Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
DRAZEX
Blood coats my knuckles in a film that has long since stopped mattering.
Another corridor cleared. Another male who could not tell me where they took her, or would not, and the distinction ceased to hold meaning three hours ago.
My father's compound has become a maze of locked doors and averted gazes and staff who press themselves into shadows when they hear my approach.
Let them cower. Let them understand what happens when someone touches what belongs to me.
Love makes you weak.
My father’s words echo through the chambers of my skull, and I bare my fangs at the empty corridor.
Weak. He wanted me to believe caring was weakness, forged me into a weapon and spent thirty years ensuring that weapon never turned against the hand that wielded it.
He should have considered what happens when the weapon finds a reason to turn.
I round the corner toward the surveillance hub, and the two males stationed at the entrance take one look at my face and step aside without a word. The monitors inside display feeds from every sector of the compound, every corridor, every checkpoint, and I scan them all.
Nothing. There is no hint of her. The feeds from the private wing have gaps where there should be continuous footage. Someone scrubbed the records. Someone with access to compound security that very few possess.
Vezra. The name burns through my thoughts, searing where it lands. She’s disappeared since the attack on Kash, has vanished into the architecture of the compound she helped build, and her absence screams confirmation of everything I already suspect.
My father told me to return to my duties. Told me to hunt the traitor. Told me that when he was satisfied my judgment had returned, we would discuss the human's future.
He expected me to comply. Expected the weapon he forged to bend to his will the way I have always bent, and he cannot fathom that the bending has stopped.
The surveillance tech at the central console shrinks in his seat as I approach, his pale grey skin going ashen.
His scent broadcasts panic so thick I can taste it on the recycled air, and the part of me that has spent decades reading fear for leverage registers his vulnerability without interest. He is not my prey.
He is an obstacle between me and information.
“Pull the maintenance level feeds.” My words come out stripped of inflection, flat as the blade I have become.
“My lord, those sectors are offline for scheduled repair. Lord Vorath authorized the maintenance window three days ago.”
“Pull whatever exists.”
The tech's hands move across the interface.
The screens shift, feeds cycling through footage that shows nothing but empty corridors and darkened access points.
Three days. My father scheduled the maintenance before I identified Vezra, before the attack on Kash, before any of this should have required planning.
He understood what was coming. Has understood from the beginning. Has prepared for this moment while I scrambled to identify a threat he controlled all along.
The rage that floods through me holds no heat. This fury runs cold, crystalline, sharp enough to cut through my fog of grief and helplessness. My father wanted me violent. Wanted me controllable. I will show him what violence looks without a leash.
“Where is Vezra?”
The tech's throat bobs with a thick swallow. “No one has seen her since yesterday evening, my lord. She reported to her quarters after the incident with Kash and hasn't been logged at any checkpoint since.”
Disappeared into the compound she has memorized better than anyone except me. I'm doing nothing more here than terrorizing a lab tech. I'll stalk each and every corridor until I find her.
I leave the surveillance hub without another word, my stride eating distance, my claws extending past fingertips that have stopped pretending at civility. Staff members flatten against walls as I pass. Their fear follows me through corridors that have become a battlefield.
The medical bay. Her workspace. The place where she spent hours bent over analysis equipment, talking to herself as she worked through problems, leaving traces of her presence in every corner she touched.
If she anticipated this, if she suspected my father might move against her, she would have left a trail.
A note. A file. Anything that might point toward where they planned to take her.
The reasoning is thin. I am grasping at fragments because the alternative is admitting I have nothing, and nothing is not acceptable.
She mapped this compound in the days she spent here, learned its rhythms, studied its people with the attention of a soldier assessing terrain.
She would not have overlooked the possibility of betrayal. Would have prepared.
I cling to that belief because the alternative breaks me.
The medical bay doors slide open, and Veth looks up from Kash's monitoring station. The expression that crosses his features tells me everything about my current state. I must appear as the monster everyone believes me to be. Good. Let them see what my father made.
“My lord.” Veth rises from his seat, his movements slow and deliberate in the manner of someone who understands that sudden motion triggers hunting reflexes. “Kash's condition has stabilized. The wound is healing.”
I have no patience for anyone else except my Chosen. “Where is she?”
The question lands in the medical bay's sterile air, and Veth's pale grey features shift through several expressions before settling on one I cannot read.
His gaze tracks across my face, down to the blood on my knuckles, back up to eyes that must be showing more silver than black, pupils contracted to slits that have nothing to do with the lighting.
His nostrils flare. “You claimed her.”
Not a question. A recognition that carries echoes of knowledge I have never encountered.
“What does that have to do with finding her?”
Veth rises from his seat, and his gaze holds mine with an intensity I have never seen there before.
“My grandmother's stories, my lord. The ones I mentioned after Krel's surgery.” He pauses, reading something in my expression.
“You dismissed them. Old tales with no relevance to a compound built on violence and commerce.”
The memory surfaces through the haze of rage. Veth murmuring about claimed mates who could find each other across continents. Through stone. Through water. The blood remembers what the mind forgets.
I filed it away without examining why it interested me. Refused to consider what it might mean.
“You claimed her.” Veth's words cut through my thoughts. “The bond exists now, my lord. You can track her.”
The information lands in my chest and lodges beneath my sternum, and the world shifts around me as understanding crystallizes.
I’ve been hunting her the way I would hunt anyone. Following trails. Searching for traces in the air. Scanning surveillance feeds and interrogating guards and tearing through the compound looking for evidence of her passage.
Her scent is not a trail.
Her signature lives in your blood. You’ve been fighting it. Trying to think your way to her instead of letting your body do what it exists to do.
The pull. The ache that has built in my chest. I thought it was grief. Thought it was the hollow agony of loss pressing against my ribs, demanding acknowledgment.
It was her. Calling to me. Telling me where to find her while I drowned in rage.
“Close your eyes. Stop thinking. Let your instincts take over. She's waiting for you to hear her,” Veth says.
My eyes close. The medical bay falls away, its hum of equipment fading, the smell of antiseptic and recycled air dissolving into nothing.
There she is.
Not direction exactly. Not a compass bearing or a location marked on a map. Certainty that lives in my bones, that pulls at my blood with a gravity I cannot resist. Down. Below. The deep places where stone meets stone and darkness holds court.
My eyes open, and Veth takes a step backward at whatever he sees in my face. I do not blame him. The predator has awakened, and the thing looking out through my eyes has stopped pretending to be civilized.
“My lord.” Veth's words follow me as I move toward the door. “Bring her back. The compound needs her. The enforcers need her.” A pause that carries weight I will examine later. “You need her.”
I am through the door before he finishes speaking, my stride lengthening into a run, my body following the pull in my blood that has screamed at me for hours.
The maintenance levels descend through the compound in a spiral of rough corridors, carved stone giving way to natural rock as the depths claim their territory.
I have walked these passages all my life, have memorized every turn and shadow, have built a sanctuary in the hidden places where no one expected to find compassion in the heir to House Draven.
Now I walk them as hunter, not refugee.
Her scent grows stronger with each step I take, a thread of sweetness weaving through the mineral smell of deep earth and old stone.
The pull in my blood intensifies, that cellular certainty guiding me through darkness that would disorient anyone who had not spent decades learning these tunnels by heart.
My fangs have extended past my lower lip, my claws click against stone with each stride, and the control I have maintained for thirty years has crumbled into dust that scatters in my wake.
Love makes you weak.
My father's words play through my thoughts one last time before I bury them forever. Love did not make me weak. Love made me strong enough to stop being what he wanted. Strong enough to choose beyond the icy perfection he tried to beat into my bones.
He forged a weapon. Now that weapon turns on him.