Chapter 3 - Olivia
The vault door was already open.
Olivia stood at the base of the old watchtower with her hand on the iron latch, and the door swung inward before she touched it.
The hinges groaned against rust in a way that meant no one had oiled them in years, but someone had opened them in hours—no forced entry, no scratches around the keyhole.
Whoever had been here had used a key or hadn’t needed one.
Her wolf snarled, and this was nothing like the vague restlessness from the trail.
This was specific, a hard pulse of wrong that compressed her chest and lifted every hair on her forearms. The smell hit next—male, multiple, the sharp musk of shifters who weren’t pack, layered beneath something chemical.
She should have turned around. She knew it the way she knew the trail home, marrow-deep, beyond argument. Every wire in her body sang the same frequency. Leave.
She stepped inside anyway. The reliquary was twenty feet away. Caitlynn needed it, and the ceremony started in less than an hour. Olivia Voss did not abandon tasks she’d agreed to complete.
The vault was small—low ceiling, stone walls sweating with damp, that wrong chemical smell thickening with each breath. Her grandmother’s reliquary sat on the middle shelf, palm-sized, iron, the Voss crest pressed into its lid.
She reached for it.
The first one came from behind the door.
His arm hooked around her throat from behind, a technique drilled and repeated until the muscles remembered it without thought.
She dropped her weight, drove her elbow backward into the soft space beneath his ribs hard enough to feel cartilage flex, twisted out of the loosened grip, and got her shoulder into his sternum. He hit the wall.
The second was already inside. He caught her around the waist, drove her off her feet, and her spine cracked against the stone shelf hard enough that copper boxes clattered to the floor.
She got a knee up—connected with something solid—but he pinned her wrists against stone with a grip that ground the small bones together while the first one recovered and took her legs, wrapping both arms around her thighs.
Olivia fought, freed one hand, and raked her nails down the nearest face. The sound he made was satisfying. The blood under her fingernails, more so.
A third came through the door, calm where the others were not, unhurried. He crouched beside her and withdrew something from a leather pouch—small, crystalline, a deep bruised purple that pulsed with a light that wasn’t light, an anti-glow that seemed to drink the warmth from the air around it.
Her wolf went berserk. A wall of primal terror slammed through her—the wolf’s, not hers—an animal recognition that predated language. Her body tried to shift without permission.
The man pressed the shard against the inside of her forearm.
She screamed.
And then the wolf was gone. One moment, the presence was there, and the next, nothing.
The pack bond dissolved with it: her brother’s pulse at the center, the scattered lights of every wolf in Beaumont, the ambient current of belonging she’d carried so long she’d forgotten it was there, all of it collapsing into white static and then into a void that felt worse than noise.
Her lungs locked. Her nervous system kept sending signals to a wolf that no longer answered, and the disconnect made her limbs feel foreign, borrowed, as though she were wearing someone else’s skin.
The men released her, and she didn’t move.
“That’s it?” The first one, the one whose ribs she’d hit.
He rubbed his side and looked at her with an expression she recognized—she’d seen it on delegates who met the Alpha’s sister and found her shorter than expected, softer.
His eyes moved over her critically. The green dress pulled across her stomach where she lay on cold stone, and she watched him decide—the downgrade from threat to inconvenience, the reclassification from target to cargo.
“Shut up,” the calm one said. “Get her moving.”
They walked her north through dense forest, off the trail, the canopy so thick that midday felt like dusk.
Without the wolf’s strength underwriting every movement, her muscles felt thin and imprecise—she’d spent her life drawing from a reservoir of power beneath her skin the way a person drew from a bank account they never checked.
The balance was zero now, and every step cost more than it should have.
She counted anyway, noted direction—northeast, steady, away from the territory’s strongest ward lines. Whoever planned this knew the topography, the patrol schedules, the gap between the eastern boundary check and the next sweep.
Someone inside the pack had given them this.
That thought settled in her gut like iron. Not Marcus—Marcus was brute force and bad timing. This precision came from a different source, and she filed it away.
The camp confirmed everything. Three canvas tents, military surplus, patched and re-patched.
A fire pit with recent ash. A smaller tent set apart, padlocked.
They put her inside—mildew and stale canvas, a sleeping bag on a ground pad, zip ties on her wrists, the plastic biting her skin.
She refused to flinch, refused to show any emotion that could be misconstrued as weakness.
She sat against the center pole and breathed. Four counts in, six counts out, the rhythm she’d taught herself at sixteen, palms flat against cold bathroom tile, grief sitting on her chest like a living thing.
Without the wolf, she was aware of her body the way she imagined humans were—constantly, unforgivingly.
The weight of her limbs, the press of her thighs together when she sat cross-legged, the dress clinging to the parts of her that took up more space than she wanted them to.
Her body, stripped of the wolf’s power, felt like a house with the electricity cut—same rooms, same walls, but dark and silent and missing the hum that made it home.
Outside, the men were scared. Olivia could hear it in the clipped sentences, the pacing, the voice that rose before being cut short. They’d poked a hornet’s nest and were sitting next to it, listening to the buzzing get louder.
The tent flap opened two hours later, maybe three.
Marcus Cole was thinner than she remembered. His eyes hadn’t changed, though, dark and quick, the eyes of someone who could no longer afford surprise.
“Olivia Voss.” He said her name like he was reading it off a manifest, inventory received, cargo confirmed. “You look well.”
She said nothing.
He crouched in front of her, close enough to smell—woodsmoke, sweat, the faint metallic tang of a body running on cortisol and diminishing reserves. “Your brother’s going to pay a great deal to get you back. I want you to know that.”
“You want me to feel expensive. Is that supposed to be flattering?”
“It’s supposed to be honest. You’re worth a significant amount to me, Olivia. Not because of who you are. Because of who your brother is.”
“At least you’re straightforward about it.”
“I find it saves time.” He stood and brushed his knees. “You’ll be comfortable here. My men won’t touch you. Food, water, shelter. This doesn’t need to be unpleasant.”
“You drugged me with a suppression shard and zip-tied my wrists.”
“Precautions.”
“You kidnapped me from my own territory during a sacred ritual.”
“Timing.” He held her gaze. “Your brother will have my terms within the hour. If he’s pragmatic, this ends by morning.”
He moved toward the flap and paused. “For what it’s worth—this isn’t personal.”
“Marcus.”
He turned, and she looked at him from the floor—bound, wolfless, wearing a dress she’d chosen that morning because it made her feel commanding, the silk ground with dirt now, a tear along the left seam where she’d fought for her life.
She let him see exactly what she thought of him.
There was not a trace of fear in her eyes.
“When my brother comes,” she said, “I want you to remember this conversation. I want you to remember standing here telling me it wasn’t personal, while I sat on the floor of a tent you put me in.”
Marcus held her gaze for three seconds before the tent flap dropped and the padlock clicked.
Alone with the shard pulsing against the inside of her forearm—a second heartbeat, foreign and wrong—she cataloged sounds. Noted patrol intervals. Counted the seconds between the coughing man’s circuits, because a cough meant a pattern and a pattern meant a gap.
There was always a gap.