Old Version Shatter Pieces

Chapter 79: Bodies

Carter

I held Elinn in my arms while I waited for her to really calm down before I was going to let her go. I needed to get Luke down here as fast as possible so that we could start to work through this. There was so much going on and I had no idea what to do anymore.

I had just learned so much about my mate, but how was I supposed to tell her. Who were her real parents and what sort of sway did they have over the Royals to make it so they couldn't tell me? Whoever they were I was going to make sure that they didn't hurt Elinn. But to make sure that didn't happen I had to figure out who her parents really were.

Elinn shifted from where sat squirming in my lap, another memory must have appeared to haunt her. She had said they had all of the sudden began to come back and I wasn't sure how that had happened. It didn't make sense, there had been no trigger to cause her to remember anything. She had been the most relaxed I'd seen since I met her and now she was the most stressed I had seen her.

I carefully scooped Elinn into my arms carrying her back to our room. I heard footsteps rushing towards us and assumed that it was Luke finally heading the messages I had been sending him. I didn't bother to slow down he would know where I was going and follow us. I nudged the door open seeing as Elinn hadn't shut it when she had run out earlier.

I gingerly laid her down on the bed doing my best not to wake her from her fitful sleep. I sat next to her waiting for Luke to walk in, but it wasn't Luke that ran in it was Beta Johna. He had blood on his hands and a look of terror on his face that immediately had me on guard.

"Alpha, you need to come see this, it's bad. We don't know how it happened, but you're going to need to go visit some families tonight." He didn't wait for me to say anything he just ran down the hall and I ran after him. This wasn't going to be pretty, something bad had happened that much was obvious.

Johna led me down hall after hall of the pack house and I realized we were headed outside. We hurried out the door and he continued into the forest towards the Eastern side of the house. His pace was grueling and I wondered what had put him in such a tizzy, he was usually the only one able to keep a level head about things. When Johna finally came to a stop I assessed my surroundings.

There were five bodies lying on the ground and I knew that they wouldn't be waking up. The forest floor around them had turned red with their blood making my stomach lurch violently. The corpses were mangled, with their limbs turned at angles that told me they had been tortured before they were killed. There were long wounds that had obviously been caused by a knife that ran across the majority of their bodies. All the bodies were face down and I would have to flip them over in order to identify them.

It was obvious that they had been at the ball earlier today because they were all dressed up. Two of the victims were female and the other three were male, so whoever it wasn't hadn't been targeting a specific gender. They had been targeted for another reason, but I couldn't figure that out until I knew who it was.

I slowly approached the body that was closest to me with my Beta right behind me. His arms were going in three different directions and his back was tilted at an unnatural angle. I didn't want to learn who this body was, but I knew that I had to so I could go and give the tragic news to his family. I rolled the body over and immediately had to take several steps backward.

There lying on the ground was Chad, one of my best guards and a new friend. His kids had already been through so much when their mother had died and now.... This was going to kill them. How was I supposed to tell a sixteen-year-old and an eight-year-old that their father had been murdered? That the one piece of stability they still had in their lives had been ripped away from them.