26. Raphael #2
I had chosen marriage because it was the only way to save her life.
Now I was choosing her again. Choosing death, if that’s what it cost.
“Then so be it.”
“Rafa.” Viktor’s voice cracked. He hadn’t moved from my path, but he wasn’t trying to stop me anymore. His eyes darted between me and Max, and I could smell the war in him, loyalty to his Alpha raging against loyalty to his brother. “Max, he’s not thinking clearly. The bond—”
“Stay out of this, Viktor.” Max’s voice was a whip crack. “Unless you want to join him.”
Viktor flinched but didn’t back down. Behind him, I saw Dmitri shift his weight, his hand moving toward the knife at his belt.
Not threatening me. Threatening the enforcers who might try to stop me.
The pack was fracturing in real time, loyalties splitting down the middle, and Max saw it too.
His eyes narrowed, calculating the cost of stopping me against the cost of letting me go.
I didn’t wait for his calculation to finish.
I walked out into the fading daylight without looking back. Every step was a step toward a death sentence. Every step was a step toward her.
The drive to the hotel should have taken forty-five minutes.
I made it in twenty-three, running red lights, weaving through traffic, my wolf barely contained beneath my skin.
My claws had shredded the leather of the steering wheel.
Blood from Max’s unfinished mark ran down my chest in slow rivulets, the half-carved symbol still weeping where he hadn’t completed the final line. I didn’t feel any of it.
All I felt was absence.
Somewhere behind me, Max was probably already making calls. Putting out the word. A price on my head and hers, every wolf in the organization ordered to hunt us down. By morning, we would both be dead if any of them found us first.
I didn’t care. I would deal with the bratva after I found her. If I found her.
The bond was silent. Dead silent. Not the comfortable quiet of distance, when I could still sense her presence like a hearth fire in a distant room. This was different. This was the terrifying emptiness of nothing. As if someone had blown out the flame entirely.
Either she was unconscious or she was dead. And if she was dead, I would burn this city to ash and salt the earth where it had stood. I would tear through anyone who stood between me and the man who had taken her, and when I found him, I would make his death last for days.
She’s not dead. My wolf’s voice, certain and savage. We would know. The bond would break. It hasn’t broken. Just… quiet. She’s quiet.
He was right. The bond was still there, stretched thin and muted but present, a thread of connection where there should have been a river. She was alive, unconscious probably, drugged or knocked out, but alive.
For now.
I called Petrov.
He answered on the first ring, and the fear in his voice told me everything before he spoke a word. That particular note of dread that meant he was about to deliver news that would destroy me.
“Sir. We lost her.”
The world stopped. The car kept moving, the traffic kept flowing, but inside me everything went still and cold, frozen in the moment before impact.
“What do you mean you lost her?”
“Michael intercepted her in the service stairwell. Took her to the basement. The door locked from inside.” Petrov’s voice cracked.
Professional, composed Petrov, whose voice never cracked, whose control never slipped.
“By the time my team broke through… she was gone, sir. The room was empty. Michael’s car left the parking garage ten minutes ago. ”
Michael. The general manager. The man who had been in that hotel every day for years. The man whose scent was so omnipresent I had dismissed it as part of the building itself, as unremarkable as the smell of cleaning products or coffee. The man I had watched, suspected, ordered surveilled.
The man who had been the stalker all along. Who had been hunting my mate while I hunted shadows.
“I ordered you to watch him.” My voice came out as a growl, barely intelligible through the partial shift. “I told you to keep him away from her.”
“He knew the building better than anyone. Every camera blind spot. Every back stairway and maintenance access.” Petrov paused, and I heard him swallow. “He knew we were watching and he slipped through anyway. I failed you, sir. I accept whatever punishment—”
“Find him.” I ended the call before I said what I was thinking. Before I blamed him for my own failures.
Michael had taken her. Michael, who I had dismissed as a nuisance while I hunted for external threats.
Michael, who had smiled at my wife and brought her coffee and offered to help with the wedding planning.
Michael, who had pretended to be her friend, her trusted general manager, her right hand in running the hotel.
I had killed Joe. Beat him bloody in the basement of that same hotel, feeling righteous and satisfied. Believing I had eliminated the threat. Believing my mate was safe because I had destroyed the man stalking her.
I had killed the wrong man.
The realization hit me like Konstantin’s fists, sharp and brutal. Joe had been a patsy, a distraction. Michael had used him, manipulated him, pointed him at Lena like a weapon, and I had fallen for it completely. I had been so certain, so satisfied with my kill.
And the real monster had been watching the whole time.
My phone rang again, and Dmitri’s name flashed on the screen.
“I’m coming.” His voice was sharp, urgent, with that particular edge that meant he was ready for violence. “Viktor is handling Max. Where do I meet you?”
“The hotel.”
“She’s pack, Rafa.” Dmitri’s loyalty was simple, violent, absolute. The kind of loyalty that asked no questions and demanded no explanations. “We find her.”
The hotel lobby was chaos when I arrived. Staff scattered at the sight of me, their faces going pale as they registered the blood, the partial shift, the murder in my eyes. Someone screamed and someone else dropped a tray of glasses, but I didn’t slow down.
Through the lobby, past the elevator, down the service stairs that still smelled like her fear. Her scent haunted my dreams. And underneath it, sharp and chemical, the bitter stench of chloroform.
He had drugged her. Pressed a cloth to her face and held her until she stopped fighting.
My wolf went silent with fury.
The basement was cold and dim, all rough stone and exposed pipes.
Ancient and forgotten, the original bones of the building preserved beneath the modern luxury.
I followed her scent through the mechanical room, past rows of archived boxes, into an older section where the lights were burned out and the air tasted like earth and age.
The storage room door hung open, the lock broken by my team when they had finally breached.
Inside, there was nothing. Old crates had been pushed against the wall.
A single bare bulb swung gently from the ceiling, casting shadows that danced across the empty floor.
And there, half-hidden in the darkness near the wall, lay her phone.
The screen was cracked, and it was the last thing she had touched before the darkness took her.
I picked it up. My hands were shaking. When had my hands started shaking? I had killed men without trembling. I had endured beatings and torture and the worst the world could offer, and my hands had never shaken.
But they were shaking now.
Her scent was everywhere. Terror and confusion and underneath it, fainter, the frantic reaching of our connection. She had felt me. In those last seconds before the chloroform took her, she had felt my terror matching hers. She had tried to reach me through our connection.
I’m sorry. Find me.
The memory of her last thought along our connection, before the silence swallowed everything.
And I had been forty-five minutes away, letting Konstantin use me as a punching bag while the Pakhan watched with satisfaction. I had followed pack protocol, been a good wolf, while the woman I loved was dragged into darkness.
“I left her.” The words came out broken, barely audible. “I knew Michael was the threat. I realized it yesterday, when the evidence pointed the wrong direction. And I left her to answer a summons I should have ignored.”
Petrov stood in the doorway, his face ashen. “Sir—”
“She’s not dead.” Dmitri’s voice from behind him. He pushed into the room, his eyes scanning the empty space, his body coiled with barely-contained violence. “The bond is still there. You said so yourself.”
“She’s unconscious. Drugged. He could be doing anything to her and I can’t—” My voice broke. “I can’t feel her. The silence is worse than the screaming.”
“Then we stop talking and we start hunting.” Dmitri grabbed my shoulder, his grip hard enough to bruise. He forced me to meet his eyes. “Property records. Michael’s mother. Anything registered to his family. Petrov, you have access to real estate databases?”
Petrov was already moving, his professional composure snapping back into place. “Michael’s emergency contact. His family. His employment records. Give me twenty minutes.”
“You have ten.”
They left me alone in the empty room, in the place where my mate had been taken, where she had struggled and lost, where she had reached for me and found me too far away to help.
Michael’s scent clung to the walls, that bland, forgettable cologne I had dismissed a hundred times as part of the hotel, part of the background. He had been in front of me for months, for years, smiling and helpful, playing the role of devoted employee while he plotted to take everything from me.
I had been so focused on external threats, on rival wolves and vampire territory disputes and Joe’s pathetic obsession, that I had been looking outward while the real monster sat in my wife’s office, brought her coffee, offered to help, and smiled at her with that friendly mask hiding the predator underneath.
There was only silence. That vast, terrible emptiness where her presence should have been. I reached for her again and again, but there was nothing to hold onto. Just cold and quiet and the absence of everything she was.
Find her. My wolf’s voice, raw with grief and rage. Hunt him. Kill him. Bring her home.
“I will.” I said it out loud, a promise to the empty room. A promise to the mate who couldn’t hear me. “I will find you. And when I do, Michael will learn exactly what happens to men who touch what’s mine.”
Dmitri appeared in the doorway. “Petrov found something. Property forty minutes north. Registered to a woman named Maria Santos. Michael’s mother.”
Forty minutes. She had been gone for over an hour now. Every second was a second she was alone with him, a second where anything could happen, a second of silence where our connection should have been.
I was already moving before Dmitri finished speaking, through the basement, up the stairs, and out into the night.
The stars were coming out, cold and distant and uncaring.
Dmitri fell into step beside me, his body language screaming readiness for violence.
Petrov waited by the car with coordinates loaded into his phone, his expression tight with guilt and determination.
Behind us, the hotel blazed with lights, staff and guests and police all buzzing with rumors about what had happened to Mrs. Antonov, about the blood on the basement floor, about the general manager who had disappeared, about the husband who had arrived looking like a monster and descended into the depths of the building.
None of them knew. None of them understood. The monster hadn’t come from outside. He had been here all along, wearing a friendly smile and a forgettable suit, waiting for his chance.
I had missed it. I had looked everywhere except where it mattered.
And now my mate was gone.
The bond remained silent as I drove into the darkness. Silent and empty and screaming louder than any sound could. That void where she should have been, that absence that felt like a wound torn in the center of my chest.
Hold on, Lena. I’m coming.
I didn’t know if she could hear me. I didn’t know if the bond could carry thoughts across the distance and the drugs and whatever hell she was living through. But I sent it anyway. My love. My terror. My absolute certainty that I would find her and bring her home.
And my guilt.
Because I had left her. I had known Michael was the threat and I had answered the Pakhan’s summons anyway, choosing pack duty over my mate’s safety. Being a good wolf instead of a good husband.
If I didn’t find her in time, I would have to live with that choice forever.