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Chapter sixteen

Felix

I waited until the others’ heartbeats settled into the steady rhythms of sleep before triple-checking the lock on my door.

Six weeks undercover, and my wolf was climbing the fucking walls.

Not because of the space—the converted storage room with its exposed brick and industrial pipes was twice the size of my spartan quarters at Council headquarters—but because every minute was a performance that was slowly peeling away layers of my sanity.

I’d decorated the place with just enough shit to sell the Felix persona—motorcycle magazines marking bikes I’d never buy, clothes strategically tossed to suggest a man who didn’t answer to anyone’s standards, and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s that I’d been methodically replacing with colored water.

Couldn’t have the lone wolf badass looking like he couldn’t hold his liquor.

Once I was sure I was alone, I stripped off my shirt and examined the purple-black bruise spreading across my ribs. Gideon, the dramatic bastard, hadn’t pulled his punches during our little staged fight. The edges were already fading to a sickly yellow, my werewolf healing handling it.

“Fuck,” I muttered, pressing my fingers against the tender spot.

Six weeks of this charade was taking its toll. I rolled my shoulders, trying to shake off the tension. The insomnia was getting worse—three, maybe four hours of sleep a night, my mind too wired to shut down.

The transformation from Sam Shaw—Wolf Council member, Derek’s twin, the man who’d failed the Milton Pack—into Felix Masters, disgruntled rogue wolf with authority issues and charm to spare, had been more exhausting than I’d anticipated.

It wasn’t just the physical changes—the longer hair I’d grown out, the perpetual stubble.

It was the mental drain of thinking like Felix, reacting like Felix, being Felix in every goddamn moment while Sam Shaw slowly suffocated beneath the mask.

But the worst part? How at home I felt here despite it all.

This loft, these people… they’d become something I hadn’t expected.

Something I couldn’t afford to want. When Mira made coffee at 2 a.m. because she couldn’t sleep, when Zeke hummed old folk songs while tending his plants, when Duke actually cracked a smile at one of my stupid jokes, when Annabella laughed—really laughed—it felt good. I felt lighter than I had in months.

Here, I wasn’t Sam Shaw. Wasn’t the Council member who had to make the brutal calculations that ruined lives.

I wasn’t the person who’d fucked up, taken pity on a ripper, and gotten a whole Pack killed.

Here, the weight of those dead wolves didn’t press against my chest with every breath.

Here, I could pretend, for stolen moments, that I was simply Felix Masters—that I could run with this crew, let loose, maybe even fall in love with a woman whose eyes changed color with her moods.

Which made what I was doing a special kind of hell.

My stomach clenched as the image of Reynolds flashed through my mind—the man who’d been my mentor at the Wolf Council, now sitting in a care facility, unable to remember his own name.

The last time I visited, he’d looked at me with empty eyes and asked if I was there to fix the plumbing while his mate sat next to me, silently crying as she held his hand.

That’s what Annabella’s crew did to people. What Lydia did with her memory magic. Everything that made Reynolds who he was—his history, his knowledge, his bonds—gone. Erased like they’d never existed.

I thought about tonight’s mission—Gideon, another Council enforcer they’d tried to “process.” How many more Council members would end up like Reynolds if I didn’t stop them?

But then I’d see Annabella curled up on the couch with her coffee, or catch her singing under her breath while she worked, or witness her fierce protectiveness over her team, and the certainty would waver.

She wasn’t a monster. None of them were.

They genuinely believed they were fighting for something better: a world where witches and werewolves could coexist, where children like her sister wouldn’t be persecuted for what they were.

There would be no persuading them otherwise.

Annabella would always be relentless in pursuit of a better life for Ellie.

That made them more dangerous, not less. And it made my job infinitely harder.

I reached down and retrieved the USB Gideon had slipped me from where I’d hidden it in the sole of my boot.

I connected the drive to my tablet, the triple-layer encryption responding to my thumbprint, retinal scan, and personal authentication code. When the files finally decrypted, I frowned at the documents filling the screen.

“What the fuck?” I muttered, scrolling faster.

Evidence of Victor Kane—the newly appointed human representative to the Wolf Council—systematically recruiting humans who’d been trafficked or harmed by werewolves.

Building a network of anti-Shifter operatives within human government agencies.

Pushing for more “aggressive containment” policies that read like concentration camp proposals with prettier language.

Kane had been controversial from the start, the first human ever appointed to the Wolf Council, supposedly to help ease tensions between our species.

But Kane was ex-military with a well-documented hatred of Shifters.

When Derek had been in the army, he’d led a task force charged with hunting down Kane after he went rogue.

Derek had believed Kane had died in an airstrike, only for him to resurface a few months ago and get himself nominated to the Wolf Council as part of a deal with the human governments.

A second file showed financial records that made my blood run cold. Speculation, hints, but no firm evidence yet, that Kane was funneling Council emergency funds into Webster’s shell companies. Money meant to help ripple victims was being used to manufacture more of the drug.

The next document was a detailed timeline projecting ripple’s spread through Shifter populations, complete with target percentages for addiction rates in major cities:

Initial distribution (completed) – Target: 5% of Shifter population in conclave cities

Secondary wave (in progress) – Target: 15% of Shifter population, concentrated attacks in human areas

Crisis point (projected in 60 days) – Target: 25% of population, expected human response: containment camps

Final solution (projected in 6 months) – Vaccine distribution, permanent suppression of Shifter abilities

The scope of it made my stomach drop. This wasn’t some underground drug operation or power grab—this was a coordinated attack on every Shifter in North America. A calculated genocide disguised as public health policy.

Most damning were logs of private meetings between Kane and certain Council members, always followed by unexpected shifts in voting patterns.

Council members who’d spent decades maintaining their positions suddenly voting in lockstep on matters that furthered Kane’s agenda. What the hell did he have on them?

And then I saw it—a photo of a memo, unsigned, dated just two weeks ago:

Memory extraction operations proving unexpectedly beneficial.

Subjects retain basic personality and motor functions while being unable to recall operational details, personal relationships, or decisions from their previous positions.

Psychological impact on remaining Council members significant—increased paranoia and new susceptibility to our influence.

Essential to continue supporting AM operation while ensuring operatives remain unaware of broader objectives and purpose.

AM’s idealism makes her an optimal asset for destabilization efforts.

My hands went numb around the tablet.

AM. Annabella McGrath.

Annabella.

The woman sleeping just down the hall, who’d risked her life to save Mira tonight, who carried the weight of trying to fix a broken world on her shoulders.

Someone—Webster, it had to be—wasn’t just using Annabella’s team to weaken the Council.

The memory wipes were creating a strategic leadership vacuum in Shifter governance.

With each Council member they “processed,” the Wolf Council became more dysfunctional, less able to coordinate anti-ripple efforts across territories.

This leadership collapse was allowing ripple to spread unchecked, creating more addicted Shifters who were attacking humans in record numbers.

And those attacks were exactly what Kane needed.

Every news headline about rippers harming humans became ammunition for his anti-Shifter policies.

Every grieving human family became a potential supporter for his containment solutions.

Annabella thought she was dismantling a corrupt system, but she was actually helping create the crisis that would justify Shifter genocide.

I stared at the memo until the words blurred, my chest tight with something between rage and desperation.

She thought she was fighting for her sister’s future, for a world where half-witches like her could belong somewhere.

Instead, she was helping to build the very system that would destroy us all.

I wanted to punch something. Wanted to track down Webster and tear his throat out with my bare hands. Wanted to find Kane and show him exactly what happened to humans who thought they could cage apex predators.

Instead, I sat in the dark, staring at the screen.

Annabella was being manipulated, and she had no fucking idea.

I had no fucking clue how to stop it. Worse, I couldn’t tell Annabella without blowing my cover and likely getting myself killed.