THE HEIR HE NEVER CLAIMED

The Trap Was Built for Me

Dominic — MMC POV



The ceremony ends at 10:47 p.m.

By 11:15, Serena has moved three pieces of furniture in the Luna suite. I know because I can hear it through two floors and a corridor, the specific sound of someone making a space theirs with the efficiency of long preparation. She has been packed for days. She dressed for tonight in advance. Every element of this evening was arranged around a version of events I was simply the last to be informed of.

I sit behind my desk and I do not move for a long time.

The bond is still there.

That is the fact I keep returning to, the one that overrides every other piece of information available to me: the bond did not break when I spoke the refusal. It should have. A formal rejection before witnesses is supposed to sever the Fated designation cleanly, the Moon Goddess's acknowledgment withdrawn and both wolves returned to baseline. That is the documented biological mechanism. Every account I have ever read confirms it.

Instead it sits in my chest like a coal that refuses to go dark, pulsing at irregular intervals toward something or someone moving steadily south on a Nevada highway if my trackers' last report is accurate. She left through the east gate at 4 a.m. I have not authorized pursuit. I have told myself, twice, that authorization would be inappropriate given the circumstances.

I am still telling myself this when Roel walks through my office door without knocking.

His face tells me everything before he opens his mouth.

—Talk, I say.

—Ashwood's men aren't standing down. He crosses the floor and puts his tablet on my desk. Security feed, Nevada state highway, timestamp from forty minutes ago. Two vehicles. No pack insignia. —Two operatives, off-record deployment. I pulled the transponder signatures — they're Ashwood Syndicate. Private contractors.

I look at the feed. Two black SUVs moving at a steady pace through open desert.

—He told me this was contained, I say. —He told me the rejected mate was a non-issue. Those were his exact words: a non-issue.

—I know what he told you.

—She has no pack protection. I stand up. —She has no rank, no residency rights, nothing. If his contractors reach her before—

—I know. Roel's voice is careful in the specific way it gets when I am three seconds from breaking something. —Dom. She's alone on a highway with no money and no destination. If Ashwood's people find her before we do—

—Why? The word comes out harder than I intend. —Why is he moving on her? The rejection is done. The designation is voided. She has nothing he needs to neutralize.

Roel is quiet for exactly two seconds. The kind of quiet that precedes information I am not going to want.

—I've been pulling Ashwood's internal communications for the last three hours. He turns the tablet over. A document on the screen — flagged, marked with a classification level I don't recognize. —This was in his personal archive. Sealed six years ago, re-accessed forty minutes before tonight's ceremony. It's a bloodline assessment, Dom. Commissioned by Elder Ashwood and then buried. The subject is Mara Voss.

I look at the document header.

PRIMAL BLOODLINE — CLASSIFICATION SUPPRESSED. VOSS PACK REGISTRY.

—Her Omega ranking, Roel says quietly. —It was falsified. Someone reclassified her bloodline at birth and buried the original assessment. She was never Omega. The real classification is—

My desk phone rings.

The caller ID reads: VANCE ASHWOOD.

I look at the phone. I look at the document on Roel's tablet. I look at the security feed with two SUVs moving through Nevada desert toward a girl I put on a highway alone tonight.

The phone rings a second time.

I pick it up.

—You told me she was a non-issue, I say.

Ashwood's voice is composed, unhurried, the voice of a man who has already calculated every version of this conversation.

—I told you the designation was a non-issue, he says. —The girl herself is a different matter entirely. And I think you just read why.