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I shift back. Naked in the courtyard, frost on the grass, my skin steaming in the cold air.
Roman is beside me in seconds, phone in hand.
“Find her,” I say. My voice doesn’t sound like me. It sounds like the thing that killed a man in a warehouse in Cicero with one hand. It sounds like the thing that will do far worse to anyone who has put hands on my mate. “Find her now. And when you find her, stay back. She’s mine.”
Roman doesn’t argue. He doesn’t question. He looks at me with the eyes of a wolf who has finally seen his alpha without any mask at all and knows that what’s coming next will be the most violent thing either of them has ever done.
“Lex,” Roman says. “How long?”
“Working on it. DeSanto is using a burner. But the building has cameras. I’ll have a vehicle description in minutes and a direction of travel in less than an hour.”
“You have thirty minutes,” I say. “After that, I start hunting blind.”
Roman and I go to his SUV.
“Where?” he asks.
“My building.”
He looks at me once, then drives. Lex is still working the cameras. We don’t have a location yet. Sophia could be anywhere in Chicago or already outside it. Sitting at the compound accomplishes nothing.
There is something I want.
We pull into my garage with Lex still feeding camera timestamps and vehicle descriptions through the speakers. I leave Roman in the SUV and take the elevator upstairs. The penthouse feels wrong without her. I don’t let myself look toward the bedroom.
I go to the desk. Unlock the drawer. The old steel waits exactly where I left it.
Scarred. Blackened with age. Viktor wore these when the family still settled territory disputes in alleys. I wore them the last time DeSanto needed a message. Tonight his men took my mate.
I slide the knuckles over my right hand. The steel is cold against my skin. Not for long. I lock the empty drawer and go downstairs.
Roman sees my hand when I get into the SUV. His eyes lift to mine. “Those again.”
“They took Sophia.”
He considers that for approximately half a second. “Fair.”
Lex’s voice comes through the speakers.
“I’ve got the vehicle.”
The bond is silent. The void where her heartbeat should be is the most terrifying thing I’ve ever felt, worse than any threat to the pack, worse than the federal investigation, worse than Viktor’s betrayal. She’s out there, unconscious, in the hands of men who don’t know what they’ve taken and don’t understand what’s coming for them.
I think about the last thing she said to me.
I loved you.
Past tense. She used past tense because she was hurt and furious and she wanted the words to cut. And they did. But past tense or present tense, loved or love, the bond doesn’t care about grammar. The bond cares about the woman whose heartbeat lives in my chest, and right now that heartbeat is silent, and I am going to tear the city apart until I hear it again.
If DeSanto has harmed her, if he has touched her, if there is a single bruise on her skin that I didn’t put there, there will not be enough left of him to identify.
The wolf is quiet now. Quiet with the absolute, focused stillness of a predator who has located prey and is closing the distance.
She’s out there. She’s alive. The bond may be silent but it’s not broken, and a broken bond feels different from an unconscious mate. She’s alive.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Sophia
