THE ALPHA'S OBSESSION: My Maid,My Mate

Chapter 7: What the Fire Wants

Kane reached the breach in the eastern wall with his shirt still unbuttoned at the collar, cold air biting against skin that didn't feel it, his wolf pacing restless and sharp just beneath the surface in a way it hadn't in years — not with the old, familiar hunger for violence that usually accompanied a threat to his territory, but with something closer to fear. Not fear for himself. He didn't have time to fully examine that thought, didn't have the luxury of sitting with what it meant that his wolf's first instinct in a breach of his own walls was concern for a maid he'd known less than two days, before Garrick met him at the rubble with a face carved from stone.

"One intruder," Garrick reported, falling into step beside him without being asked, the two of them moving toward the smoking gap in the wall with the ease of men who'd fought side by side more times than either cared to count. "Down before he reached the inner courtyard — Torvin caught him with a blade before he'd cleared the second garden wall. But he wasn't alone getting in, Alpha. The breach was cut clean, not clawed. Someone used tools, timed the strike, knew exactly where the old stone was weakest. This wasn't a wolf losing his temper at your border. This was planned, and planned well."

"Planned by who?"

Garrick's jaw worked before he answered, the words visibly tasting wrong in his mouth even before he said them. "He's wearing Vale colors, Alpha."

Kane's stomach dropped through the floor of the world, a sensation so physical he nearly stopped walking. Alpha Corwin Vale — architect of half the treaty his father had built this fragile, bloodstained peace on twenty-two years ago, a man whose entire political position, whose entire claim to legitimacy among the allied packs, depended on the Calloway line staying safely, permanently, unambiguously dead. If Vale already had ears inside this house, if word of what had happened in that locked room had somehow already crossed territory lines in the space of a single night, then everything Kane had hoped to buy himself — time, quiet, the chance to understand what he was protecting before he had to defend it — had already evaporated before he'd even had the chance to spend it.

"Where's the intruder now?"

"Dead, Alpha. Killed himself before we could take him for questioning — bit clean through his own collar vein the second Torvin had him pinned. That's not the act of a scout doing reconnaissance. That's the act of a man more afraid of what he might say alive than of dying."

Kane crouched beside the body in the flickering torchlight, studying the dead man's face — young, unremarkable, the kind of low-ranking soldier who existed specifically to be sacrificed and forgotten by the men who sent him, disposable in exactly the way that made him useful for this. He searched the man's coat methodically, controlling the tremor of fury building in his hands, and found what he'd been dreading buried in an inner pocket: a folded scrap of paper, sealed with Vale's personal mark, empty of any written message except for three words that turned Kane's blood to ice water in his veins.

Confirm the girl.

Someone had already sent word. Someone inside this house — a servant, a guard, someone who had overheard something in the portrait hall that shouldn't have carried past its walls — had reached out beyond his territory in the handful of hours since Wren's mark had first begun to glow beneath his hands.

Kane stood slowly, the paper crushed in his fist hard enough that his knuckles had gone white, and felt his wolf go very still and very focused in a way that frightened him more than its earlier restlessness had. This wasn't the blind rage that had shattered his study window the night before. This was colder. Quieter. The kind of focus that men who knew him well had learned to fear far more than his temper.

"Triple the guard on the east wing," he said, his voice carrying the flat, absolute authority that had made grown wolves flinch since he was barely out of his twenties. "No one goes near that portrait hall who isn't cleared by me directly, personally, by name. And Garrick—" He turned, meeting his second's eyes with a weight that left no room for argument, no room for hesitation. "Find out who in this house is loyal to Vale. Tonight. I don't care whose feelings get bruised in the process."