Chapter 29
Merric
The bond goes dark. I’m mid-fight at the south gate—silver wolf, three Syndicate operatives down, two more retreating into the smoke—when Brenna’s presence in my chest dims from a flame to a flicker and then to nothing.
Not death. I’d know death. The connection would rupture, tear, leave a wound that never heals. I watched my father’s mate bond sever when my mother died—saw the way his whole body went rigid and then collapsed, as if someone had cut his strings. This is different. Not the odd numbness I felt when we were separated that masked her fake death. This is suppression. Unnatural. Forced. Someone has taken the connection between us and smothered it. The absence is a cold, black void where warmth should be.
The knowledge hits me, and I disengage from the fight with a violence that sends the nearest operative flying into the gate posts. The others scramble back. I don’t care. They’ve stoppedmattering. Everything has stopped mattering except the silence in my chest.
I shift mid-stride. Human form. Running.
“Rook! The cabin!”
He’s there. Already running. He felt it too. The shift in my behavior. He saw me abandon a fight I was winning, and that told him everything.
The cabin door is open. Cameron’s room is empty. Door wide, bedsheets cold, the window cracked where he opened it to listen to the night before falling asleep. The bathroom is empty. The kitchen is empty. The whole cabin smells like the ghost of breakfast that will never be made.
In the yard between the cabin and the lodge, I find Brenna’s fight.
White fire scorchmarks across the gravel path. A defensive line, wide, the kind you throw when you’re trying to hold ground against multiple attackers. Three wolves’ blood, dark and arterial, pooling between the stones. Spent purist wolves limping toward the forest, wounded, mission accomplished. And on the ground near the equipment shed, two used darts.
I pick one up. Syndicate manufacture. I don’t know what they are, but I’ll bet my life they’re designed to neutralize wolf-witch abilities. Designed specifically for her.
They came for her. Not for the compound. Not for the pack. For her. And our son.
Someone told them exactly where she slept. Exactly where Cameron would be. Exactly how to draw me away.
The dart casing cracks in my fist.
Rook is at my shoulder. “How long?”
“Minutes. The drug probably worked fast, but they still have to move them to the vehicles.”
“East. The purist wolves came from the east. The logging road.”
The logging road. The vehicles that have been surveying for a week.
Not surveillance. Rehearsal. Every night run was a practice extraction. Timing the drive, planning the routes, confirming the distances.
I don’t need to think a moment longer. I shift. Rook shifts beside me. We run.
Behind us, Jonas is already organizing the compound’s response—securing the boundary, tending wounded, accounting for every wolf. I leave him to it because Jonas is competent. Right now, the only thing I’m capable of is the singular, annihilating focus of an alpha whose mate and son have been taken from his territory.
The trail is clear. Boot prints: heavy, combat boots, four sets. Drag marks between them, two bodies carried at speed. The chemical residue of the suppression darts is a scent trail that burns my wolf’s nostrils. They’re not covering their tracks… because they’re counting on speed, not stealth.
Rook runs at my left flank. Karl materializes from the trees to my right—dark wolf, silent, already tracking—and his path converges with ours. Three wolves, moving fast, following the scent of Syndicate operatives and the ghosts of two people I will not lose.
The logging road is two miles from the compound. We cover it in under ten minutes, running flat-out through timber that would slow a human to a crawl. The trail hits the road, and I see tire tracks: fresh, deep, three vehicles.
Three SUVs. Black. Two are already gone, taillights vanishing north around the bend. The third is still loading. An operative at the rear door, radio in hand, looking the wrong direction.
I don’t slow down.
I hit him at full speed. Two hundred and forty pounds of wolf driven by something older and darker than strategy. My jawsclose on his arm, and I feel bone give. He screams and drops the radio. Rook takes the second operative from behind—clean, efficient, the man on the ground before he can raise his rifle.
Karl goes for the tires. Four slashes, four flats. The SUV settles on its rims.
I shift. The operative I downed is conscious, clutching his broken arm, face gray with pain and shock. I pick him up by his tactical vest and slam him against the SUV door hard enough to dent the panel.
