flowers in the kitchen.

Hope is trimming stems when I come down, each cut placed with deliberation. Her smile arrives warm and immediate when she sees me—the temperature of welcome without the substance behind it.

“Max, good morning—you look exhausted, is everything alright?” She adjusts a lily without breaking eye contact.

“I wanted to talk to you about Kylie.” I pour coffee because my hands need occupation that isn’t clenching.

“Of course, what about her?” Hope sets down the shears and gives me the full weight of her attention.

“She’s getting worse—nosebleeds, tremors she hides by keeping her hands busy, weight she can’t afford to lose.” I lean against the counter and watch her face the way I’d read a sparring partner.

“My Kylie has always been fragile, Max—low iron, poor constitution since she was small.” Hope’s hand drifts to her collarbone, fingertips resting against the hollow of her throat.

“Fragile kids don’t dodge blind-side strikes that half my trained wolves miss.” I let that land between us and wait for what her face does with it.

“Kids do surprising things under adrenaline—you of all people should know that.” Hope picks up the shears and trims a stem at a careful angle.

“This wasn’t adrenaline, it was instinct faster than anything I’ve seen from a wolfless student in fourteen assessment cycles.” My grip tightens around the mug.

“Well, she’s always been a quick learner—her father was the same way, rest his soul.” Hope’s voice goes soft on father, wielding the dead man’s memory like a shield.

“She needs to see the pack healer, Hope, and not eventually—tomorrow.” I hold her gaze and don’t blink.

“Tomorrow, absolutely—you have my word, Max.” Her smile doesn’t shift by a single degree, which tells me everything.

“It’s so kind of you to notice what I should have caught myself.” She picks up the shears again.

Kind. She deploys the word like a curtain between this conversation and whatever sits behind it. I set down the mug and give my hands the counter edge instead.

“Has she always had the tremors, or is that new?” I keep my voice one careful degree below the line between conversation and interrogation.

“New, I’m fairly certain—stress, I’d imagine.” Hope performs recollection, eyes lifting briefly to the ceiling. “She puts entirely too much pressure on herself at the academy, and I keep telling her to ease up.” Her fingers resume their careful trimming.

“She mentioned a fever last week that knocked her out for a whole night, said she hasn’t felt right since.” I watch the shears in her hands for what they do when her face doesn’t move.

“The fever, yes—she told me about that, rode it out alone, poor thing.” Hope’s fingers go still on the stems for one beat, maybe less, then resume their careful work.

“She didn’t come to you that night?” I keep my posture loose against the counter, giving nothing away.

“Richard and I were at the summit dinner—we didn’t get back until very late, I wish she’d called me.” She doesn’t hesitate for a fraction.

She placed the exact night without my naming it—I said fever, not a date. She located it without a single beat of delay, which means she knew about it before her daughter mentioned it.

“I tell her to come to me when things get bad, but she insists on handling everything alone—it worries me.” Hope sighs, a sound engineered for maximum maternal sympathy.

“She’s not being stubborn about it—she’s being careful, and that’s a different thing entirely.” The edge arrives in my voice before I can smooth it down.

“You seem to know my daughter quite well for someone she’s lived with barely three weeks.” Something sharpens behind her eyes and vanishes before it fully forms.

“I run pack assessments for a living, observation is the whole job.” I rinse my mug without rushing and set it on the rack.

“Of course—how silly of me to read anything into it.” She returns to the flowers with renewed focus. “I’ll have the healer see her first thing tomorrow morning.” She trims a stem without looking up.

“I’d appreciate that, Hope—let me know what they find.” I move toward the hallway, and her voice follows me like something carefully aimed.

“You’re such a good brother, Max.” The emphasis on brother is slight enough to pass for accidental, and I know it isn’t.

My wolf goes quiet behind my ribs as I take the stairs—not calm, the kind of quiet that precedes something decisive. Good brother. I should embroider that on a pillow, maybe a matching set.

She rehearsed that conversation—not for me, but for anyone who might eventually come asking.

The tremors started after the heat and worsened after the night I left Kylie’s room. Bodies don’t deteriorate on a schedule unless someone is winding the mechanism.

My study locks behind me at ten, the screen filling with alternate registries. Border patrol logs, migration treaties, census records spanning five decades—Silver Creek should appear somewhere.

Four hours of cross-referencing produces nothing. Phonetic variations, historical name changes, regional dialects—every search returns the same blank answer.

I pull border skirmish records because packs destroyed in conflict leave scars in the system. Names crossed through but present—wounds that never fully close.

No wound, no footnote, no Silver Creek in any form, any archive, any decade. I lean back and the chair creaks while the screen throws blue light against the dark.

Callum was real—verified, remembered by wolves who carried his body off the Eastern Ridge. My father stood beside him when he fell and still speaks his name with the weight of earned respect.

But the woman Callum brought home walked out of thin air with papers from a place that never drew breath. She is downstairs right now, trimming flowers and calling me her daughter’s brother.

The pack that Hope Donovan claims to come from has never existed—not in any registry, on any continent, in any recorded history of wolf-kind. And the woman who invented it is my father’s wife.