The silence stretched. Charged with a meaning I couldn't quite name. Heavy with something that felt like possibility.
Then Kade's voice came through the speakers, surrounding me in the intimate space of the vocal booth. His tone carried an approval that made my chest warm and tight simultaneously.
“Jasmine.” He paused, and I watched his throat work as he swallowed. “That was incredible.”
The words settled over me. It was a validation I hadn't known I was desperate for, coming from an Alpha whose opinion I'd convinced myself not to care about.
But I did care. God, I cared so much it hurt.
“Play it back,” Lucian's voice joined Kade's through the speakers, excited, and amazed. “She needs to hear what we just heard.”
I pulled the headphones off, and my hands shook again, but this time it was adrenaline and something like joy rather than fear.
Kade's hands moved over the mixing board with practiced ease, and then my voice filled the studio through the monitors. I heard myself as they'd heard me. The studio had captured every detail. The lyrics were emotional, igniting my core. But mostly I was amazed at the technical skill I'd developed without even realizing it.
I sounded good. Really good. Not perfect, but honest and powerful, real.
Through the glass, I watched Kade watching me, and I saw the moment he registered my reaction. Saw the satisfaction in his expression when he realized I could hear my worth, could recognize what I'd created.
Theo moved then, crossing to where I stood, and pulled me into a hug that lifted me slightly off my feet. “Honey, that was beautiful,” he said against my hair, his voice rough with emotion. “You're going to blow everyone away at the gala.”
The prediction should have terrified me. Instead, wrapped in Theo's arms with my voice still playing from the monitors and Kade's approval warming me from across the glass, I let myself believe it might be true.
Maybe I could do this. Maybe I could be more than what my old pack had made me. Maybe my voice, the one thing that hadkept me alive through the worst months of my life, could finally give me the freedom to live again.
Chapter Twenty-three
Theo
The security room hummed with the white noise of electronics and climate control, a sound I'd grown familiar with over the past week. I'd made these checks part of my routine since Jasmine had arrived, scanning through camera feeds with the methodical attention I'd learned during my years protecting the pack. The monitors glowed blue-white in the dim space, casting shadows that made the cramped room feel even smaller. My coffee had gone cold an hour ago, sitting forgotten on the edge of the desk while I tracked the usual flow of people entering and leaving the building. Delivery drivers, residents returning from work, and the doorman's shift change at six. Nothing unusual. Nothing that made my instincts prickle. Until it did.
Movement on the northwest camera caught my attention. Not of the movement itself, but something about the rhythm of it. The way two figures stopped at the corner, lingered too long, then moved on, only to reappear fifteen minutes later from a different angle.
I leaned forward, my chair creaking under my weight, and isolated that camera feed to the center monitor. The image enlarged, grainy but clear enough to show two men in theirlate twenties, both wearing dark coats that looked too heavy for the weather. One had his hands shoved deep in his pockets, shoulders hunched. The other kept glancing up at the building's entrance, his gaze tracking in a way that suggested he was counting floors or marking exits.
My jaw clenched. This wasn't a casual interest. This was surveillance.
I pulled up the timestamp, rewound the footage. There, the same two men had walked past forty minutes ago, coming from the opposite direction. Before that, an hour prior, just one of them, standing across the street and staring up at the building while pretending to check his phone.
I zoomed in on their faces, and my blood turned to ice.
I knew that face. The one on the left, with the sharp cheekbones and bitter expression. I'd seen it in the photos we'd pulled when we'd first started looking into Jasmine's background, trying to understand what she'd run from. Pack photos from social media, group shots at pack gatherings. This man had been in the background of several, always standing close to the Alpha. Always watching with those calculating eyes.
My fingers moved across the keyboard before my brain fully processed the command, pulling up the other angles, the other cameras. The building had twenty-three exterior cameras covering every approach, every entrance, every blind spot I'd personally verified when I'd upgraded the system two years ago.
There. Another figure on the south entrance, an older man this time. He leaned against the marble wall that fronted the lobby entrance. He held a coffee cup, but I'd been doing this long enough to recognize the posture. He wasn't drinking. Wasn't relaxed. He was positioned exactly where he'd have a clear view of anyone entering or leaving through the main doors.
I zoomed in on his face, captured the still image, and ran it through my mental catalog of Jasmine's old pack members. Therecognition came slower this time, but it came. He'd been in fewer photos, more peripheral, but definitely present. Definitely pack.
My heart rate kicked up, adrenaline flooding my system to prepare for action I couldn't take yet. Not until I knew more. Not until I understood the full scope of what we were dealing with.
I pulled up the last six hours of footage and began scanning through it at double speed, watching the patterns emerge like a constellation forming from scattered stars. The older man had been there since noon, rotating positions every hour. The two men had started their pattern around three. And there, a fourth person, male, older, standing near the service entrance on the building's east side. He'd been there the longest, nearly five hours, barely moving except to shift his weight or pull out his phone.
Four of them. Four that I could identify. How many more were there that I couldn't see? How many were watching from windows across the street, or sitting in cars parked just out of camera range?
I captured stills of each face, saved the timestamps, and began compiling a file that would show the pattern of their surveillance. My hands moved with readiness, but inside, something primal was howling. They'd found her. Jasmine's old pack had tracked her here, to our building, to our home. To where she was supposed to be safe.
The scar on my face pulled tight as my jaw clenched harder. I forced myself to breathe through my nose, slow and controlled, because rage wouldn't help her right now. Analysis would. Planning would. Action would.
