Chapter 147
Kara
Then Viktor's calmer but harder voice: "Contact Boss. Now. If she's sick or poisoned, we're all dead."
The footsteps retreated, leaving me alone with the porcelain and my misery. I don't know how long I lay there, drifting in and out of consciousness, my body wracked with chills one moment and burning up the next. Every time I thought the nausea had passed, it would surge back with renewed force.
When the door finally opened again—maybe thirty minutes later, maybe hours, I couldn't tell—I could barely lift my head. Viktor stood in the doorway, backlit by the dim hallway light, holding something in his hand.
He crossed the room and dropped a small pharmacy bag at my feet. It rolled twice before coming to rest against the toilet, and when I saw what had spilled out, my entire world tilted on its axis.
A pregnancy test. The distinctive pink and blue packaging of a First Response Early Result test stared up at me from the grimy floor.
"Pee on it," Viktor said, his voice devoid of emotion. "Now. Boss's order."
I stared at the test, my mind refusing to process what I was seeing. "What?"
"You heard me." His eyes were cold, clinical. "Boss wants to know if you're carrying those Alphas' pup. So piss on the stick and let's find out."
My hands shook as I reached for the box, the implications crashing over me like an avalanche. The trip to Maui. The marking. The nights we'd spent together with no thought of protection because wolves didn't get pregnant easily, because the mate bond usually prevented conception until both parties were ready, because—
Oh God.
"If you are," Viktor continued, watching me with those reptilian eyes, "your value just went up considerably. Imagine—the future heirs of Silver Frost Pack, perfect little hostages to ensure Alpha cooperation." He paused, and something cruel entered his expression. "And if you're not... well. Boss will have to reconsider your usefulness."
He turned to leave, then looked back over his shoulder. "Make the right choice, little Luna. Your life might depend on it."
The door slammed shut again, leaving me alone with the test clutched in my shaking hands. I stared at it for a long moment, my mind racing through possibilities, probabilities, the terrifying math of what this could mean.
If I was pregnant, I became a permanent hostage. A tool to control my mates, to force them into whatever Konstantin wanted. My child would be born in captivity, raised as leverage, used as a weapon against the people I loved.
But if I wasn't pregnant... if the test came back negative... would Konstantin decide I was worthless? Would Viktor get orders to make me disappear like Scarlett had disappeared?
The test felt like it weighed a thousand pounds in my hands. I looked at it, then at the toilet, then at the locked door.
And I realized with a sick, twisting feeling in my gut that I had absolutely no idea which result I was hoping for.
---
Asher
The war room felt like a tomb at four in the morning, the kind of suffocating silence that preceded either victory or complete annihilation. I stood before the massive territorial map that dominated the north wall, my fingers tracing the web of red pins that marked every search grid, every checkpoint, every goddamn place we'd already looked and found nothing. The monitors lining the adjacent wall flickered with grainy footage—security cameras, drone feeds, thermal imaging that showed nothing but wildlife and our own frantic patrols cutting through the snow. Twelve hours since Kara had been taken from our roof. Twelve hours of searching that had yielded precisely fuck-all.
The air in the room was nearly unbreathable, thick with the clash of our scents—my black ebony turning acrid and bitter with rage, Blake's gunpowder so sharp it stung the sinuses, Cole's mint taking on a scorched, almost metallic edge that spoke of desperation held barely in check. The combination created a pressure that made even our most experienced warriors hesitate at the threshold, their wolves recognizing the dangerous instability of three Alphas on the edge of complete breakdown.
I hadn't slept. Couldn't sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw her hand prints in the snow, small and desperate, fingers splayed as she'd tried to grab onto something, anything. Saw the drag marks where they'd hauled her across the roof. Smelled that fucking chloroform-soaked tactical cloth that we'd bagged as evidence but that still haunted my nostrils.
Blake paced behind me like a caged predator, his footsteps a steady rhythm of barely contained violence. He'd changed clothes twice already, the first set torn to shreds when he'd partially shifted in a fit of rage, the second soaked through with melted snow from when he'd thrown himself into a drift, trying to catch any trace of her scent that the wind might have carried. Now he wore simple black tactical gear, and I could see the tremor in his hands every time he stopped moving, the way his wolf kept trying to claw its way to the surface.
Cole sat at the main computer terminal, his fingers flying across multiple keyboards as he cross-referenced traffic cameras, satellite imagery, and every piece of digital data he could access. His usual meticulous calm had fractured into something manic—he'd been at it for hours without pause, subsisting on black coffee and the kind of desperate focus that came from knowing that every second counted. Themint scent that usually brought comfort now carried an edge ofanxiety that made my teeth ache.
"Report," I said, my voice coming out flat and cold, the Alpha command barely leashed. It was the only way I could function—lock down every emotion, every screaming instinct to tear the world apart until I found her, and focus on the tactical reality. If I let myself feel the full weight of her absence, the terrifying void where our bond should be, I'd be as useless as Blake currently was.
Blake's head snapped up, his eyes flashing gold before he wrestled his wolf back. "Nothing from the ground teams. Devon's squad swept the north forest—found the entry point where the bastard climbed the pine, just like we thought. Claw marks forty feet up, bark stripped where he used the branches as cover. He knew our patrol routes, knew exactly where the cameras had blind spots." His hands clenched into fists, knuckles white. "We found boot prints at the base. Size fourteen, military-grade tread. Matches the pattern from the roof."
I absorbed this, my mind cataloging details even as my wolf howled at the confirmation that this had been planned, orchestrated. "Vehicle?"
"White panel van, no plates," Cole answered without looking up from his screens, his voice hoarse from hours of barking orders and coordinating searches. "Caught it on a traffic camera heading north on the Old Mill Road, timestamp 2:47 AM. That's approximately thirty minutes after we estimate the grab happened. Blizzard conditions fucked the image quality—can't make out any identifying features, can't track it past the intersection with Highway 3."
I moved to stand behind him, studying the frozen frame on his monitor. The van was a ghost in the swirling snow, just a white blur against white. "Enhance it."
"Already tried. The snow's too dense, and whoever planned this knew the camera locations—they kept the van angled so we never get a clear shot of the driver or any passengers." Cole's fingers hammered keys, bringing up another feed. "But I pulled footage from the gas station two miles north. No white vans stopped there. Which means either they had enough fuel to get wherever they were going without refilling, or they ditched it and switched vehicles."
"How far could they get on a full tank in those conditions?" Blake demanded, coming to loom over Cole's other shoulder.
"Depends on the van's make and model, but in a blizzard? Maybe sixty, seventy miles before they'd need to refuel or risk getting stranded." Cole pulled up a map, drawing a rough circle. "That puts them potentially anywhere in this radius—could've headed toward Fairbanks, could've cut east toward the Canadian border, could've holed up in any one of a dozen abandoned properties."