His Unidentified & Untouchable Mate

Bright and Early

Zahraa POV

Rowan had warned me that he would be there for the interrogation, but he hadn’t warned me that Alpha Jared would. He was a tall and imposing man, with brown hair and eyes the color of coal. He had a reputation for being unkind, and when he looked at me, I already knew he saw me as nothing more than a worm.

Placed in front of me was a map of the pack lands, with the factory circled in bold red ink.

Calmly, his hands steepled in front of him, Rowan asked, “Zahraa, could you kindly tell us where Jacob got this map?”

“I don’t know, alpha,” I replied, truthfully. “It was on his desk yesterday morning, along with other documents.”

“How did he come to notice the factory?” Jared’s stare pierced me, chilled my spine and made me want to tremble before him.

I resisted as best I could, but had to clench my hands in my lap to do so effectively. “I believe he said there was an email sent out about the lands that had been searched. He realized that the map that had been emailed didn’t have the factory, so it couldn’t have been searched.”

“Why didn’t Jacob alert anyone of where he was going?” Rowan shifted. His expression gave me the impression that he wanted to interrogate me about as much as I wanted to be interrogated.

Again, I had no answer for them. “I’m not sure. The best I could guess would be out of excitement. When he found the discrepancy, he told me we were going there straightaway.” I paused, feeling naked and defenseless under their scrutiny. “Maybe he knew that no one would believe him.” A swell of guilt rose in my chest. “I didn’t believe in him either, to be honest.”

“Alright. Sure. That sounds good enough to me,” Jared spoke in a dismissive way that left me feeling as though his thoughts weren’t matching his words. He ran his finger over the surface of the table, as if inspecting it for dust. “Let’s talk about the statements we’ve received thus far.”

I was confused. What could those statements possibly have to do with me? Brow furrowed, I c****d my head to the side ever so slightly and nodded. “Sure.”

“Put simply, they don’t match up,” Jared continued, gaze locking onto mine. “Some seem to think they were going there for a meeting called by their leadership. Some think it was a rave in an old factory. Some don’t remember at all. It gets worse; those that agree it was a rave, can’t seem to agree who they arrived with. Some list people that had never gone missing at all, some list people that denied arriving with them. Not a single story was corroborated across thousands of statements. What does that tell you?”

I hoped that was a rhetorical question, because I had no idea.

“No clue? Fine. Let’s continue.” Jared shuffled a paper in front of him and cleared his throat. “Okay. Let’s talk about the injuries. While there were several we could make sense of – broken bones, cuts, scrapes, bruises, etc. – there’s a strange amount of concussions with no sign of injury whatsoever. That could explain the memory loss, sure; but when they ran scans at the hospital, there was no damage done to the brain at all. They had all the symptoms, none of the injury. What do you make of that?”

Another impossible question. Considering my best friend’s father was in the hospital recovering from one such injury, I knew surprisingly little about it. My role had been to soothe Ingrid, and I’d focused on that, even when the doctors came to deliver news.

Jared didn’t continue this time, so I swallowed the lump forming in my throat. “I’m not sure, alpha.”

“And the room,” he continued on, standing so he could pace the floors of the uncomfortably cold interrogation room. The floor was a plain white tile, the walls a matching sterile color, interrupted only by one sheet of one-way glass. “It took us hours after the rescue to get back into it. Yet you had access immediately. And the dimensions don’t add up. For nearly eight thousand wolves to fit into a room even tightly packed, you would need 40,000 square foot of space. That room had 20,000. And wolves say they hadn’t seen most of the people that came out of that room within.” He paused, face pinching in his frustration. “Including myself. I went over the lists. I’d taken charge. There’s no way all of the people that left the room had been in there.”

I couldn’t take it anymore. “What are you suggesting, Alpha Jared?”

“You tell me,” he slammed his hands down on the table, jolting it and making their pens jump. “It seems to me you are the only one who could open that door. And furthermore,” he slammed my file down in front of me, flipping it to the file that detailed my known abilities. “You are the only one in this pack that has magic that can span dimensions. All this complicated circumstance that doesn’t add up could, if we factor in your creepy space magic.”

I balked. I’d been warned I’d be interrogated, warned that they were going to look at Jacob, as he stood to benefit, but I hadn’t expected to be outright accused.

“That’s enough,” Rowan barked, standing as well. “Alpha Jared, take a walk. I’ll take it from here.”

“Fine,” Jared stood sharply and marched out of the door, slamming it as he left.

Rowan sighed and massaged his temples. “I’m sorry about that, Zahraa. I know he’s acting tough and brutish, but I believe my brother is just stressed. Maybe even scared.”

I would be scared if I had gone through what he had. To disappear off the face of the earth, only to return to find that your memories didn’t match those that had disappeared alongside you.

“Sure,” I agreed, sipping the water I’d been offered at the beginning of the interrogation. When the silence stretched into something thick and unbearable, I spat, “Alpha Rowan, please, you must know that I would never do such a thing.”

“Zahraa, you’ve been with this pack for a long time, and I feel I’ve come to know you well,” he spoke in an even tone, but a practiced one. One that was tight and formal and not at all like the Rowan I knew. “I don’t believe you’d do something like this. I don’t want to believe that you would do something like this. But Jared has a point; you’re the only one that could pull something like this off. Only one within the pack, that is.”

“Then it was someone outside of the pack,” I urged. “Because I would never-”

Rowan put a hand up to silence me, and my protest died on my tongue. “Like I said – I want to believe you, Zahraa. But I need you to answer me some questions.”

I nodded, too firmly. Too compliantly.

“Good girl,” he all but purred, lips curling into a smile that made me believe perhaps I was walking into a carefully laid trap. “Let’s start by going over everything you and Jacob have done the last few days.”