"If I catch footage of the rogue making contact with someone inside the pack, it's the link we're missing," I say. "It connects the patrol changes to the physical attacks. It gives Alden something he can lay in front of Brynn and the full council with no room for dispute."
Ciaran exhales slowly through his nose. "You'll go without me if I decline."
"Yes, absolutely," I confirm.
He gives me a look. "We’ll take a small team. We move before the main training rotation finishes so we don't draw attention leaving the estate." He straightens off the shelf. "I'll get Kieran and one other. We stay tight."
We clear the compound's eastern gate just after sundown. Ciaran, Kieran Rourke, and an enforcer named Tomas who moves with the quiet efficiency of someone two years past his first serious patrol assignment accompany me. Tomas keeps his distance from me like he’s been ordered to protect me but not get too close.
That was probably a direct order from Alden. He falls into position at my left shoulder without a word, jaw set, eyes moving across the tree line.
The forest along the eastern corridor is denser than the southern approach. The canopy tighter, the undergrowth more assertive, the ground cover shifting from pine needles to soft leaf mulch that muffles footsteps in both directions. We reach the first camera position in just under twenty minutes.
I crouch at the roots of a pine where I mounted the unit at shoulder height and pull up the download interface on my tablet. The footage loads in segments. Ciaran and Tomas move south along the corridor with a hand signal between them, and Kieran settles with his back against a boulder fifteen feet back, arms folded, watching the northern approach.
The first two camera segments are clean. I pull the third segment and let it run.
I'm watching the playback when the feeling starts. It arrives without a specific trigger, no sound, no movement in my peripheral vision, just the particular crawl along the back of the neck that six years of fieldwork has taught me not to dismiss.
Something close enough to register but not close enough to see.
I don't look up from the screen.
I tap through to the next segment with deliberate slowness, shift my weight as if resettling my position, and angle my body slightly east toward the rocky incline thirty yards out. Then I stand, tuck the tablet under my arm, and move toward it at a pace that says I have a reason to be walking that direction and not that I'm running from anything.
The incline rises in broken shelves of pale granite, the kind of terrain that forces a specific route through the gaps between slabs. I take the second gap from the left, a narrow channel that requires a sideways step at the top, and come out on a small flat ledge above.
I stop. Turn.
The corridor below is empty. The boulder where Kieran stood is empty.
The warning goes from a tingle to hairs fully raised in a second. My hand moves toward the radio clipped to my vest strap, fingers finding the call button.
The ledge above me is the last thing I register before the weight hits me from behind. My knees crack against the granite as I go down, tablet spinning out of my grip and clattering across the rock face, and the cloth pressed over my mouth and nose carries a chemical smell I recognize immediately and cannot stop inhaling.
Chloroform works faster than most people expect.
The radio is under my right hand. I press the transmit button once, maybe before the granite comes up to meet my cheek and the forest goes dark.
22
ALDEN
The Blood Moon preparations have consumed the mansion since morning.
Torches along the ritual path. The council clearing decorated and swept, ritual stones scrubbed clean of old ash. The war hall cleared for weapons check. I've moved through all of it on autopilot, sitting through Brynn's procedural briefing on the trial protocol with enough outward composure that she doesn't ask me twice about anything.
By late afternoon the compound smells like pine resin, cold iron, and the particular tension that accumulates in a closed space full of wolves who know something significant is coming.
I stop by Cassidy's quarters just after the dinner hour, intending to check in before the evening's preparations pull us in separate directions for the night.
The door is unlocked. That's the first thing.
I push it open and stand in the doorway for a moment, reading the room. The bed is made, but not recently. Her field pack is gone from its spot by the window. So is her GPS unit, her tablet, and the camera bag she keeps hung on the wall hook beside the door. The window above the desk stands open threeinches, letting in the cold evening air, and the latch is turned rather than resting naturally.
She went out this way.
I step inside and move through the space slowly, because there's nothing actionable I can do in the next thirty seconds and moving fast won't change that.
