Gideon holds his ground, but his jaw tightens once.
"-then the council has standing to question his fitness for the trial," he finishes. His voice stays steady and calm. He's making an argument to the assembled pack, not to me, and the assembled pack is listening. "An Alpha who abandons ritual obligation to chase after a human is not an Alpha who can be trusted to put the pack first."
"You're welcome to make that argument before Brynn," I say. "I have until the Blood Moon rises to present myself for the ritual, and I will be back by then." I move past him.
He doesn't reach for me, which is the smart choice. I'm aware, without turning to confirm, that the assembled wolves are watching which direction the energy moves—whether Gideon calls after me, whether anyone follows him toward the hall, whether the weight of the pack's attention swings one way or the other. I don't stop to find out.
The eastern corridor takes twelve minutes at pace. Ciaran is waiting near the bottom of the rocky incline, and I can read the state of things from his face before he speaks—tense, controlled.
"Nothing on Kieran," he says as I reach him. "Radio silence, location tracking is off. She killed her unit."
"Deliberately?"
"Has to be." He gestures toward the incline. "Cassidy’s tablet is on the rock face with a cracked screen, radio is three feet away. The transmit button was depressed when we found it."
I crouch beside the radio without picking it up and breathe in.
Her scent is here—lavender and the sharp note of adrenaline-fear, layered over granite dust and cold evening air. Clear enough that I can track it.
I follow it upward along the incline, from ledge to ledge, reading the story the ground tells without needing words. The scuffle marks on the granite. The displaced moss where someone came down hard from above. The direction the soil disturbed.
And then nothing.
The scent cuts off at a cluster of boulders twenty yards north of the incline, as cleanly as a door closing. What replaces it is pine sap fresh, deliberate, applied in quantity. And under that, ash. Both strong enough to drown everything.
Someone prepared for me to follow.
I stand at the gap between boulders for a long moment, breathing in the absence of her, the manufactured blankness left in place of the trail I need. It's methodical. It took time and forethought. It was done by someone who understood exactly how I would search.
"She's been moved," I say.
Ciaran steps up beside me. "How far can you track it?"
"I can't. Not past this point." I look at the darkening tree line beyond the boulders, the deep mountain dark already pooling between the pines. "They wanted us to find this. It's not a mistake."
"They're ahead of us."
"They planned for us." I turn back toward the trail. "Stay here. Keep the enforcers working the perimeter—look for secondary scent trails leading off the main corridor, boot prints, anything Kieran might have left coming and going. Don't stop." I look at him directly. "She's alive. The bond would tell me otherwise."
He nods once, not offering comfort. "I'll keep the line open."
The mansion grounds are in full ritual assembly when I return. Torches lit along the path to the stone clearing, the pack gathered in the wide crescent formation that precedes a Blood Moon Trial, Brynn standing in the clearing with her staff and theflat, patient expression of someone who has been waiting and is deciding how much longer she's prepared to wait.
Gideon stands beside the council arc with his arms folded, and when I step into the clearing, he doesn't speak. He doesn't need to. His posture broadcasts the message clearly enough—the Alpha arrives late, rattled, without his human mate in tow, while the pack watches and calculates.
"He demonstrates tonight what I've argued for weeks," Gideon says, loud enough to carry to the outer ring of wolves. "His priorities are misaligned. His judgment is compromised. An Alpha who disrupts ritual assembly over a missing civilian is an Alpha whose loyalty is divided, and a divided Alpha-"
"Is still the Alpha," Brynn says. Her voice cuts through the clearing without effort, sharp and final, the tone she reserves for people who have already been given enough room to speak.
She looks at Gideon with the amber-eyed patience of someone who has outlasted four Alphas and three coup attempts and finds most urgency overstated. "The Blood Moon is rising, Gideon. The ritual period begins at moonrise whether or not we have finished arguing." She turns that gaze to me, and it carries something more careful in it, not sympathy, but acknowledgment. "Alpha. We proceed."
The first light of the Blood Moon crests the ridgeline behind the eastern pines, red and low, staining the clearing the color of old copper.
Whatever Cassidy is facing in those mountains, she is facing it without me for the next several hours, pulled together by the mate bond, tight and insistent against my ribs like a compass needle that knows exactly which direction I should move instead.
The pack howls once in unison to open the trial.
I answer.
