He looked like a ghost. The pristine scholar's legendary composure was shattered, his long hands raw and bleeding from scrambling over the sharp debris of the ruined console.
He reached the overturned mahogany table where Tristan was lying motionless, a streak of blood drying on his cheek.
"Tristan," Chris rasped, pressing two trembling fingers against the side of Tristan's pale throat.
A long, suffocating second passed.
"Steady pulse," Chris confirmed, dropping his forehead against the cold floor in sheer, bone-deep relief.
He looked slowly up at me, amber eyes wide and terrified in the flashing red light.
"Where is she?" I demanded, my voice a ragged, feral rasp that tasted of copper and absolute failure.
I tried to stand. My ruined left leg refused to take the weight. I collapsed back to the cold floor with a grunted curse.
"Trent took her out the front," Chris answered bleakly, finally managing to push himself into a slumped half-seated position against the overturned table.
He didn't look at me. He looked at his hands. "I felt the exact moment the nullification field dropped the interior locking ward from her door. The extraction team breached the back bedroom. She didn't seal the Pack-Heart tether, Hayes. Her core remained unbonded through the breach. She couldn't fight them."
The brutal validation of my worst tactical fear was a blade twisting into the fractures in my bleeding chest.
She hadn't sealed the claim.
The trauma of the alpha bite had been too massive, too ingrained for her to overcome in sixty seconds. She had faced an elite extraction team powerless because she would rather risk death than willingly let another dominant alpha claim her autonomy again.
My failure was complete.
I was the celebrated Heir of the most powerful combat dynasty in the South, and I hadn't been strong enough to protect the single most important thing in my entire life from a pathetic coward in an expensive suit.
"I tracked the fleeing residual signature to the extraction vehicles," Chris said, his voice dropping into a clinically cold cadence as his ancient magic began to reboot in his shocked system. "The primary armored transport is shielded, but they couldn't mask the panic spiking through her unshielded core. Her scent trajectory is moving rapidly north."
"Where?" I snarled.
I found bloody leverage against the wall behind me and dragged myself up against the splintered stone doorframe of the dark hallway.
"Directly North," Chris confirmed flatly. "Once they cross the Northern territorial border, the Council has full legal jurisdiction over her. They'll lock her down as a formal Northern asset within the hour."
The silence that followed was the specific, absolute silence of men who had just had their worst fear confirmed.
I let it sit for one second.
I reached for the phone in my jacket. Cracked screen. Eight percent battery.
I pulled up my contact chain. My eastern handler. The Northern diplomatic office. Anyone who could get ahead of the story before Ashcroft's people wrote it for them.
Every line came back dead. Campus blackout. Ashcroft had locked the grid.
Then my phone buzzed. Not a contact. A news alert — a coastal syndicate I had a passive monitoring flag on.
I opened it.
The headline was three words:ALDRIDGE ACADEMY: EXPOSED.
The story had dropped forty minutes ago. Byline: Elias Thorne,The Aldridge Observer, routed through an independent off-campus server outside the Dean's network jurisdiction. Photos. Financial records. Eyewitness documentation of the siege. The missing student's name. Everything the Council had spent years protecting, dropped in one story on a journalism student's personal server before anyone thought to shut it down.
The coastal syndicate had picked it up in twenty minutes. Then three more. Then twelve.
The Dean's communications blackout was already irrelevant.
