Chapter 139
Blake
Four minutes.
That's how long it took me and Asher to sprint back from the North Border in wolf form, covering ten kilometers of frozen wilderness in a time that should have been impossible. My paws barely touched snow, gunpowder-leather scent streaming behind me in a trail of pure panic.
Cole's words kept echoing in my head: She never showered. She ran.
We crashed through the front entrance still half-shifted—eyes gold, claws extended, muscles denser than human physiology allowed. The marble floor cracked under the impact of our landing, three deep craters in the pristine stone.
"Split up." Asher's voice was barely human, more growl than words. "Systematic search. Every room. Every closet. Every fucking corner."
I took the ground floor, my wolf's superior senses scanning for any trace of her white-musk-and-snow scent. Kitchen first—I yanked open every cabinet, checked inside the industrial freezer, even looked in the fucking dishwasher because my brain had stopped working rationally about thirty seconds after Cole's panic call.
Garage next. Her Arctic White Tesla sat exactly where we'd left it, engine cold, no tracks in the snow around it. She hadn't driven away. That should have been a relief. It wasn't.
Then the storage room.
The door stuck slightly—it always did, warped from years of moisture—and I had to wrench it open with more force than necessary. The hinges screamed in protest as the door flew back, revealing that narrow space that had been her prison for eight years.
The military cot was still there, thin mattress barely thicker than cardboard. The walls were bare except for the calendar she'd scratched into the plaster with her fingernails: XX days until high school graduation. Each mark a day of suffering we'd inflicted.
My fist went through the drywall before I could stop it, plaster and wood splintering under the impact. The physical pain was nothing—welcome, even—compared to the agony of knowing what we'd done to her in this room. How many nights had she cried herself to sleep here while we partied with other girls upstairs? How many times had she gone to bed hungry because we'd stolen her food?
"Second floor clear." Asher's mental voice was tight with barely controlled terror. "Library, guest rooms, even our master suite. Nothing."
"Ground floor negative." I forced the words through the link even as I backed out of that damned storage room, unable to look at it anymore. "She's not down here."
Cole's mint scent hit my nose a split second before his voice filled the bond: "I've got her trail. Main hallway, second floor. Her scent leads to... the old servants' wing."
My wolf's ears pricked forward. The servants' wing. That maze of cramped corridors and narrow staircases that hadn't been used in decades, kept locked because the structure was unsound. Why would she go there?
Unless she was trying to hide somewhere we'd never think to look.
"On my way." Asher's response was immediate.
I was already running, taking the main staircase three steps at a time. My claws gouged marks in the mahogany banister as I used it to sling myself around the landing, not caring about the damage. Nothing mattered except finding her.
We converged at the hidden door at the end of the second-floor corridor—the one that led to the old servants' passages. Cole stood there, one hand pressed against the wood, his mint-ozone scent sharp with discovery.
"She went through here." He didn't look at us, gaze fixed on the door like he could see through it. "Recent scent. Very recent. Mixed with alcohol and..." His voice dropped to a whisper. "Despair. She smells like despair."
The word gutted me. Asher's ebony-tobacco surged with Alpha fury—not at Kara, but at himself, at us, at the fucking universe for putting her in a position where she felt this way.
"How recent?" Asher's question came out clipped, controlled. Battle-mode.
"Minutes. Maybe ten, fifteen at most."
My wolf calculated frantically. We'd been gone—what, twenty minutes? Thirty? She'd used the time we were distracted by the border alert to slip away, heading into the most dangerous part of the estate. If the old stairs collapsed under her weight, if she fell through rotted floorboards...
"We go. Now." Asher pulled open the door, revealing the narrow spiral staircase beyond. The wooden steps groaned ominously under his first footfall, and I smelled dry rot and mildew mixing with Kara's fading scent trail.
Cole went first—he was lightest, least likely to break the ancient wood. I followed, then Asher brought up the rear, each of us moving with supernatural care despite the screaming urgency in our veins.
The staircase seemed to go on forever, winding up and up into darkness. Kara's scent grew stronger with each step, layered with other tells that made my chest tight: her palm prints on the dusty handrail, slightly smudged from the alcohol in her system. Wet footprints from melted snow on the treads—she'd been outside recently. The ghost of her body heat still lingering in the enclosed space.
And underneath it all, that thread of fear pulsing through the mate bond like a second heartbeat.
"She's heading to the North Tower," Cole breathed, barely audible. "The old attic."
Asher swore, a vicious string of profanity in three languages. "That leads to the roof access."
The roof. In sub-zero temperatures. In a blizzard. While drunk and emotionally shattered.
My wolf howled, and this time I let the sound tear free from my human throat, a bone-deep cry of anguish that echoed up the stairwell. If she was on that roof—if she'd been out there in the cold this whole time—
We burst through the attic door at the top of the stairs, and the temperature dropped twenty degrees in an instant. The heavy wooden door to the roof terrace stood open, Arctic wind screaming through the gap with enough force to knock a human off their feet.
"KARA!" Blake's bellow preceded him through the doorway, pure Alpha command and desperate plea rolled into one.
But the only answer was the howling wind and the eerie silence of falling snow.
The roof terrace was empty.