His mate wore a mask

CHAPTER4

Zane

I have been running packs for four years.

Not officially .... my father still holds the throne, still sits in the Lycan Court with his silver-ringed hands folded and his voice that carries through stone walls. Officially I am the Crown Prince, the heir, the future, the boy every Alpha in every allied pack watches with the specific combination of deference and calculation that powerful men use when they are not yet sure who you are going to become.

But I have been running operations for four years. Coordinating border disputes. Handling the packs that go quiet when they should not. Traveling the territory in official visits that are also, always, intelligence tours. I know how to read a room. How to read a person. How to sit in a meeting with Beta Harlan Dusk and Alpha Derrick Cole and nod at exactly the right moments while cataloguing every piece of information that matters.

I know how to be patient.

I have been patient my entire life.

And in some seconds at Silver Veil Club, something ended my patience completely.

"You're staring at the corridor again," Kade says.

He is my second .... Kade Mercer, third son of a southern Alpha family, which means he has the particular energy of someone who grew up with enough power to be comfortable but not enough to be careless.

"I'm thinking," I say.

"You've been thinking since last night. You look like a man who sat on something sharp and is refusing to acknowledge it."

"Go away, Kade."

"This is my room too." He tilts his head at me. "It was the dancer, wasn't it. The masked one."

I do not answer.

"Zane. She left. It was one encounter. You don't even know.... "

"She is my mate."

Kade closes his mouth.

He opens it again. "You're sure."

"Yes."

"The mask covered most of her face."

"I did not need her face." I turn from the window. "I had some seconds. Her wrist in my hand, her weight against me when she fell, her scent.... " I stop. The word scent does not do it justice. What I found when my nose was at her temple was not a scent so much as a frequency .... something that reached into the base of my brain where the wolf lives….

Kade is quiet for a moment, which he rarely is. "She ran."

"Yes."

"From you specifically. She ran from the building."

"Yes."

He sits up slowly. "And you told the security to stop her from leaving, which she clearly got around, and she is now.... "

"Somewhere." My jaw tightens. "I could not track the scent past the alley. She lost me deliberately."

"A wolf who can lose a Lycan Prince in an alley." Kade sounds somewhere between impressed and concerned. "That is not a standard skill set."

"No," I agree. "It is not."

I have been thinking about what it means since midnight. The scent was there .... and then it was not. Not gone the way scents naturally dissipate, but cut, like a thread. Interrupted. Which means she is doing it deliberately. Suppressing, masking, hiding.

Why?

What kind of girl walks around deliberately invisible?

A girl who needs to be.

I think about the way she moved on that stage .... not trained but aware, deeply aware of her own body in the way that people are when they have spent years managing how they occupy space. I think about the seventeen seconds. The way she did not scream when I caught her. Just looked at me with eyes I could not see clearly through the mask and wrenched away, decisive and fast.

She is not frightened of me specifically. She is frightened of being found.

"The tour of allied packs," I say. "How many packs are in the Ashford City district?"

Kade reaches for the briefing folder on the table. "Silverpeak .... which we're in now. Ironwood to the east. Three smaller packs within city limits."

"We are extending the tour."

"By how long?"

"However long it takes."

He sets the folder down. "Your father is expecting you back in.... "

"I will handle my father."

Kade looks at me for a long moment.

"What?" I ask.

"I've known you since we were fifteen," he says carefully. "I have never seen you break a strategic plan for anything."

"Conclusions, Kade."

"My conclusion is that whoever she is, she has completely reorganized your priorities and you are not even a little concerned about that."

I turn back to the window. The Silverpeak Pack mansion grounds spread below .... Mercer had given me the full brief Alpha Derrick Cole, solid political ally, son Dreston Cole being groomed for succession. Beta Harlan Dusk, efficient, somewhat cold.

Beta Harlan Dusk.

I pull the briefing folder from Kade's hands and flip to the family section.

Beta Harlan Dusk. Mate Delia Dusk (omega). One child Remy Dusk (male, 19).

I almost close the folder.

Then something stops me.

I read the line again.

One child Remy Dusk (male, 19).

My wolf goes very quiet. Not dormant .... focused. The way he goes when something is wrong in a way that requires my full attention.

I set the folder down.

I cross to the door.

"Where are you going?" Kade asks.

"The corridor," I say. "I want to see the house."

What I mean is I want to see who is in it.

What I mean is I followed a scent to an alley last night and lost it, and this morning I woke up in this house and something is wrong.

The corridor is empty when I step into it.

But it is not absent.

I stand still. I breathe slowly. And there it is .... ghost-thin, almost nothing, the kind of trace that belongs to someone who has gone to extraordinary effort to be unfindable.

Warm. Specific. Like cedar and something underneath cedar that my wolf has decided is the most important thing he has ever smelled.

It leads toward the east wing staircase.

And stops at a closet door.

I walk to it. I put my hand flat against the wood. Inside .... towels, cedar planks, the absence of anyone. But the trace is strongest here, on this door, which means someone stood very close to it very recently.

Someone who did not want to be seen.

Someone in this house.

My hand tightens on the door frame.

Kade appears at the end of the corridor, reading something off his phone. "Breakfast meeting with Alpha Cole in twenty minutes," he calls.

"Fine," I say.

I do not move from the closet door.

The trace is fading already, beaten back by whatever she takes to kill it.

But it was here.

She was here.

I am not extending this tour anymore. I am canceling everything after it. I am staying in Silverpeak Pack until I find the person who spent seventeen seconds in my arms and then went invisible.

I pull out my phone. Open the message thread with my head of security.

Start with the ally packs in the Ashford district, I type. Find all female wolves aged 18-22. Anyone registered under suppressants. Anyone with unexplained records.

I pause.

Then I add Also pull any unusual registrations. Anyone recorded as male whose profile doesn't fully match.

I send it.

Behind me, Kade's footsteps approach. He stops beside me, looks at the closet door, looks at me.

"You found something," he says.

"A trace."

"Here? In the pack mansion?"

"Yes."

He is quiet. Then, slowly "Zane. If your mate is in this house.... "

"I know."

".... then someone has been hiding her."

I step back from the door.

"I know," I say again.

And I think about Beta Harlan Dusk and his son Remy and the briefing folder and the very specific kind of cold that goes through a man when a lie he did not know he was looking at suddenly becomes visible.

I am going to find her.

And when I do, I am going to understand exactly what she has been hiding from .... and who put her there.