THE HEIR HE NEVER CLAIMED

The Alpha Who Can't Command

Dominic — MMC POV

The order doesn't land.

I tell Garrett to pull the eastern perimeter teams and reposition them at the Nevada border, and Garrett — my Head of Security, fifteen years with this pack, a wolf who has never once hesitated on a direct command — looks at me for a full two seconds before he moves.

Two seconds. That has never happened before.

I don't say anything. I file it, and I feel the exact shape of what it means, and I keep moving.

This is Stage Two. I know what it is because Dr. Hess spent twenty minutes explaining it to me an hour ago in language I could not make him use faster. Bond withdrawal, unresolved rejection, the biological architecture underneath Alpha function starting to come apart at the edges. The pack-channel connections go first — the subtle current that makes a command arrive with authority rather than just volume. Then response time. Then actual function. The doctor was very clear about the sequence. He was also very clear about the treatment, which is the only part I told him to stop talking about.

I walk out of the security bay and into the corridor and my phone rings.

Roel.

—Talk, I say.

—Ashwood's contractors left Hawthorne four minutes ago. His voice is stripped down to information, no padding. —We have satellite confirmation. Two vehicles, northeast on Route 95. Dom — that's her road.

—How far?

—Thirty-eight minutes at current speed. He pauses. —Our closest team is two hours out. I know. I'm already rerouting.

Two hours. Thirty-eight minutes. I do the subtraction and the result is clean and unacceptable.

—What assets do I have inside that window?

—Checking. The sound of him working. —I have three civilian contractors we've used for off-record logistics in Nevada. Not fighters. I have one KraneTech security consultant based in Reno — he's forty-five minutes out from Hawthorne, but I might be able to cut that if he's mobile. And I have—

—Get them all moving. Right now, before you finish the sentence.

—Already calling. A beat. —There's something else. The satellite image that confirmed her location — she stopped at a gas station. She went inside. Her truck has been on the lot for eleven minutes now.

Eleven minutes inside a gas station.

—Is she still inside?

—Truck's still on the lot.

I walk faster.

The bond hits without warning — not the low constant smolder of the last four days, but something acute, spiked, broadcasting unmistakably in the frequency that means fear. Her fear. I feel it the way you feel a temperature change, sudden and systemic, the bond flaring back to life around an emotion that cuts straight through the withdrawal haze.

She is terrified of something inside that building right now.

—Roel. The contractors Ashwood deployed. Did we get identification?

—Running it.

—How many people in his private security have interrogation training?

A silence.

—Dominic.

—How many, Roel.

—Most of them. He says it quietly. —They're not a surveillance unit. They never were.

I am already at the parking structure.

I pull my own keys.

Roel starts to say something about protocol, about operational exposure, about what it means for the KraneTech position if the Alpha Supreme is personally observed interfering with an Ashwood Syndicate deployment. I hear him. I process every word. I understand the legal and political dimensions of every single thing he is describing.

—Get me the fastest route to Route 95, I say. —And keep trying to raise the Reno contractor.

—Dom, you're six hours away, you can't—

—Then I'll drive six hours. The car starts. —Stay on the line. Tell me the moment you have eyes on those contractors' position again.

The bond fires in my chest a second time — sharp, directional, the specific signal of proximity and danger in combination — and I pull out of the structure at a speed that makes the concrete walls blur, and I think about two seconds of hesitation from a wolf who has never once questioned my command, and I think about the projected timeline Dr. Hess laid out so carefully, and I think about a girl alone in a gas station bathroom while Ashwood's contractors close the distance at highway speed.

My phone buzzes in the cupholder. Roel, text only.

Satellite just lost the truck. She's moving.

So are they.