I flinched away, turning my tear-stained face in disgust.
"Wren, my darling defective girl. They weren't protecting you. They were stealing valuable property from me. They recognized what rare anomaly you are and tried to lock you in a dark warded basement before the high council could see you. They're territorial thieves hiding behind a legacy crest."
"I'm not legally yours!" I screamed, struggling against the mercenary's iron grip. "You severed the tether in front of your pack! You threw me away!"
"I severed an arranged legacy bond with a seemingly defective omega I believed to be politically useless," Trent saidsmoothly, leaning closer into my personal space, his cold eyes dropping to the center of my covered chest.
He lowered his voice to an intimate whisper meant only for my ears.
"I didn't realize the magical 'defect' residing in your core was actually the unmanifested biological capacity of a mythological battery. You aren't useless, Wren. You're an active Pack-Heart."
The breath stalled in my lungs.
He knew. Not just a political suspicion about my legacy scent anymore. He had confirmed the biological truth on the terrace — and the horror of his complete knowledge was paralyzing.
"The formal Northern tribunal summons slated for tomorrow was just a diplomatic formality to appease my father," Trent whispered, resting his cold manicured hand flat against my velvet chest, over the wildly pulsing silver lines hidden beneath the fabric.
The alien heat of his palm sickened me.
"I was never going to bring you before the high council. Why share a limitless magical conduit with rotting Southern politicians when I can anchor my own combat line with it exclusively? I'm taking you back home tonight, Wren. Permanently."
"No," I pleaded, looking desperately toward Hayes — struggling violently, uselessly, against his own devastating blood loss on the hard floor. "Hayes! Tristan! Please!"
Trent smiled and nodded to the mercenary holding me.
"You were worthless when you were broken, my dear," Trent stated loudly, his cold voice ringing across the ruined bloody safehouse, ensuring every bleeding alpha trapped in the red room heard the final conclusion of the Northern siege.
"But now... now you are priceless."
The mercenary hauled me roughly toward the shattered front doorway.
I was dragged screaming out of the ruined safehouse, out into the freezing dark night air where a armored black transport waited anonymously at the end of the long dirt road — leaving the three alphas I had refused to seal the tether with rapidly bleeding out on the cold floor of the cage they had built to save me.
25
HAYES
Physical pain wasn't an abstract concept relegated to combat theory. It was a burning, localized reality tearing through the center of my chest and my left shoulder.
I was kneeling on the shattered stone tiles in the obliterated safehouse sitting room, my right hand pressed hard against the wet, torn fabric of my dark dress shirt, trying to staunch the heavy, rhythmic flow of blood.
The suppressed kinetic slugs hadn't pierced my magically hardened ribcage, but the raw crushing force of the impacts at point-blank range had pulverized the dense muscle tissue and fractured the bone beneath it.
I didn't care about the fractures. I barely felt them in the adrenaline haze.
The only thing I felt was the devastating, hollow silence echoing from the narrow hallway behind my bleeding back.
She was gone.
I coughed — a wet, rattling sound tearing from my throat — my vision swimming dangerously as the blood loss compounded the exhaustion of fighting an elite extraction team without a magical conduit.
"Hayes."
Barely a raspy whisper in the dark, destroyed room.
I forced my blurring eyes open.
Chris was dragging himself slowly across the bloody stone floor, his entire frame trembling as the crippling shock of the nullification blast began to loosen its grip on his ancient magical core.
