Get It 22

[Max’s POV]

The ceiling has been the same shade of nothing for four hours. My wolf paces behind my ribs, relentless and certain in a way the rest of me can’t match—she’s mine, it insists, a drum beat I can’t quiet.

Two facts keeping me vertical in this bed when every muscle screams for sleep. Kylie is my fated mate, and her mother’s pack of origin and name don’t exist—and both of them point in the same direction. Someone has been lying about what Kylie is, and that someone lives across the hall.

By dawn I give up pretending. The shower runs cold enough to make my teeth ache, and by the time I reach the kitchen my father is reading patrol reports at the counter.

I pour my own coffee, drink it black, and build the conversation in my head before I open my mouth—family interest, not investigation. Easy. Normal.

“You’re up early.” He doesn’t look up from the page.

“Couldn’t sleep.” I lean against the counter, cradling the mug against my sternum. “Ceremony prep on my mind. I’ve been thinking about the Donovans—now that Hope’s family, seems like I should know the full history.”

Dad sets the report down and gives me his full attention. “Ask what you want to ask, son.”

“Callum.” I keep my voice level, thumb tracing the handle of my mug. “I know the broad strokes—Eastern Ridge, the skirmish. But I was young. Tell me what actually happened.”

My father’s hand wraps tighter around his cup, his thumb running the rim. “Callum Donovan was a good wolf. One of the best I’ve served with—steady under fire, no ego, came home to his girls every time.”

He pauses, and the kitchen shrinks around the silence. His thumb stops on the rim of his mug. “Until the day he didn’t.”

“What happened at the Ridge?” I aim for both carefullness and nonchalance, because the topic is too aching to be flippant, yet I can’t give him any suspicions of my intentions.

“Border incursion—rogue pack pushing our eastern boundary.” Dad’s voice drops into debrief register, stripped of everything but sequence. “We mobilized a unit of six. Callum held forward position with Mark and Garrett flanking.”

“Thomas was there too?” I want the full picture—every piece of who these people were before Hope became my father’s wife.

“Anchored the rear. Jensen and Cole ran perimeter.” He lists the names with the flatness of a man who’s recited this particular roster too many times for it to sound anything but tired. “Callum took point on initial contact. Rogues came through the tree line at the ravine, and we held formation.”

“Until?”

“Second group hit from the south.” My father’s gaze drifts past me, through the kitchen window, into a morning that happened fifteen years ago. “Callum turned to cover Mark’s flank. The wound was to the throat—quick, clean. He was down before any of us could close the gap.”

My jaw tightens. I’ve heard death described by soldiers before—the clinical precision isn’t detachment, it’s the only way to get through the telling. “You were there.”

“Standing ten feet to his left. I carried him out of that ravine myself.” His voice thickens at the edges and he clears his throat. “Thomas lost his arm in the same fight—you’ve seen the scar. Mark still walks with the limp.”

Six wolves in a unit, and three of them still carry the fight in their bodies. A good man died protecting his own, and the pack took in what he left behind. That’s the history Kylie grew up inside—a dead father who earned his place, and a mother who walked into the gap he left.

“Hope and little Kylie—she was barely eight.” Dad shakes his head, the motion slow, heavy. “I told Hope myself. Sat in her living room while her daughter slept upstairs and watched that woman’s world come apart.”

“Did Hope ever talk about where they came from before the pack?”

“Small pack out west—Silver Creek, I think. Disbanded before she met Callum.” He lifts one shoulder. “Some packs don’t survive. People scatter.”

My grip on the mug tightens hard enough that my knuckles ache. Silver Creek. The name that leads to empty registries and dead-end searches across every database I can access.

“Why the sudden interest?” His eyes sharpen—alpha instinct surfacing through the father.

“She’s your Luna now.” I drain the coffee and set the mug in the sink with a control I don’t entirely feel. “Just getting to know the family. Seems right.”

He accepts this because it’s reasonable, and because the alternative—his son investigating his wife—isn’t a place his mind goes. Not yet.

I walk out carrying the full weight of Callum Donovan’s story—a man the pack loved, a death that left a hole, a family the pack wrapped around without question. My father’s voice when he talked about carrying Callum out of that ravine wasn’t performance. That was a man who still misses his friend.

And Hope walked into all of that trust with a fabricated name and a daughter she’d already started hiding. The pack gave her everything because of who Callum was, and she’s been using it ever since.

My father’s study is empty when I circle back, the morning light cutting pale stripes across the desk. The pack registry sits in the third drawer, and I pull Kylie’s entry because I need to see it once more with my own eyes, need the proof to sit in my hands instead of my head.

Kylie Donovan. Date of birth, parentage, pack absorption at age eight. And there, in the field that should read shifted or bonded: wolfless.

Human-presenting. No wolf manifestation on record. The words sit on the page like a forgery I can see through but can’t prove.

I’ve had her scent in my lungs—wolf scent, unmistakable, drenched in a bond that nearly brought me to my knees on the training mat. My wolf recognized her before my brain caught up.

She is not dormant. She is not latent, not weak—she’s been burning behind whatever wall someone built to contain her, and I’ve seen the fire break through.

Someone registered her as nothing. Someone maintained that registration through every annual review, every academy intake, every physical where a wolf like hers should have torn through the pretense.

Not oversight. Not error. Fifteen years of deliberate, sustained erasure—and the only person with the motive and the proximity to hold it in place that long is the woman the pack just made Luna.

I don’t have a word for what Hope Donovan is. But I have the shape of it—someone who can suppress a wolf that powerful, fabricate a history that holds for over a decade, and hide her daughter in plain sight inside a pack of wolves built to detect exactly what Kylie is.

The Donovan file is thick—absorption paperwork, Kylie’s academy enrollment, and at the bottom, the Eastern Ridge report. I spread it across the desk because I’m here and the drawer is open and I want to understand what Callum’s sacrifice actually bought his family.

Patrol formation, casualty report, witness statements—six accounts from Mark, Garrett, Thomas, Jensen, Cole, and my father. Every detail lines up clean and unambiguous.

Callum Donovan died fighting alongside the alpha, and the pack honored his family because of it—gave them a home, gave them protection, gave Hope every benefit of every doubt. And somewhere inside all that generosity, a woman with no verifiable past made herself Luna.