Page 4 of Curvy Sold Mate

The murmur started at the edges of the crowd and worked inward. Viktor let it pass through him.

Caitlynn opened her eyes. The gold was fading from her hands, the candle flames settling back to their measured heights. She looked at Kahn, then at the crowd, then at the space beside the dais where the named candidates were meant to stand.

The space was empty.

“Where’s Olivia?” Caitlynn asked.

A beat passed, then another.

The crowd shifted. Heads turned. Backward, sideways, scanning the edges of the hall. Viktor’s eyes were already moving, cutting through the room in the systematic grid pattern he used for threat assessment: front row, second row, the columns along the east wall, the service corridor entrance, the main doors.

She wasn’t there.

Chris stepped forward. “She was here an hour ago. Heading east to retrieve something for the ceremony.”

“The grounding token,” Caitlynn said, her voice changed now, all traces of steadiness replaced by worry. “I asked her to get it. She said twenty minutes each way.”

That had been over an hour ago. Viktor calculated the distance to the eastern vault, the travel time on foot, the time required to locate and retrieve a single item. Generous estimate: forty-five minutes. She was thirty minutes overdue, at a minimum.

The animal inside him slammed forward.

Not a stir this time, but a full-body collision, hurling itself forward with a force that made his vision sharpen, the muscles across his shoulders bunch, and every instinct he’d spent two decades domesticating rear up ferally. He shoved it down hard, held it by the throat.

“Search parties,” Kahn said. His voice carried the flat command tone that the pack recognized as non-negotiable—the Alpha voice, the one that moved bodies before brains caught up. But beneath it, in the register only Viktor, Chris, and Caitlynn operated in, there was something else: the hairline crack of a brother whose sister had gone missing on his watch, during a ceremony designed to protect the women in his pack.

The hall mobilized. Viktor moved without waiting for assignment—he didn’t need one. He took the eastern trail. It was the last known route, and he took it at a pace that sat precisely at the boundary between urgency and control.

Then the prints stopped. There was no sign of a change in direction. Rather, it was a sudden stop. The ground beyond was churned with multiple prints, heavier, the chaotic stamp of bodies moving fast. Signs of a struggle. He crouched, touched the disturbed earth, and found it still damp.

It felt as though a lead bullet had split open his heart, but he could not focus on that now. He followed the heavier prints north into thicker forest, tracked for another two hundred meters, then turned back. Tracking alone was inefficient, and what he needed was information, not another thirty minutes in the woods with his wolf trying to shred the inside of his skull.

He was back at the compound in nine minutes.

The ransom note arrived twelve minutes after that.

Chris brought it. His face was set in a way that made Viktor’s hands go still. The note was short—handwritten, deliberate penmanship, a care that was itself a statement. Marcus Cole, demanding resources in exchange for Olivia Voss. A list of demands and a deadline.

Kahn read it at his desk with the door closed and his knuckles white around the edges of the paper. Chris stood to his left. Viktor stood where he always stood.

“He’s desperate,” Chris said. “Broken forces, no territory, depleted resources. This is a man funding his next move with the only leverage he can get.”

“He got it.” Kahn set the note down and pressed both palms flat on the desk. The wood creaked under the pressure. “He got my sister.”

Viktor heard himself speak, keeping his voice level.

“I’ll go.”

Both men looked at him, seemingly searching for whatever Viktor kept locked in the basement of himself, the part that had cracked its restraints the moment Caitlynn said Olivia Voss and Viktor Hale that hadn’t stopped pressing since.

“Viktor,” Kahn said carefully, as though he were treading on dangerous grounds.

“I’ll pay the ransom. I’ll retrieve her. It’s a tactical extraction with a financial component—it’s what I do.” Every word measured, every syllable laid down with the precision of a man defusing ordnance. “Send me.”

Kahn held his gaze. The silence between them stretched taut enough to hum—a decade and a half of trust, of reading each other without words, of the shorthand that only existed between two men who’d bled on the same ground. Kahn was looking for what lived behind the words, and Viktor was aware of this. He was also aware that for the first time in all those years, the thing behind the words was close enough to the surface that Kahn might actually find it.

“Okay,” Kahn said, and the way he said it told Viktor that he already had.

Chapter 3 - Olivia