4 Sloane
The guard came through the service door talking, which was his first mistake.
“High Praetor wants the—” He got that far before he saw me at the terminal.
I watched the sentence die on his face as he reached for his radio. He was the careful type, the report-it-first type who would get me swept up in an instant.
It had taken me three agonizing days to manufacture the clearances to infiltrate this residence. Three days since I first uncovered the High Praetor of Antiquities’ name in the Severance decoy logs. Three days of forging credentials and memorizing patrol routes.
I refused to let one diligent gray-coat end it.
“Don’t,” I said, pleasant as a bake sale. “Truly. You do not want to key that mic.”
He keyed the mic.
I crossed the distance between us before his thumb finished pressing and drove the heel of my hand up under the radio, snapping it out of his grip and into his teeth.
While he staggered back, I hooked my ankle behind his and took his legs out from under him. He hit the cigar-stained rug hard. I followed him down, dropping my forearm across the side of his throat—pinching off the blood flow while the air kept moving.
He struggled. I held him until his eyes rolled back and his limbs went slack. I rolled him onto his side, tucking him in like a drunk uncle.
“Sleep it off, sweetheart. You picked a bad desk to guard.”
I returned to the terminal. The High Praetor’s personal study closed around me again with its stink of leather, old cigars, and ancient, dusty ledgers. The arrogant bastard had built himself a den.
The data drive remained seated in the port where I’d left it, the progress bar crawling across the screen.
“Sixty-one percent,” I read off the screen. “You are the slowest miracle, ever.”
The Lodestone Underground’s top forger had promised this drive could slice through any Conclave firewall.
It was hand-warded, custom-cut tech designed specifically to infiltrate magically warded servers like this, but it still moved at an agonizing crawl.
I braced both palms on the desk, watching the bar, letting my mouth run to keep my hands from shaking.
“Come on. Come on. Little faster. We have places to be.”
SITE COORDINATES — TRANSFER PENDING.
There it was.
This was the target, vastly superior to the Scorched Earth decoy I’d pulled three nights back.
This drive was sucking down the actual transport coordinates for Severance. Ward-clearances. The routing data that told every Conclave checkpoint on the continent which black vans to wave through blindly.
Once I secured this? The Underground could intercept those vans and save hundreds, maybe thousands, of dormants from being hollowed out into husks.
The system coughed up metadata fragments as it worked.
ARBITER, Phase Two, candidate intake. I frowned. What was this? It looked like priority tags. Two files flagged above the rest, encrypted behind a partition named Avaline-Keystone.
“Well, hell.” I said it softly, the way you speak standing over a grave. “Hi, girls.”
I couldn’t see whatever names were locked in there, but I recognized the clearance level. High value dormants. Maybe possessing bloodlines the Conclave prized above all others. I’d work on cracking the partition later.
My throat cinched tight. I forced my hands to keep moving, typing fast and mean. Anger is just grief with somewhere to go, and I have always had somewhere to put mine.
“Two more,” I told the High Praetor’s empty leather chair. “I’m walking out with two more of yours tonight. Choke on it.”
The bar hit ninety-one.
That’s when the floor bucked.
The concussion slammed up through the soles of my boots before the sound arrived, lurching the whole suite sideways. A crystal decanter walked itself off the sideboard and shattered on the rug in a spray of amber liquid and ancient glass. Then the noise hit—something massive coming apart below.
Klaxons began to shriek. This was the facility-wide wail signaling an emergency.
“Oh, that is a whole different flavor of bad,” I said to the empty room.
Someone had breached the fortress.
Every Seeker and gray-coat in the building was about to swarm this floor.
I planted one hand flat on the terminal and held my ground. Abandoning the drive meant leaving with nothing. I refused to choke out a guard just to run away with a corrupted file. I needed those Severance routing coordinates.
Ninety-six.
The service door banged wide open.
Two Seekers rushed in, weapons raised, both wearing Conclave security uniforms. The one in front was young enough that his voice cracked on the shout. “Hands! Hands off the—get your hands—”
“There he is!” I lit up, exuding warmth and flustered urgency, the chameleon persona dropping over me instantly.
Shoulders loose, chin high, a woman caught doing paperwork and absolutely delighted about the interruption.
“Thank goodness, I have been trying to raise somebody on this floor for ten minutes! Do you know half your servers just fell over? The High Praetor is waiting for this report—ohhh, listen to that, that’s a wall going.
Someone is about to have a very bad day. ”
I moved toward them, drifting off the desk with my auditor badge held high, projecting pure clipboard energy.
The young one’s eyes flicked to my badge. Show a rules man a laminated card, and his brain can’t help but read it.
I seized his gun hand at the wrist, twisting it toward the ceiling, and smashed his nose with the flat edge of my badge. I drove my knee up into his solar plexus, folding him in half.
The second guard adjusted his aim to the center of my chest, a full stride beyond my reach.
“Now wait,” I started.
That was when the smell reached me.
It slid under the door, cutting through the smoke and the burnt-sugar reek of failing wards. Wind sweeping down off a mountain ridge over wet river stone, carrying the green, sweet scent of moss after a rain. It rolled into that den like a flash flood tearing through a dry ditch.
It bypassed my human senses entirely. It struck the iron vault inside me, the cage where I had buried my wolf.
My breath caught in my throat.
The wolf rose up inside me with a terrifying, primal violence.
It clawed at the walls of my chest, roaring its recognition, fighting the thick sludge of chemical suppressants in my blood.
Mine, it snarled, tearing at my ribs. Mate.
The sheer, overwhelming force of it brought a wave of ecstatic relief and absolute, suffocating terror.
I had buried her to go undercover. To save other dormants.
But she knew that scent. She hungered for it. She was answering the call.
The guard’s finger tightened on the trigger.
The massive oak doors blew off their hinges.
Wood tore out of the frame in a spray of splinters and brass. One door skated across the rug and hammered the desk hard enough to crack the mahogany.
The guard spun toward the impact.
The doorway filled with a shadow, and the man standing there crossed the room before my eyes could track the motion.
I have never seen anything that massive move with such devastating speed. Soot stained the harsh lines of his face. Gray ash smeared his throat and both wrists. Dark blood coated his left forearm.
He grabbed the guard by the back of the collar and the gun-arm simultaneously. The sickening crack echoed through the room. The guard hit the floor. Silent. Dead.
The man straightened. His pale, gold-rimmed eyes swept the room.
He found me.
We locked gazes.
His eyes widened, the pale gold burning stark against the soot, and I watched his expression crack open. He recognized me. He saw the suppressed animal buried underneath it all. Of course he did.
The bond snapped taut between us, bone-deep and wordless, an electric cable pulled tight across the wreckage of the High Praetor’s den. He was the other half of my soul, the phantom I had run from, the voice on the comms that had haunted my every waking hour since.
“You,” he breathed.
One word. Gravel and wonder and an ocean of grief, dragged out of a chest that clearly hadn’t planned on speaking.
“Don’t.” My voice emerged thin and trembling, stripped of its warm chameleon lilt. “Don’t come any closer.”
He took a step backward, immediately complying with my request, but the air between us compressed anyway.
A concussive wave of pure wolf rolled off him, hitting me hard.
My blood boiled.
The dead-magic suppression compounds turned from ice to steam in a single heartbeat. Years of meticulously maintained, forced hibernation began to cook off in his presence.
My knees gave out, hitting the rug hard. I clamped my jaw shut, trapping the scream behind my teeth.
I knew exactly what this was.
The Lodestone Underground had trained me for this nightmare scenario. I was a dormant wolf shifter heavily suppressing myself to stay undercover.
If I were to ever encounter my fated mate, his presence—his scent—would trigger an unstoppable Heat.
The mate bond would attempt to seal itself, forcing my wolf to the surface.
But the chemical suppressants would fight the shift, turning my own biology into poison.
The warring forces would literally cook my internal organs unless we completed the bond.
“Stay back,” I gasped, clutching my chest. “I mean it—stay—”
“You’re hurt.” He took another step out of the room, complying. His blood-dark, ash-marked hand stretched out, driven by the desperate, instinctual need to protect what belonged to him. “What did they—tell me where—”
“No!” I threw my hand up, palm out, every tendon in my arm shrieking with the effort. “You. It’s you. Don’t you understand?”
A wave of blistering heat rolled up my spine and broke over my skull. My voice turned ragged, feral, sounding like the animal I had locked away.
I watched the devastating realization hit his pale eyes, tearing him apart worse than the breached doorway had.
“Tell me what to do.” His voice dropped to a wrecked, inhuman rumble. “You’re on the floor and I can’t touch you. Tell me what to do.”
“Back up.” My contacts melted against my eyes. I squeezed my eyes shut against the blinding white pain. “Did you follow me? Did you—”
“Sloane, I swear I didn’t.” His voice was wrecked. “I swear I was trying to stay as far away from you as possible. Kaia told me what you wanted and I swore I would not force you—I swore it. But now—”
I believed him. The raw grief in his voice was impossible to fake.
Panic clawed at the back of my mind because the terrible truth was that distance offered little safety anymore.
Simply smelling him, simply being in the same room, had already jump-started my Heat.
The biological countdown had begun. If he avoided touching me, I might stay on my feet just long enough to finish the mission and escape before the fever fully consumed me.
It was a long shot, but it remained the only play I had left.
“Sloane, please. I swear this to you—”
The words tore out of him, ragged and bleeding, and they struck the walled-off room in my chest like a thrown torch.
“I know,” I cried, my voice breaking clean in half. “I know. I heard you. On the line—drop the wards, even if it kills me—that was you. I believe you. But, you don’t understand—”
I forced one eye open, peering through the haze of pain.
He stood behind the broken bodies of the High Praetor’s guards, both hands fisted at his sides, his jaw locked so hard the muscle twitched under the ash.
I knew every instinct in his massive frame must be screaming toward me, yet he held himself perfectly still, fighting his own nature to keep me alive.
Behind me, the terminal chimed its bright completion tone.
One hundred percent.
The drive sat in the port, transfer complete. It held the coordinates, the routing, the locked files—the key to dismantling the entire operation before Severance could even begin.
“The drive,” I rasped, pointing a trembling finger at the terminal. “Pull it. It has the Severance routing data. Dormants are being shipped to a black site, and that drive is the only way we find them. You have to take it and run.”
He looked at me like I was crazy. “We take it. I won’t leave you like this. You know I can’t—”
The klaxons rose to a deafening pitch. Heavy boots pounded down the hall, multiplying rapidly.
Through the rolling smoke of the corridor, the first wave of guards rounded the corner at a dead run.