Chapter 174 Bonus chapter 3
Chapter 174 Bonus chapter 3
Getting to the challenge field meant cutting through the crowd.
Leo led them. Kai stayed close behind him. Lily matched their pace without being asked. All three of them moved with the focus.
The crowd was thicker near the center field where the current rotation was running. Bodies pressed together along the boundary ropes, everyone watching the pairs mid-challenge, nobody particularly interested in moving for three teenagers pushing through from the back.
Leo didn’t slow down.
He reached the boundary rope as Kane and Aria were finishing the current sequence. Kane was already looking up before Leo got there, the way he always did, like he had registered the change in the crowd before he could have logically seen it. His eyes found Leo first, then Kai and Lily behind him, and something in his expression shifted.
He crossed to the rope before Leo reached it.
Aria was a step behind him.
“Emma’s gone,” Leo said. He kept his voice level. “We’ve searched the full perimeter. She’s not on the field.”
Kane looked at him. Not past him, not at the field, directly at him.
“How long,” Kane said.
“Fifteen minutes. Maybe twenty now.”
“What happened?”
Leo told them. All of it. The man with the northern territorial band. The way he had recognized them, the easy confidence of him, the way his eyes had stopped on Emma. What he said about Devon Cross. The words he had used and the tone he had used them in. Emma’s face when she heard it. The way she had run.
Kane listened without moving.
Aria listened without interrupting.
When Leo finished, neither of them said anything for a moment. They looked at each other, the brief exchange they had when something needed no discussion, and then Aria stepped over the boundary rope.
Kane spoke to the official without turning his head fully. “We’re done.”
The official started to say something about standings, about the rotation still running, about the rules governing mid-challenge withdrawal.
Kane looked at him once.
The official stopped talking.
Kane stepped over the rope.
“Which direction,” he said to Leo.
“We don’t know. She went into the crowd and we lost her. The east exit was the most direct route out of the field but there are two others.”
Kane looked at the three gaps in the fence line. He was quiet for a second, reading something Kai couldn’t identify.
“Let’s go East first,” Kane said again, and started moving.
Aria fell into step beside him. The kids followed.
The east exit opened onto a path that ran along the boundary of the pack grounds before splitting toward the elder hall on one side and the outer territory on the other. It was quieter here, away from the Games noise, the kind of quiet that made footsteps audible and distance feel larger.
Kane stopped at the split.
He crouched briefly and looked at the ground. Kai watched him read it the way he read everything, without explaining himself, just taking in what was there.
“Outer territory,” Kane said.
“How can you tell?” Lily asked.
“Her footprints. She was running.”
Lily looked at the ground. She could see it then, the pressed earth, the spacing between marks that said someone had been moving fast.
They followed the path.
The outer territory was a wide stretch of land that bordered the pack grounds to the east, used for training and patrol but not for gatherings. The Games had pulled most of the active pack members toward the center field, which meant this stretch was largely empty. Trees thickened on both sides. The path narrowed.
Lily stayed close to Aria. Kai stayed close to Leo. Nobody spoke.
Then Kane stopped.
He put one hand out, a flat gesture that meant hold, and everyone held.
Kai heard it a second later. Movement in the trees to the left, not one set of footsteps but several, spread out in the way that meant deliberate positioning rather than coincidence.
Kane and Aria looked at each other.
Then they heard Emma’s voice.
She wasn’t calling for help. That was the thing that made it worse somehow. She was just talking, short and careful, the tone of someone trying to stay calm while in a dangerous situation.
“I don’t want any trouble,” she said. “I was just passing.”
A voice answered her from the trees. Low, male, unhurried. “We know who you are. We know whose house you live in.”
Another voice from a different angle. “Long way from the Games.”
Emma said nothing.
Kane moved.
Not fast, not loud, just gone from standing still to moving through the tree line with the kind of efficiency that left no wasted motion. Aria went the opposite direction, splitting without discussion, covering the angle Kane hadn’t taken.
Leo looked at Kai and Lily.
“Stay here,” he said.
“Leo…”
“Stay here.”
He moved to the edge of the tree line where he could see without being inside it.
Kai and Lily stayed.
Kai counted four distinct positions in the trees from the sounds alone. Maybe five. He couldn’t see any of them clearly but he could hear the shift in movement when Kane entered the tree line, the sudden change in energy when the rogues registered that the calculation had changed.
One of them said something sharp.
Then it stopped being quiet.
The sounds that followed were fast and final in the way Kane’s fights always were. No extended back and forth.
Aria’s side went quiet first.
Kane’s side went quiet shortly after.
Then there was only the sound of the trees and Emma’s breathing and footsteps coming back toward the path.
Kane came through the tree line with Emma beside him, his hand at her shoulder, not gripping, just present. She was upright, unhurt, her eyes still wide but her breathing slowing. She looked at Kai and Lily and something in her face shifted, relief maybe, or something close to it.
Aria emerged from the opposite side, composed, her eyes moving over Emma once with the focused efficiency of someone checking for damage.
“Are you hurt?” Aria asked.
“No,” Emma said.
Aria looked at her for a moment longer. Then she stepped forward and pulled Emma into a hug, not brief this time. She held her properly, the way you held someone when you needed to confirm for yourself that they were actually there.
Emma stood very still for a second.
Then she held on.
Kane looked at his kids over Emma’s head. All three of them. The look he used when he was accounting for everyone and finding the count correct. Something in the set of his shoulders settled.
He looked at Leo.
“Good call,” he said.
Leo nodded once.
Lily exhaled.
Kai, for once, said nothing at all.
Kane put his hand briefly on the back of Emma’s head, once, and then looked at the path back toward the pack grounds.
“We’re going home,” he said.
Nobody argued.