Chapter 31 Chapter 31
Chapter 31
DEREK
The two hours crawled by like days. it moved so slowly that i was certain that the moon goddess was deliberately slowing down time to frustrate me, punishment for always neglecting my wife.
I stood at the window of my office, watching the sun sink toward the horizon, calculating angles and entry points and contingencies in the part of my mind, unable to rest for a moment. My wife's life depended on it, i could not afford to make a mistake. Selene was human, it was easier for her to get hurt and something permanently than a werewolf would bounce back from the injury. The car accident was still a miracle she survived, i was not going to keep expecting one to keep happening.
The rest of me was somewhere in the basement of a meatpacking plant, counting every minute Selene was alone with wolves who saw her as nothing but leverage.
Marcus had sent the pack soldiers in waves, as he seperated them into small groups into the western district to avoid drawing attention.
Connor was monitoring their positions from the war room, coordinating through encrypted comms. Elena had run down every piece of intelligence we had on the Blackwood Pack, building a picture of Vincent Blackwood's operation that was detailed enough to be useful and disturbing enough to make my wolf want blood.
At five forty-five, I changed into clothes I didn't mind destroying. Dark pants, a shirt that could be replaced. Boots. No weapons beyond my own body, because wolves didn't need them.
"Teams are in position," Marcus reported, appearing in the doorway. "Ready on your signal."
"Stay back until you hear from me," I reminded him. "I go in first. If I'm not out in twenty minutes with Selene, then you move."
He didn't like this plan one bit. I could see the objection forming behind his eyes, the argument about protocol and strategy and the risks of the Alpha exposing himself before the pack was engaged, about surprises that could be waiting behind closed doors and how important it was for a decoy first to scan the perimeters. But I was already walking past him, already heading for the elevator.
"Derek." His voice stopped me. "Bring her back."
I didn't answer. I just kept walking.
I shifted two blocks from the meatpacking plant, ducking into an alley where shadows were much to mask the transformation.
The change was quick and painless as my wolf senses came fully online.
The meatpacking plant smelled of rust and stagnant water and wolves. Even from two blocks away, I could pick out individual scents, could count the signatures I'd identified from the crash site among them. Blackwood's pack had made themselves comfortable here. They'd been here long enough that their scent had soaked into the walls.
I moved through the shadows with my belly low to the ground, using every piece of cover the building had to offer.
.
The north entrance was exactly where the blueprints had indicated— it was a loading dock that had once received livestock deliveries, now sealed with chains that snapped silently under my jaws. The door beyond it opened onto a concrete ramp that descended into the lower level, and I followed it down into darkness.
My wolf eyes needed no light. The basement was saturated with different scents, wolves that used this as a hideout, here enough for their scent to permeate into the walls and underneath everything, faint but unmistakable, Selene's scent.
Blood. Fear. Something antiseptic they must have applied to her wounds.
I followed the trail through a maze of old refrigeration units and equipment storage, moving silently, cataloging every sound from above. Footsteps on the floor above me, muffled conversation, occasional laughter. Blackwood's wolves were relaxed, confident in their position. They weren't expecting company.
Good.
The sound reached me before I found her. Two voices, male, coming from behind a heavy metal door at the end of a corridor. I pressed close to the wall and stilled, letting the words filter through.
"She's been out for an hour," one of them said.
"The boss said to check on her every thirty minutes. Make sure she doesn't die on us before the exchange."
"She won't die." The second voice was dismissive, bored. "Humans are tougher than they look. I've seen them survive worse."
"She hit that barrier going sixty and rolled the car three times. Her ribs are cracked. She's lost blood." The first voice again, and there was something in it that might have been discomfort. Not compassion, exactly, but an awareness that this had gone further than anticipated. "The boss wants her alive and coherent enough to be useful. She's not going to be either of those things if she dies in some basement."
"Then she should have picked a less important husband." A pause. Shuffling sounds. "Honestly, though? I almost feel bad for her. She has no idea, does she?"
"About what he is? No. She's completely in the dark."
A sound that might have been laughter, low and unpleasant. "She kept telling us that taking her for ransom wasn't worth it. That Sterling wouldn't pay. That he didn't care about her enough to give us what we wanted."
The words landed somewhere in my chest like a fist.
"She actually said that?"
"Over and over. Before we knocked her out, she was begging us to let her go, saying there'd been a mistake, that her husband wasn't the kind of man who would trade anything for a wife he barely noticed. She offered to call his grandmother instead. Said the grandmother would pay us. That she could arrange a wire transfer herself."
Another pause. I could picture the scene—Selene, bleeding and terrified in the back of their SUV, trying to negotiate her own release because she genuinely believed Derek Sterling would not come for her. That she wasn't worth the trouble.
The guilt and the rage arrived at the same time, and for a moment they were indistinguishable from each other.
"She's so completely unaware," the second wolf said, and now there was something almost wondering in his tone. "The Alpha's mate, and she doesn't even know what he is. She thought she'd been taken for money. Kept asking us why we wanted to kill her if we just wanted a ransom."
"She's blissfully unaware of everything," the first confirmed. "Which honestly makes this whole thing worse. She's not a political player. She's not pack. She's just a human woman who married into something she doesn't understand."
I'd heard enough.
I shifted as I moved through the door, human form better suited to what came next. The two wolves inside spun at the sound of the hinges, their eyes going wide with recognition and then immediately flat with the practiced calm of fighters who'd assessed the situation and accepted that they were probably going to die.
They were right.