Claimed by the Alpha I Hate – Episode 27
Nolan found Daisy after her final class, but the warmth of their hallway kiss had vanished from his expression. Elias stood beside him holding a sealed file. Daisy recognized her mother’s name across the front.
Every question she had postponed returned at once. “You finished the investigation?” Her hands tightened around her books. She had demanded the truth for days, yet now she feared what it might take from her.
Nolan led her into an empty office. He dismissed the guards and waited until the door closed before Elias placed the file on the desk. No one treated the moment like an Alpha delivering a convenient answer.
“We reconstructed the takeover from patrol records, witness accounts, and the medical report,” Elias said. Several original documents had been hidden among Eastwind’s administrative files rather than destroyed.
Daisy opened the folder. Timelines covered the first page. Blackwood forces had entered the central settlement hours after Vera was last seen alive near the western boundary.
“That doesn’t prove anything,” she said. Nolan could have sent scouts ahead or issued an order no public record contained. Months of hatred resisted collapsing beneath a few lines of ink.
“My advance units were accounted for,” Nolan replied. “Their locations were verified by Eastwind witnesses as well as our own logs.” He did not ask her to trust his word alone.
Elias showed her the medical findings. Vera’s injuries did not match claws, wolf bites, or weapons carried by Blackwood soldiers. The surviving evidence pointed to an attack before the main invasion reached her location, though it did not identify the killer.
Daisy read the page twice. The letters blurred, and she pressed her palm against the desk. If Nolan had not killed Vera, then the anger that brought Daisy back to Eastwind had been aimed at the wrong man.
“I told you I didn’t kill her,” Nolan said firmly. There was no triumph in the statement. Clearing his name did not restore Daisy’s mother or explain why Vera had been alone near a dangerous boundary.
“But she died because you invaded.” Daisy reached for the last certainty available. “If Blackwood hadn’t come—”
“The estimated time of death was before my first force crossed into Eastwind.” Nolan held her gaze. “Whatever happened to Vera was already happening while Scott prepared to run.”
The truth overwhelmed her. Daisy had pictured Nolan’s hands stained with her mother’s blood so often that abandoning the image felt like losing Vera again. Hatred had given her grief a direction. Without it, sorrow became vast and shapeless.
She sank into a chair. “Then who killed her?” Elias could offer only an ongoing investigation. The evidence raised questions about Eastwind’s secret vampire contact, but it did not establish a name or motive.
Nolan crouched in front of Daisy without touching her. “I don’t know yet. I won’t stop until I do.” His promise no longer sounded like an Alpha managing an accusation. It sounded like a mate accepting her loss as his own.
“I said horrible things to you.” Shame caught beneath her grief. She remembered calling him a beast while praising the same man for kindness, never allowing him to defend himself honestly.
“You believed I took your mother.” Nolan understood why she had hated him. “I hid my identity when I should have told you. Neither of us reached this room without mistakes.”
Daisy finally let him take her hand. The bond warmed at the contact, not demanding desire this time but offering steadiness. Nolan remained with her while Elias quietly left.
Accepting the report did not mean Daisy fully trusted Blackwood or forgave the takeover. It meant one accusation could no longer stand between them. For the first time, she looked at Nolan without seeing Vera’s imagined killer.
Yet the file opened a more dangerous mystery. Someone had reached her mother before Blackwood, someone whose attack did not resemble a wolf’s. As Daisy closed the folder, neither she nor Nolan knew that the answer was already moving toward his mansion.