43. Sam
Chapter forty-three
Sam
Icame back wrong.
Not all at once—in pieces. Like someone had taken consciousness apart, scattered it across the forest floor, and was feeding it back to me one broken fragment at a time.
Smell first. Pine. Copper. Dirt. Something chemical and vile coating the back of my throat.
Then sound. Voices. Distant. Urgent. Someone saying my name like they’d been saying it for a while.
Then pain.
That one showed up like it had been waiting in line and was done being patient. Everything hit at once—chest, shoulder, ribs, neck, back—my nerves screaming awake in a chorus of white-hot objection. My muscles were concrete. My tongue tasted like I’d been chewing on batteries.
And underneath all of that—deeper, louder, more insistent than any of it—the bond.
Pulling northeast. Stretched thin and thrumming with something I couldn’t name through the fog still wrapped around my brain.
Annabella.
My wolf lunged. Hard. Like he’d been throwing himself against the sedation for however long I’d been out, and my return to consciousness was the crack in the wall he’d been waiting for.
Mate. Where is mate? Get up. Get up NOW.
Something hot pressed against my chest. Hands—small, trembling with effort.
“Come on, come on,” Esme whispered. “Wakey-wakey, stubborn Sam.”
I jerked upright.
I was inside our van, the overhead light casting a sickly yellow wash across metal walls.
I was on the floor between the bench seats.
Someone must have hauled me in here and laid me on a sleeping bag.
The dart wounds throbbed with each heartbeat, but the thick underwater heaviness in my head was receding, Esme’s purge spell chasing the last of it from my system.
I grabbed the bench seat and pulled myself up. The van rocked.
“Easy —” Gideon started.
“Where is she?”
Gideon went quiet.
That silence told me everything. My wolf went from desperate to completely unhinged. I could feel him tearing at the inside of my skull, claws and teeth and howling, and I had about three seconds before I lost the fight to keep him contained.
I shoved past Gideon toward the van’s rear doors.
“Sam —”
I hit the doors. Wrenched the handle. Cold air flooded in; dark forest, the van parked on the logging access road where Mina had it during the operation. How long had I been out? How far had they taken her?
“Sam.” Jem blocked my path. He’d moved fast, positioned himself between me and the forest with his arms at his sides and his weight balanced like a man who expected to get hit and had made peace with it.
“Move,” I said.
“No.”
“Move, Jem.”
“And then what?” His voice was quiet, controlled. “You going to run through sixty square miles of Mountain Pack forest in the dark? Alone? Half-poisoned, no weapons, no plan, and they’ve got a thirty-minute head start on a quad bike?”
I didn’t care. I didn’t care about any of it. The bond was screaming at me—northeast, she’s northeast, she’s hurt and scared and they put silver on her and she needs you—and every second I spent here was another second she was in their hands.
“They have my mate.” The words came out low and savage, barely human. “They put silver cuffs on her. I can feel it. If you think I’m going to stand here and—”
“Yeah. And charging after her solo is exactly how you end up dead in a ditch, and she ends up with no one coming for her at all.”
That landed. I hated that it landed.
Gideon appeared at my shoulder. “He’s right. And you know he’s right, which is why you’re pissed off instead of already running.”
My hands were shaking. I wanted to tear something apart. Wanted to run until my lungs gave out. Wanted to find every wolf who’d laid hands on her and show them what happened when you touched what I’d claimed as mine.
“Sam.” Gideon again. “She needs your brain, not your fangs. You can lose your shit after we get her back. Right now, she needs the guy who planned the Georgia extraction in twenty minutes on a napkin.”
I closed my eyes.
Found the bond.
There. Northeast. Far—too far, getting farther—but there. A thread of heat in the cold. I followed it, blocking out the van and the voices and the pain, tracking it like a single scent through a blizzard.
She was unconscious. The sedatives had her wrapped up tight. I couldn’t get through to her clearly, just impressions: a chemical fog, the burn of silver against skin, and underneath it, so faint I almost missed it, her wolf. Simmering; low and vicious.
That was my girl.
I opened my eyes.
“She’s alive,” I said. My voice came out rough, scraped raw. “Sedated. She’s moving northeast. Fast.”
“Quad bike and sled,” Jem confirmed.
I turned back into the van. Forced myself to sit. Forced my hands flat on my thighs to stop them shaking.
“Okay.” I breathed. “Okay, run me through it. Everything after I went down.”
Jem’s recounting was military-efficient. After I’d dropped, they’d hit Annabella with darts. Esme’s shockwave had scattered most of the attackers, bought them breathing room. But two fighters had reached Annabella through the chaos.
Fuck!
“How’d I get here?”
“Gideon carried you.” Jem’s mouth twitched; not quite a smile. “He complained the entire time.”
“You’re heavier than you look,” Gideon said flatly. “And you drool when you’re unconscious. I want that on record.”
I looked at Esme. She was slumped against the van’s interior wall, legs folded under her, skin pale, eyes closed. Whatever she’d used to purge the sedation from my system, it had cost her the last of what magic she had.
“Seven darts,” Gideon said, watching me. “Six embedded, one graze. Witch-enhanced sedation with a metabolic suppressant layered in. If Esme hadn’t burned the last of her reserves to drive it out of your blood, you’d still be face-down in the pine needles.”
“Thank you,” I said. And meant it.
She gave me a weak thumbs up without opening her eyes.
Mina was at the front of the van, exactly where she’d been running comms during the operation, three devices spread across the makeshift desk.
“I’m pulling satellite data for quad routes in this sector. Problem is, the Mountain Pack controls over sixty square miles of forest here, and they know it better than we ever will. There are probably a dozen trail networks that don’t show up on any map.”
“But?”
“But quads have heat signatures, if they’re recent enough.” She glanced back at me. “Give me ten minutes, and I can narrow the search area.”
“You’ve got five.”
Her eyebrows rose, but she didn’t argue. Just bent back to the screen.
I processed. Tried to think past the bond’s constant, agonizing pull toward her.
“This was planned.”
“Not necessarily her specifically,” Gideon said. “They had a grab-and-go setup ready. Standard procedure for a defensive patrol near a high-value site. Whoever came through, they were prepared to take prisoners.”
“Which means the Mountain Pack was probably running security for Webster’s facility. Standing orders to guard the site, report intrusions.”
“And we just torched their patron’s investment,” Jem said.
“Exactly. So they grab an intruder. Insurance. A show of competence: ‘We lost the building but here’s the person who did it.’” I paused, something clicking into place. “They don’t know who they have.”
Gid shrugged. “They know she’s a woman. They know she fought like hell. They probably know she’s a Shifter from her scent. But her connection to Webster? Her history? No. To them, she’s a prize they’re delivering to buy forgiveness for losing the site.”
“How long do we have?” Jem asked.
“Depends on how fast the Pack contacts Webster. Depends on whether Webster sends someone or comes himself. Depends on how far they need to travel,” I said.
“We need to hit them before the handoff. While the Mountain Pack still thinks she’s just some random intruder.
Before whoever Webster sends arrives and everything escalates. ”
Gideon folded his arms. “That’s a significantly better plan than running screaming through the forest.”
“Don’t push it.”
“What? I’m calling it growth, Sammy-boy.”
I didn’t have it in me to banter back. Not right now. The bond was a steady ache, a compass needle pointing toward the only direction that mattered. I could feel her—faint, sedated, wrapped in silver and darkness—and every instinct I possessed was screaming at me to go.
I pulled out my phone instead. Cracked screen. Smear of dried blood across the glass. But it powered on.
Derek picked up on the first ring.
“Sam.” One word. My name. And I heard everything in it: the fact that he’d been waiting, that he already knew something was wrong, that the twin bond had been feeding him unease for however long I’d been unconscious.
“We hit the facility. It’s done, burned to the ground. But the Mountain Pack was waiting when we pulled out. They ambushed us and took Annabella.”
The silence on the other end lasted four seconds. I know because I counted.
“How bad are you hurt?” Derek asked.
“Functional.”
“That wasn’t the question.”
“It’s the answer you’re getting. Derek, I need Waylen on satellite surveillance for quad-capable routes northeast of our position.
I need Ryan to make a formal inquiry to the Meute des Montagnes Alphas.
Something about them having a person of interest. Enough to make them think twice about what they’re doing. ”
“Ryan can’t project Pack authority into another Alpha’s territory.”
“I know. But a formal inquiry from a sitting Alpha raises the stakes. It tells them we know they have her, we know where they are, and there will be consequences. If they’re still deciding what to do that might make them hesitate.”
“Alright, I’ll wake Waylen from his nap,” Derek said. “He’s going to be insufferable about it.”
“He’s insufferable when he’s awake and well-rested. Being woken up won’t make a difference.”
The ghost of a sound that might have been a laugh. Then Derek’s voice shifted. Quieter.
“We’ll get her back.”
The certainty in those four words cracked something I’d been holding shut since I’d opened my eyes and realized she was gone. I couldn’t afford to feel it. Not yet. Not until she was safe.
“Yeah,” I said. “We will.”