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Ethan’s name, my right-hand man who’s been helping me find Irene, pops up on my phone screen.

I answer the call.

“Boss, we have a lead.” His voice is gruff.

My muscles tighten. “On Irene?”

“There’s a hospital that might have records from when she was a child,” he says. “The files are old, but if we can access them, we might confirm whether she’s alive.”

The last lead we got was from a healer six years ago, and she wasn’t any help because she succumbed to dementia before I could even reach her. She couldn’t remember her own name, let alone remember who Irene was in the first place.

But this? This is the first real lead in years.

I should be thrilled.

Instead, as I grab my coat and walk past Lila’s empty desk, the thought of finding Irene tastes like rusty nails on my tongue.

The hospital doors hiss open,spilling us into a space that reeks of sickness and sterility.

It smells like antiseptic, ammonia, stale coffee, and beneath it all, the faintest trace of blood.

I grit my teeth as my wolf shudders.

Too clean. Too sterile. Too wrong.

The sharp overhead lights reflect off the polished white tiles. Nurses move too fast, wheeling in gurneys, pushing carts, their footsteps a frantic click-click-click against the floor.

A man wafts to us from a nearby room.

A baby wails somewhere down the hall.

The whole place hums with life, but it’s a kind of life that lingers too close to death.

The hospital chokes me.

The walls feel tight, the air stale. My wolf paces beneath my skin, his fur bristling in discomfort. He wants out.

Ethan, who’s standing beside me, taps my shoulder and jerks his chin toward the reception desk. “I’ll ask about the records here. The healer in charge is Dr. Wells. You might have better luck talking to him than me, boss.”

Right. If he can't get the records from the nurse, the healer in charge might have access to them.

I nod. “We regroup here in twenty minutes.”

Ethan gives a sharp, “Yes, boss,” before walking off.

I watch as he slides into conversation with a blonde nurse, his easy grin already in place. Most men wouldn’t be able to flirt their way into confidential hospital records, but Ethan Maxwell isn’t most men.

I picked him to be my right-hand man for a reason.

I take the opposite hallway, my boots echoing off the cracked tile floors as I move deeper into the wreck that is St. Bishop’s Hospital.

St. Bishop's is one of the oldest hospitals in Phoenix, which was founded for our kind. It's council-approved, pack-funded, and where werewolves used to and are still going to when human hospitals aren't an option.

Yet looking at it now, it’s worse than I expected.

The walls are yellowed, water-stained, and peeling in some places. The beds, the few they have, are separated by thin curtains, barely offering privacy. I pass a frail old man sharing a bed with another patient, his breathing labored.

Sad to say, the stench of cheap disinfectant barely covers the scent of sweat, infection, and decay.