THE HEIR HE NEVER CLAIMED

He's Already in Nevada

Dominic — MMC POV

The speedometer reads a hundred and forty-two and the Nevada highway is empty and flat and I push it to a hundred and forty-eight and the bond is firing in continuous bursts now, no longer the slow twice-hourly pulse of the last four days.

Fear. Sustained, escalating, not processing down. She is afraid and she has been afraid for the last twelve minutes without interruption and I am doing a hundred and forty-eight miles per hour and I am still forty minutes away.

Roel is on speaker.

—Give me the Reno contractor, I say.

—He's not answering his secondary line. Roel's voice is tight. —I've sent the location data, I've pinged his emergency channel, he's either on the move already or he's—

—Pull his GPS tracker.

—I did. He's moving. He's forty-three minutes out, Dom. He left before I called him, which means—

—Means he already had the location. I keep my eyes on the road. —Who gave it to him?

Silence.

—Find out, I say.

I push the car harder and try to send a command through the pack channel to my advance team — the direct Alpha push that bypasses verbal communication, the signal that has moved wolves to action in emergency conditions since I was twenty-six years old. I feel it leave me and I feel it arrive wrong, like a signal transmitted through water, distorted and weakened before it lands. The team responds, but three seconds late.

Stage Two.

Dr. Hess was precise about the sequence. The pack channel goes first — the current that makes an order arrive as authority and not just noise. Right now I can still push through it by force, by raw Alpha function overwhelming the degradation. In another week, I won't be able to. In two weeks, my betas will start to read the gap.

None of that matters in the next forty minutes.

My phone lights up. Roel, text.

Confirmed: Ashwood contractors entered the station four minutes ago. Two-man unit. She's inside. Both exits are blocked.

Both exits.

I read it twice. I run the picture: a gas station, two vehicles, two men with professional training and Ashwood authorization, and Mara Voss with no pack protection and no rank and nothing that makes her legally anyone's problem to protect.

I call Vance Ashwood.

He picks up on the second ring, which means he was expecting this.

—Alpha Voss-Krane, he says. Warm. Composed. The voice of a man standing still in the middle of a move he already finished.

—Call them off, I say.

—I'm not sure I know what you're referring to.

—Vance.

—My people are simply relocating a young woman who finds herself in a vulnerable position. He pauses. —Given that she is no longer under pack protection — and that you yourself authorized the removal of that protection two days ago — I'm not certain what objection you could reasonably raise.

The bond fires again. Not fear now. Pain.

Something physical. She is in physical contact with someone and it is not consensual and the bond is transmitting it with a clarity that hits me like a strike to the sternum.

—If she is harmed, I say, and my voice has gone very quiet, which is worse than shouting, —I will dismantle everything your family has built inside this Pact. Every contract. Every Elder appointment. Every arrangement your father made and your grandfather made before him. I will take it apart with my hands if I have to.

—You're six hours from Nevada, Dominic. He sounds almost gentle. —And you're not well. I've heard the medical reports. Stage Two bond withdrawal does interesting things to Alpha judgment.

He ends the call.

I put the phone down and I drive and the bond transmits another burst of pain and I run the math one more time and the math has one answer and that answer is not fast enough.

I scroll to a contact I have not used in three years. A number I have kept because information is currency and this particular number represents a debt on both sides — one he owes me, one I owe him, and we have both been waiting to see who would need to collect first.

Jace Merrow. Rogue wolf. Seattle base. Documented grievance against the Ashwood Syndicate that predates mine by seven years.

He picks up on the first ring.

—Merrow, I say.

—I know who this is.

—I need a location covered. Route 95 Nevada, gas station outside Hawthorne. Two Ashwood contractors, active. I need them removed and the woman inside that building extracted before—

—Hawthorne, he says.

Something in his tone stops me.

Three seconds of silence.

—Merrow.

—I'm already in Nevada, he says.

The highway blurs past at a hundred and forty-eight miles per hour.

—Why, I say.

He doesn't answer. The line stays open.