Chapter 22 Alden
ALDEN
The Blood Moon preparations have consumed the mansion since morning.
Torches along the ritual path. The council clearing decorated and swept, ritual stones scrubbed clean of old ash.
The war hall cleared for weapons check. I've moved through all of it on autopilot, sitting through Brynn's procedural briefing on the trial protocol with enough outward composure that she doesn't ask me twice about anything.
By late afternoon the compound smells like pine resin, cold iron, and the particular tension that accumulates in a closed space full of wolves who know something significant is coming.
I stop by Cassidy's quarters just after the dinner hour, intending to check in before the evening's preparations pull us in separate directions for the night.
The door is unlocked. That's the first thing.
I push it open and stand in the doorway for a moment, reading the room.
The bed is made, but not recently. Her field pack is gone from its spot by the window.
So is her GPS unit, her tablet, and the camera bag she keeps hung on the wall hook beside the door.
The window above the desk stands open three inches, letting in the cold evening air, and the latch is turned rather than resting naturally.
She went out this way.
I step inside and move through the space slowly, because there's nothing actionable I can do in the next thirty seconds and moving fast won't change that.
Her secondary field bag is still on the desk, unzipped. I look without touching. A worn paperback with a cracked spine. A photograph of a man in a park ranger uniform, her father, I've gathered, from the way she mentioned him once and then didn't again.
A small notebook with her handwriting crowded into every margin, analysis and observation stacked on top of itself in the way of someone who thinks faster than she writes.
I stand there longer than I intend.
For someone who arrived in Briar Ridge with nothing but field equipment and a state-issued assignment, she has made this room look lived in. That's not a small thing. I recognize it for what it is, which is the same reason I don't like what the open window implies about where she's gone.
I reach for the window latch when the bond hits.
It's not subtle. The mate bond drives the message through the chest wall like a fist and leaves no room for interpretation.
Fear. Sharp and immediate, not the low ongoing anxiety of someone alert in the field, but the spiking adrenaline of a specific moment.
And underneath it, restraint. The sensation of movement stopping, of struggling against something that has weight.
That last part turns the cold in my chest into something that has no patience left.
I'm through the window before I've made a conscious decision about it, shifting as I hit the ground. I land on four paws in the side courtyard, and the howl that comes out of me is not the measured signal I use to call patrol. It's full pack mobilization.
Wolves come out of doors and training grounds within seconds. I shift back to human before the first enforcer reaches me, because I need words more than speed right now.
"Cassidy is in trouble. Hurt, injured, possibly missing,” I say with firm, unyielding resolve. “Someone get Ciaran on a radio!”
The enforcer—Rafe, third year, reliable—is already reaching for his radio. "Ciaran, this is Rafe at the mansion. Alpha is requesting immediate contact. Over."
Static. Then Ciaran's voice, tighter than usual. "I'm here. We have a situation."
I take the radio from Rafe's hand. "Talk."
"We were running the eastern corridor for camera retrieval," Ciaran says.
"I took Tomas south to check the lower boundary markers.
Kieran was holding Cassidy's position." A pause that carries weight.
"When we came back up the trail, she was gone.
Kieran's not responding to comms. Cassidy’s last GPS coordinate puts her at the rocky incline off the eastern fork, but the signal dropped and hasn't returned. "
The bond is still flaring against my ribs, fear with that particular quality of restrained movement pressed against it. Alive. She's alive. But not free.
"How long ago?" I ask.
"Forty, maybe fifty minutes," Ciaran says. "I tried to raise her on the radio. Nothing. I tried Kieran four times. Nothing."
"Stay at her last position. Don't let anyone disturb the ground around it." I hand the radio back to Rafe. "Get me four enforcers who know the eastern corridor, full gear, five minutes."
The assembly responds faster than I expect, which means word has already spread through the estate in the way pack news moves.
By the time the four-enforcer team is assembled at the eastern gate, there are twenty wolves gathered in the courtyard watching, and the energy is charged, ready to act, ready to find my mate.
Gideon steps through the crowd before I've cleared the gate.
He's dressed for the ritual—dark ceremonial gear, the kind worn only for Blood Moon proceedings—and he moves with the unhurried confidence of a man who has choreographed his entrance.
Behind him, three of his closest council allies fall into position with the deliberate spacing of a planned appearance.
"Alpha." His voice carries to the assembled wolves without effort. "The council requires your presence. The Blood Moon Trial has a prescribed opening protocol, and your absence from the assembly hall constitutes-"
"Step aside, Gideon."
"-procedural violation that could be interpreted as forfeiture under ritual law.
" He doesn't step aside. He tilts his head slightly, the gesture of someone making a point rather than asking a question.
"The pack is assembled. The stones are prepared.
Whatever domestic concern has arisen can wait until after the protocol is observed. "
I look at him for a moment. Specifically at his face, and the way he holds it very still, the way his eyes move from me to the assembled wolves behind me and back again, measuring audience.
He expected this. He timed his arrival for this.
"You'll have your trial, Gideon," I say. "When I return."
"Ritual law doesn't accommodate personal schedules." He takes one measured step forward. "If the Alpha is unable to maintain composure in the face of a missing human woman-”
"Careful."
The single word comes out quiet, and the temperature around us drops by several degrees. A wolf somewhere behind me takes an involuntary step back.
Gideon holds his ground, but his jaw tightens once.
"-then the council has standing to question his fitness for the trial," he finishes.
His voice stays steady and calm. He's making an argument to the assembled pack, not to me, and the assembled pack is listening.
"An Alpha who abandons ritual obligation to chase after a human is not an Alpha who can be trusted to put the pack first."
"You're welcome to make that argument before Brynn," I say. "I have until the Blood Moon rises to present myself for the ritual, and I will be back by then." I move past him.
He doesn't reach for me, which is the smart choice.
I'm aware, without turning to confirm, that the assembled wolves are watching which direction the energy moves—whether Gideon calls after me, whether anyone follows him toward the hall, whether the weight of the pack's attention swings one way or the other. I don't stop to find out.
The eastern corridor takes twelve minutes at pace. Ciaran is waiting near the bottom of the rocky incline, and I can read the state of things from his face before he speaks—tense, controlled.
"Nothing on Kieran," he says as I reach him. "Radio silence, location tracking is off. She killed her unit."
"Deliberately?"
"Has to be." He gestures toward the incline. "Cassidy’s tablet is on the rock face with a cracked screen, radio is three feet away. The transmit button was depressed when we found it."
I crouch beside the radio without picking it up and breathe in.
Her scent is here—lavender and the sharp note of adrenaline-fear, layered over granite dust and cold evening air. Clear enough that I can track it.
I follow it upward along the incline, from ledge to ledge, reading the story the ground tells without needing words. The scuffle marks on the granite. The displaced moss where someone came down hard from above. The direction the soil disturbed.
And then nothing.
The scent cuts off at a cluster of boulders twenty yards north of the incline, as cleanly as a door closing. What replaces it is pine sap fresh, deliberate, applied in quantity. And under that, ash. Both strong enough to drown everything.
Someone prepared for me to follow.
I stand at the gap between boulders for a long moment, breathing in the absence of her, the manufactured blankness left in place of the trail I need. It's methodical. It took time and forethought. It was done by someone who understood exactly how I would search.
"She's been moved," I say.
Ciaran steps up beside me. "How far can you track it?"
"I can't. Not past this point." I look at the darkening tree line beyond the boulders, the deep mountain dark already pooling between the pines. "They wanted us to find this. It's not a mistake."
"They're ahead of us."
"They planned for us." I turn back toward the trail.
"Stay here. Keep the enforcers working the perimeter—look for secondary scent trails leading off the main corridor, boot prints, anything Kieran might have left coming and going.
Don't stop." I look at him directly. "She's alive. The bond would tell me otherwise."
He nods once, not offering comfort. "I'll keep the line open."
The mansion grounds are in full ritual assembly when I return.
Torches lit along the path to the stone clearing, the pack gathered in the wide crescent formation that precedes a Blood Moon Trial, Brynn standing in the clearing with her staff and the flat, patient expression of someone who has been waiting and is deciding how much longer she's prepared to wait.
Gideon stands beside the council arc with his arms folded, and when I step into the clearing, he doesn't speak. He doesn't need to. His posture broadcasts the message clearly enough—the Alpha arrives late, rattled, without his human mate in tow, while the pack watches and calculates.
"He demonstrates tonight what I've argued for weeks," Gideon says, loud enough to carry to the outer ring of wolves. "His priorities are misaligned. His judgment is compromised. An Alpha who disrupts ritual assembly over a missing civilian is an Alpha whose loyalty is divided, and a divided Alpha-"
"Is still the Alpha," Brynn says. Her voice cuts through the clearing without effort, sharp and final, the tone she reserves for people who have already been given enough room to speak.
She looks at Gideon with the amber-eyed patience of someone who has outlasted four Alphas and three coup attempts and finds most urgency overstated.
"The Blood Moon is rising, Gideon. The ritual period begins at moonrise whether or not we have finished arguing.
" She turns that gaze to me, and it carries something more careful in it, not sympathy, but acknowledgment. "Alpha. We proceed."
The first light of the Blood Moon crests the ridgeline behind the eastern pines, red and low, staining the clearing the color of old copper.
Whatever Cassidy is facing in those mountains, she is facing it without me for the next several hours, pulled together by the mate bond, tight and insistent against my ribs like a compass needle that knows exactly which direction I should move instead.
The pack howls once in unison to open the trial.
I answer.