Chapter 20
RAPHAEL
I ran.
The wolf tore through the dark pines with everything he had, muscles bunching and releasing in a rhythm older than thought.
My paws struck cold ground with each stride, claws digging into frost and earth, propelling me forward faster than any car could navigate these mountain roads.
The cold sliced into my lungs with each breath but I did not slow.
The branches whipped against my flanks, leaving scratches that healed almost as fast as they opened.
There was only one thing that mattered. Only one destination. Only her.
The bond stretched ahead of me like a thread of spider silk, impossibly thin, impossibly fragile.
She was there through it, but wrong. Muffled.
Like trying to hear a voice through layers of wool, the shape of it recognizable but the details lost. The drug was doing something to our connection, smothering it, and with every minute that passed, I felt her slipping further into silence.
No. I would not let that happen.
I pushed harder, my hindquarters driving me forward with renewed fury.
The forest blurred around me, trees and shadows and moonlight bleeding together into a single dark canvas.
My wolf had no room for fear. No room for grief.
Only the hunt. Only the chase. Only the certainty that I would reach her or die trying.
The scent of the forest filled my nose with each stride.
Pine needles crushed underfoot, releasing their sharp green fragrance.
Frozen earth and dead leaves. The metallic taste of frost on my tongue.
And underneath it all, threaded through the mountain air like poison, the chemical stink of exhaust. A car had been through here recently, the smell lingering in the cold like a stain on silk.
My wolf catalogued it and kept running. That car had taken her somewhere. That car was my target now.
Her consciousness dimmed through the bond.
Fading. The sharp edge of her fear growing dull, softening into something that felt like sleep.
Or something worse. My wolf howled inside my chest, a sound that never reached my throat because there was no time for howling.
Running. Moving. Closing the distance between us mile by desperate mile.
Pine. Frost. Frozen earth. And underneath it all, so faint I could barely catch it, the ghost of her perfume. That particular blend of her shampoo and her skin and the soap she used in the shower, a scent I would recognize anywhere on earth. She had been here. Recently. Within the hour.
I was close.
The trees began to thin, the forest opening into a clearing I recognized from memory.
The cabin where Michael had held her months ago, his mother’s property, the place he had chosen for this twisted reunion.
I could see the building through the last screen of pines, dark wood and glowing windows, smoke rising from the chimney into the black sky.
I burst into the clearing and stopped.
Too late. Seconds too late.
Wrong. Everything was wrong.
Her scent was here, yes. Layered over the open ground, concentrated near the treeline where I stood.
But it was old. Minutes old, at least. And underneath it, another scent that made my wolf’s hackles rise and his lips peel back from his teeth.
Michael. His scent, mixed with the sour odor of sweat.
Fear sweat. Excitement sweat. The smell of a predator who believed he had cornered his prey.
But no heartbeat drummed from inside those walls. No breathing stirred the air. The cabin was empty.
I circled the structure, nose to the ground, following the trails of scent that crisscrossed the frozen earth.
She had approached from the south, walking, her footsteps clear in the frost. She had stopped here, at the forest’s edge where the trees gave way to open ground.
And then her scent had spiked with adrenaline. Fear.
I found her coat crumpled on the ground near a stand of young pines.
The smell of her staggered me. Her perfume, her skin, the particular chemistry of her body that I had memorized over months of waking beside her, holding her, breathing her in while she slept.
But also Michael’s scent layered thick over hers.
His hands had been all over this coat. All over her.
The thought of him touching her, searching her, putting his hands on my mate made my wolf see red.
A low growl built in my chest, vibrating through my body from nose to tail.
I nosed the coat aside and followed the trail of disturbed frost toward the deeper trees.
Thirty feet into the underbrush, I found it.
The tracking unit Viktor had sewn into her coat lining, the small black device lying discarded among the dead leaves like a broken promise.
The realization crashed through me.
He had searched her. The thought made bile rise in my throat.
Michael had put his hands on her, frisked her like a prisoner, and found the hard shape of the tracker sewn into her coat.
He had torn it out and thrown it away like garbage.
And then he had taken her somewhere else.
Somewhere we would not find by following technology. Somewhere he had prepared in advance.
She was not here. The cabin was empty. The tracker was useless.
And somewhere out there in the darkness, maybe two miles ahead on a winding mountain road, Michael was driving away with my mate.
If I had run faster. If I had not waited those four agonizing minutes in the SUV.
I would have caught him here, would have torn him apart before he ever touched her.
I threw back my head and howled.
The sound tore through the night, raw and primal and full of everything I could not say in words.
Rage at the man who had touched her. Terror at the silence in the bond where her voice should have been.
The absolute promise of death for anyone who stood between me and my mate.
The howl echoed off the mountains and faded into nothing, and then there was only silence and empty ground and the muffled pulse of the bond pointing away, away, northeast into darkness I did not know.
Tire tracks. I found them at the edge of the clearing, two sets of treads pressed into the frost, leading away down a service road I had never noticed before. The exhaust smell was strongest here, so fresh it burned my nostrils. Five minutes. Maybe less. I had missed him by five minutes.
The bond tugged at my chest, a weak but insistent pull toward the northeast. The same direction the tracks led.
She was that way. Miles away, maybe, but that way.
And the drug that muffled our connection was already beginning to fade, her presence growing incrementally clearer with each passing minute as her body processed the chemicals out of her system.
I heard the truck before I saw it. Viktor’s engine, the distinctive rumble of his modified SUV, approaching from the main road. Headlights sliced through the trees, and then the vehicle was pulling into the clearing, Viktor at the wheel and Dmitri riding shotgun with a rifle across his lap.
I did not want to shift. Every second in human form was a second wasted, a second Michael used to put more distance between us. But I needed to communicate, needed to coordinate, needed to ensure we were all hunting the same prey with the same information.
The shift was agony. Bones reshaping, muscles tearing and reforming, fur receding into skin that felt too thin and too vulnerable.
I forced it only halfway, just enough to make words, and even that felt like swallowing broken glass.
My throat was not designed for human speech in this form, the vocal cords caught between wolf and man, and the sounds that emerged were barely recognizable.
“She’s not here.” The words scraped out of me, rough and wrong. “He took her.”
Viktor was out of the truck before I finished speaking, his face hard and professional despite the fury I could smell underneath his calm.
His wolf was as angry as mine, the scent of it bleeding through his human skin.
Dmitri followed, flashlight already in hand, scanning the tracks with a soldier’s practiced eye.
“How long?” Viktor asked.
“Minutes. Five, maybe less.” The words were a snarl. “I almost had him.”
“Direction?”
“Northeast. Service road.” I gestured toward the tracks with a hand that was still half-claw, the fingers too long, the nails too thick. “He drove her somewhere else. Somewhere he prepared.”
Viktor’s face went hard. “The tracker?”
“Useless. He found it. Made her take off her coat.”
Dmitri crouched near the tracks, his flashlight tracing the patterns in the frost. “Fresh treads. He’s not going fast. Doesn’t want to draw attention.”
“Or he knows we can’t follow.” Viktor turned to me, his eyes catching the moonlight. “Can you feel her?”
“Yes.” The word was a growl, barely human. “The bond. It’s muffled, but I can feel her. Barely. She’s northeast.”
“How far?”
“I don’t know.” The admission burned in my throat. “The drug is interfering. But the bond is there. I can follow it.”
Viktor nodded once, his decision made in the space between heartbeats.
“Dmitri, with me. We take the truck, follow the road, try to cut him off or find where he’s heading.
Raphael.” His eyes met mine, wolf to wolf, brother to brother.
“You follow the bond. You’ll be faster through the forest than we are on the roads. ”
“If you find the location before I do—”
“We hold position. We don’t engage until you arrive.” Viktor’s voice hardened. “This is your kill, brother. We’re just backup.”
No more words were needed. Viktor jerked his head toward the truck, and Dmitri was already moving, climbing into the passenger seat with his rifle ready. The door slammed shut, the engine roared to life, and the headlights swung away as the vehicle turned down the narrow road.