Read Chapter 35: The Missing Found

The black-and-white collie wouldn’t stop barking.

Iona had been checking a yearling’s limp in the paddock behind the surgery when the dog—old Tam Henderson’s working bitch, Bess—came tearing out of the treeline, circling Iona’s boots in tight, frantic loops. The sheepdog had mud caked to her chest and a strip of bramble across her muzzle. When Iona knelt, Bess dropped something at her feet. A rotten strap, buckled and green with moss. Attached to it was a small leather patch, barely legible, bleached by weather.

But Iona didn’t need to read the initials. She knew that stitching. Morag’s name, sewn by Morag herself in clumsy blue thread, across a canvas backpack her mother had bought her for her first day of secondary school.

Iona’s blood went cold.

“Where did you find this, girl?” she whispered, but Bess was already off again, barreling toward the treeline with sharp, imperative yaps. Iona shoved the pack under her arm and ran after her.

The woods behind the surgery thickened quickly, the light dropping to a green gloom. Iona’s boots slipped on pine needles. Bess set a punishing pace, leading her uphill along a deer track that wound away from the estate’s manicured grounds and into wilder country, where the firs grew crooked and the ground underfoot turned shale and scree. The dog stopped at last at a seam in the rock face, nearly invisible behind a curtain of exposed roots. There, half-hidden by moss and years of fallen debris, was an old timber frame, rotted at the corners, propped ajar. A mine entrance. Gated once with iron, now rusted to flaking lace.

Bess whined and pawed at the ground. Iona kneeled at the opening, heart hammering, and peered inside. The air that met her was cold and mineral. And it carried a scent—thin, animal, wrong.

She didn’t waste a phone call on explanations. Anyone could send a text. Some things needed to be held.

Lachlan met her at the treeline within ten minutes, still favoring his left side but moving faster than a man should after a bullet wound. His brother Ewan flanked him, carrying a halogen torch. Lachlan’s eyes went from Iona’s face to the pack in her arms to the dark opening behind her. He didn’t ask how she knew. He just stepped past her and pushed the timber frame wider.

“This is an old Ross claim,” Ewan said, his voice low. “Worked it for lead in my great-grandfather’s time. Sealed before I was born.”

“Sealed,” Lachlan repeated. He looked at the gate. The chain that had once held it shut lay coiled on the ground, snapped—not rusted, but broken. Fresh edges glinting in the torchlight. “Recently.”

The shaft descended at a steep angle, timbered supports groaning under decades of weight. Iona’s steps echoed. Bess bounded ahead, claws ticking on stone, and stopped at a wider chamber where the tunnel opened into a rough-cut cavern. The air was stale, but warmer than the shaft. And there was light—a thin, grey shaft of it, falling from a natural chimney far above.

The sound was what Iona noticed first. Breathing. Shallow, rapid, from the far corner of the cavern where shadows pooled like water.

Iona stepped forward. Lachlan’s hand closed on her arm. “Careful.”

But she shook him off. Because she knew that sound. She’d heard it in every frightened animal that had ever been brought to her—the breath of something that had forgotten how to expect kindness.

Morag was curled in the corner on a pallet of rotten sacking. Her clothes were torn to rags. Her hair, once long and red like Iona’s own, was a matted tangle. She was thin—shockingly thin, ribs visible through a filthy shirt, collarbones sharp as blades. And she was changed. Iona saw it in the way her fingers ended, nails grown thick and dark and curling; in the too-wide set of her jaw; in the way her eyes, recognizing them, flashed with amber before settling back to a bruised, exhausted blue.

She didn’t speak. She bared her teeth instead, a low growl working in her throat.

Iona’s heart broke in two.

“Morag,” she said. Her voice cracked. She dropped to her knees slowly, keeping her hands where they could be seen. “Morag, it’s me. It’s Iona.”

Morag’s eyes flicked over her—wild, searching. She did not seem to find what she remembered. She pressed herself further into the corner, arms wrapped around her own knees, rocking slightly. The growl deepened when Lachlan moved too fast.

He stopped. He lowered himself down, slow, to Iona’s height.

“They did this to her,” he said. Not a question. His voice was flat with horror. “She wouldn’t take their side. So they made her a message instead.”

Iona understood. A wolf turned against her will, bound to a nature she had never chosen, in a body that would no longer obey her. Hidden away where no one could find her—not dead, not alive, not anything. A living answer to a blood dispute that Morag had never wanted to be part of.

“I need you to trust me,” Iona said softly. She shifted closer, one inch at a time. Morag’s rocking stilled. “I’m not going to hurt you. No one here is going to hurt you ever again. Do you understand?”

Morag’s lips moved. A dry, scraping sound came out—the first time her throat had worked in what looked like weeks. No words. Just air.

Iona reached into her pocket and brought out a biscuit wrapped in wax paper—leftover from her lunch. She peeled it open, broke off a piece, and set it on the ground between them. Then she sat back and waited.

Morag stared at the biscuit. Then at Iona. Then at the biscuit again.

Her hand shot out. Snatched the morsel. Retreated to her corner, where she devoured it in two starving bites, watching Iona the whole time with those half-human eyes.

Iona broke off another piece. Set it down. Waited.

They did this for a quarter of an hour. Lachlan and Ewan stood silent guard at the chamber entrance. Bess lay flat on her belly at Iona’s side, tail giving the barest wag each time Morag crept forward.

When the last piece was gone, Morag did not retreat. She knelt in the lamplight, trembling, her changed fingers digging into the stone floor. Her breathing was ragged. Her blue eyes were wet.

Iona stayed very still.

Morag’s mouth opened again. Worked. Closed. And then, with a sound like a stone breaking loose from ice, she spoke her first word.

“Home.”

The word fell into the cavern and lay there, small and impossible. Iona felt her own eyes sting. She reached out, slow, and took Morag’s hand—clawed, filthy, raw. Morag didn’t pull away.

“Yes,” Iona said. “Let’s go home.”