It paced beneath my skin, agitated, pressing against my ribs. This wasn’t the usual restlessness of being separated from her. This was a specific, pointed wrongness, a sensation that lived in my chest rather than my senses.
The bond.
I straightened.
Percy’s chair came down on all four legs. He’d felt it too. The teasing drained from his face, replaced by an alertness that stripped away every ounce of his laid-back demeanor.
Solomon was already on his feet.
“That’s not us,” Percy said. His voice had dropped an octave. “That’s her. Through the bond.”
He was right.
The alarm wasn’t coming from our instincts. It was coming through the mate bond itself, a pulse of raw fear pushing through a connection that shouldn’t have been strong enough to transmit emotion.
The bond was incomplete, unclaimed, a thread where a rope should be.
And yet Mira’s terror was flooding through it with enough force to make my vision blur.
“Find her.”
We moved.
The crowd parted around us. People sensed the shift even if they couldn’t name it, stepping aside as three men cut through the dance floor. Right now, we didn’t care about blending in with humans.
I reached for her scent. Pine smoke, old books laced with honey. The trail should have been obvious, a beacon in a sea of human noise.
But there’snothing.
I stopped. Inhaled again. Deeper, pulling the air across my tongue the way my wolf processed it.
Her scent was gone.
It wasn’t faded or masked by the crowd.Gone.
As if someone had taken an eraser to every molecule she’d left behind. The gravel path to the restrooms should have been saturated with her, but it smelled of dirt and pine and strangers and absolutely nothing else.
“I can’t find her scent.” Solomon’s voice was controlled. Barely. The tendons in his neck stood out and his hands had curled into fists at his sides.
Percy shook his head. “Same for me. It’s been wiped.”
Wiped. Scent trails didn’t get wiped. Not naturally or by accident.
This was deliberate, and it required knowledge that a human stalker shouldn’t possess.
The bond. It was all we had.
I closed my eyes. Reached past the panic hammering at my ribs and found the thread. Thin, wavering, but present. A line of fear and fury stretching away from the town square and into the dark.
“East.” I opened my eyes. “Into the woods.”
We ran.
The fairy lights ended at the tree line. The music faded behind us, replaced by the crunch of undergrowth and the rasp of our breathing. The bond pulled us deeper, a compass needle spinning toward her terror.
Solomon spotted it first. A mark on a birch tree, waist height. A gouge in the bark, deliberate, angled downward.
“Knife mark.” He traced the cut with his fingers. Fresh sap beaded at the edges. “She’s marking a trail.”
