CHAPTER 3 – The Man Who Was Supposed to Be Dead
Thomas read the note again and again until the words blurred.
“The truth about what happened on that mountain was never an accident.”
For forty-two years, he had believed the explosion was his fault.
A bad call.
A wrong path.
A rescue mission gone terribly wrong.
But Captain Hayes’s letter told a different story.
The rescue team had not been sent to save missing hikers.
They had been sent to recover a child.
A little girl hidden in the mountains by someone powerful enough to rewrite government records.
And Shadow had found her.
Thomas’s breath caught as he turned the next page.
There was a photograph inside the box.
A young girl, no older than six, wrapped in Shadow’s rescue blanket.
On the back, someone had written:
“She must never know who her father is.”
Thomas felt the room tilt.
Because the little girl in that photo...
Had his daughter’s eyes.
That night, Thomas called his daughter, Emily.
May you like
But before he could say a word, she whispered,
“Dad... there’s a wolf outside my house.”
