(Alaric's POV)
"Damn it! Why isn't he answering?" Giovanni calls his dad for the tenth time and it goes to voicemail. We landed in New York a couple of minutes ago and we've tried getting in contact with Markus, Anne, and Chris.
No one has picked up and we're all starting to freak out in our own way. Jaisley is trying to act cool, but her eyes show her nervousness, Hanna is sweating out of control, Don is growling, and Giovanni is tapping his feet in impatience.
Me. I'm pacing back and forth, eyebrow twitching, and my mouth is weirdly dry.
"Chris' phone location is off, but we can try their apartment. I have the address. If they're not there, then we can probably find something that'll tell us where they are," Don says. Hanna calls an Uber and we make our way there.
My body is shaking with nerves and my head feels like it'll explode. I really hope everything is ok with the girls. I've been waiting for this moment where I'll reunite with Anne. I haven't seen her in months and honestly, my heart is bleeding.
I've tried to hide and act like I'm ok, but I feel like a part of me is missing. If something happens to her, I don't know what I'd do. If someone hurts her, I'll rip them to shreds.
I look over at Don and he has a painful expression on his face.
"Are you alright? You know they're going to be ok, right? We're going to find them," I tell him. I've repeated the same lines to myself a hundred times and I'm starting to believe it. Anne would never allow herself to be harmed. She's a badass witch and she's strong.
"I couldn't feel her for a while and my body felt numb. Then when I could feel my body again, I felt burning all over. What if someone's hurting or torturing her?" There's a fiery in Don's eyes and I can tell his wolf is trying to take over. His wolf can't stand the thought of someone else touching his mate and I know he's hurting.
"The girls have to be fine. They're both strong and smart. If they're not at the apartment, we will find them," I reassure him and myself.
It doesn't take long for the Uber to stop in front of their apartment building. LaGuardia Airport was only about half an hour from their apartment, and that's including heavy traffic.
I look up at what looks like over a hundred stories of luxury. It's mostly made of brick, steel, and glass. We all follow Don up to the girl's apartment, B36. They didn't live too high up.
Giovanni puts his ear against the door, seeing if he can hear anything. When he doesn't, he knocks the door down with the force in his leg. The door comes crashing down with a hard thud.
"A bit dramatic, don't you think," Jaisley asks Gio. He shrugs his shoulders and steps first into the apartment.
The space is filled with bright colors, alot of big windows, and everything looks cozy. The girls aren't here and it feels like a dead end.
"Lets just look around to see if we can find something. This would've been the perfect time to have a witch on our side, but surprising, the two witches we did know, are the ones that are missing," Hanna says.
We all start looking around for anything we can find. I can't help, but feel distracted by the heavy scent of Anne in the apartment. I've been away from her for so long that her scent hits me like a storm and drowns out all of my other senses once I come in contact with it.
My feet lead me to Anne's room and I spot Jaisley with a picture in her hands. Her eyes are bulged in shock, but when I walk in, she hides it behind her back.
"What's that," I ask her, referring to the picture behind her back. I take a look around Anne's room. It's spacious and it definitely describes her. The room is a mix of burgundy, black, and white. Her room has a darker look to it compared to the living space and kitchen.
She has her knife and gun collection displayed on one wall, instead of in the box she had when she was living in the pack house. I can see the box on top of her dresser though.
Her room in the pack house and her room at her dad's house looks nothing like this. She never got to decorate like she really wanted to. Does that mean she wasn't fully herself in New Orleans?
This room shows more of the person she is on the inside. How dark she is on the inside, all her fears and insecurities, the cold that always creeps into her heart when she doesn't want it to, and everything else that creep up on her in the dark.
It's not the smile she plasters on in public.
I turn my attention back to Jaisley, who thinks I forgot about the picture. I walk over to her and try to grab the picture, but she swerves away from me in lightning speed.
"What are you hiding," I ask her and she narrows her eyes at me. She still tries to run away from me with her vampire speed, but I eventually catch her and tear it from her hand. She doesn't try to take it back from me because its pointless.
I look down at the picture in my hand and my breath freezes.
An ultrasound.
"What is this, Jaisley," I ask her, but I already know the answer. I swallow a dry lump in my throat. "This is yours, right," I ask her, but I know it's not.
I watch her shake her head. I breathe out a long sigh and my eyebrows scrunch in confusion. I push the picture of the baby in my back pocket and try to act calm when I hear someone coming to the room.
"We know where they went," Gio says loudly as he runs in. The others follow him in as he carries a laptop in his hands. "They had to be going here. They have the coordinates to the middle of a forest somewhere. This is possibly the last thing they looked at before they left. We should go now."
My mind is a blur as we go to the destination of where we think the girls are. I don't know what to think or what to feel.
I've come to the conclusion that the baby has to be mine. In the picture, the baby looks like it could be eight months, but she looks about the same size as Gianna. Gianna's doctor says that wolf pups grow faster and there's no way Anne was two or three months pregnant when she lived at the pack house.
Why did she hide this from me? Did she not trust me? What happens now? What do I do now?
We walk through the forest because the Uber couldn't drive through the forest. Gio tries tracking on his phone and we eventually walk up to this mansion. We all pause in shock at the bloodbath we see waiting for us.
"What the hell," Hanna speaks out what we're all thinking.
First thing we see on the porch of the mansion is a sea of bodies. By the smell of it, they're werewolves and at second glance we register that they've all been brutally murdered.
Some heads have been severed from their bodies and others have bleeding gapes through parts of their bodies. There's no sound coming from inside the mansion and the door that leads inside is wide open.
Don is the first to run into the manion and we all follow once we snap out of our frozen state. Everywhere I turn, there's another body hanging somewhere or exploded into pieces.
It's not a pretty image, that's for sure.
We split up and look around the huge mansion. This was a pack house, but now it's just a place that holds a lot of murdered spirits.
"Chris!" I hear Don yell from the third floor. I can hear the others rushing to where he is and I climb the stairs. I get there last and everyone's standing around Chris who's sitting on the ground, covered in blood. She's sitting on the ground next to a dead body and I almost die when I think it's Anne.
When I catch the scent of the person dead, it smells nothing like Anne, and I almost cry in relief. When I see who's really on the ground, my tears of joy are replaced by a pang that goes through my heart.
"Dad," Gio croaks out. He falls to his knees next to his father's body. He lays with his hand over his heart that bled out onto the floor. I can image a sword was plunged through his heart and ripped out.
"WHO DID THIS," Gio yells. Chris jumps at the sound of Gio's scream and tears fill her eyes.
"Where's Anne," I ask Chris, fearing what happened to Markus has happened to Anne. She looks up at me and shakes her head, letting out a sob.
"She's not here," Chris answers.