Chapter 24
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
MAGNUS
The pack meeting had been running for two hours and forty minutes. The agenda had three items remaining. I was pretending complete attentiveness while managing four other things simultaneously behind a face that showed none of them.
The current agenda item was territorial boundary documentation for the northern corridor, which was important and which Vidar was handling with his usual competence and which did not require my active participation beyond the occasional nod that signaled I was present and engaged.
Meanwhile, I checked my phone under the table.
Detail check-in, I texted. I had been running them every forty minutes since I left Nell. Darius Omonodi had disappeared from the building by the time my men reached the ground floor. Only a shifter could do that.
Subject went for a run. Park perimeter. No threats. All clear.
Nell running? The image of all those curves in motion; her locs pulled back, her perfect handful sized breasts ignoring the containment of a sports bra. Was she fast? She couldn't possibly match my wolf. But I'd like to chase after her. To corner her. Then to pounce.
I put my phone face down on my thigh.
That could not happen. I was getting married. The thought arrived with the flat insistence it had been arriving with for weeks, the internal memo I kept sending myself that kept getting filed without being read.
I was getting married. I should ask for a photograph of Rosalind. I should know what my future wife looked like before I met her at an introduction dinner arranged by our mothers.
I should use her name more. Rosalind. I had been thinking of her as the Lobo princess for so long that the name felt like a foreign language.
Rosalind.
Rosalind Lobo.
Rosalind Blackwood.
My nose wrinkled. Must be dust in the room.
I pulled out my phone to text Sorsha about the photograph.
My thumb went to Nell's detail instead.
Current status.
The response took ninety seconds. Ninety seconds was not a long time in most contexts. In the context of a detail that had been responding in under ten seconds all evening, ninety seconds was a different kind of time entirely.
We lost visual. Approximately five minutes ago. She went off path. We're conducting a sweep now.
I read this twice. I was out of my chair before the second reading finished.
I was aware, distantly, of the meeting stopping around me. Of Vidar's voice saying my name with a sharp edge. I was not in the room anymore in any way that mattered. I was in the stairwell and then in the lobby and then in my car. The car was moving before the door was fully closed.
Nell was missing. Ten minutes now. The Volki had military-grade weapons. Even before that they had claws.
Or maybe it was Sorsha. Had the Lobos spotted us coming out of Vidar's place? Had they sensed the tension that night?
Or maybe they'd seen me storming into the office the next morning. Or maybe it was the unknown player. Darius Omondi had sat in her office today. He'd kissed her hand. He had her scent.
I needed to get my head clear. The likely culprits were the Volki. I reached for my phone as I took a sharp turn.
Viktor answered on the third ring. "Blackwood."
"What did you do with Nell?"
A pause. "What the fuck is a Nell?"
I hung up.
Not the Volki.
Sorsha was not a woman who left variables unmanaged.
She had been watching the Blackwood situation since before the council meeting.
She had the instincts of a predator who had survived decades of pack politics by identifying problems before they became crises.
Perhaps she knew. Had known the moment I agreed to her timeline without the negotiation she had been expecting.
A man who signs in under thirty seconds is a man who needs what he's being offered badly.
I palmed the phone. Deciding whether or not to play my hand. I knew I couldn't have Nell and Rosalind. There wasn't a choice. I had signed my life away. I'd be a fool to grasp for a few more days of freedom.
My phone rang.
"We have her."
The relief that ran through me had me drifting too close to the guardrail on the highway. Nell was fine. She was safe. She wasn't under the Volki's or the Lobo's claws.
"She went off path, went over the embankment near the drainage channel on the east side. Twisted ankle. Cracked phone. She's — " a brief pause that told me her guard was dealing with something — "she's declining the ER."
I wanted to demand she go to the ER. But I wanted her to myself. I'd evaluate her ankle and see if she needed to go.
"We're transporting her back to the residence now."
I was on the FDR doing seventy in a fifty zone. I moved to the center lane and breathed for the first time in ten minutes. The wolf was still running hot. The adrenaline of the last quarter hour sat in my system like a lit fuse with nowhere to go.
My phone rang again. I looked at the screen. I switched lanes and answered.
"Magnus." My father's voice was its usual even register; the baritone that had been the weather system of my entire childhood.
"Dad."
"I'm told you left the pack meeting early."
"I apologize."
"Problem?"
I looked at the road ahead. The city moving past on both sides. My hands on the wheel at ten and two like he had taught me when I was fifteen. "There is a wrinkle in the city. A business dealing. I need to handle it personally."
Silence followed. I had grown up reading my father's silences. I knew their textures. This one had something in it I had not heard for a long time. Not since I was sixteen on a snow covered clearing, looking down at my girlfriend's dead father.
"Business," my father said. "Not pack."
"No," I said. "Business."
"Then Vidar should handle it. That's his domain. We've talked about delegating, son."
"I'm close. I'll handle it."
Another silence. Longer. He didn't mention that Vidar had been at the same pack meeting that I'd just left.
"Magnus."
"Sir."
"I trust you, son."
Four words. Delivered without inflection, without accusation, without anything that could be pointed to as a confrontation. Just the statement, clean and direct. The weight of it settled into my chest like a stone finding the bottom.
I was lying to my father. I was sitting in a car on the FDR having just called a rival Alpha and left a pack meeting — and I had lied to my father with the smooth fluency of a man who had spent his entire life telling the truth. It was not enough shame to make me turn the car around.