The Luna You Betrayed Is No Longer Yours

Chapter 126: Chapter 126 He went extra mile

_Alaric’s POV_

I deployed everything.

That was the only way to describe what happened in the four hours after Kasper told me what happened on that street. I pulled every resource I had access to and I deployed it without hesitation and without the measured calculation I normally brought to operational decisions.

Reid had the regional guard network activated within twenty minutes of my call. Every exit from the city was covered. Road, air, river. The six major routes out and the fourteen minor ones. I had people I trusted on every one of them with instructions that were simple and non-negotiable. Nothing leaves this city that we haven’t cleared.

I contacted the three pack leaders in the surrounding territories personally. Not through channels. Directly, mindlink to Alpha, the way you communicated when something was urgent enough that the formality of channels was a delay you couldn’t afford.

Each of them understood immediately.

Each of them deployed within the hour.

I pulled the city’s security camera network through the regional authority’s emergency access provision. It required my direct authorization and a formal declaration of urgent public safety concern and I signed both documents in about ninety seconds and handed them to Reid and told him I needed the footage from the street outside Orren’s building going back four hours.

The footage came back in twenty minutes. The van was visible. Dark navy, no plates on the front, a partial on the rear that my technical team had enhanced and were currently running against every registered vehicle database in the region.

I stood in the hotel room that had been converted into an operational center and watched people work and kept my hands very still at my sides.

That was the discipline of it. The thing that the position had taught me over years that I was now applying to the worst situation I had encountered personally. When you were the one giving the orders, panic in your body communicated to everyone around you and fear was contagious in exactly the wrong direction when you needed people thinking clearly.

So I kept my hands still and my voice level and I gave clear instructions and I let the machine work.

And underneath all of that, underneath every calm word and measured decision, something in me was not calm at all.

Something in me was running through every scenario in the order of their likelihood and finding each one worse than the last. Drake had been moving through this region with an intent. His father had died in that road with Rowena’s power in his chest and his last words to his son had been witnessed and whatever those words were they had produced a man who had been moving toward her with singular focus ever since.

I thought about her face last night.

Sleeping. Completely at rest for the first time in what felt like a long time. Her hand on my chest and the curtains open and the quiet that had been there in a way it hadn’t been in either of our nights for months.

I pressed the thought down and went back to the footage.

Reid came in. “The partial plate is giving us a shortlist of twelve registered vehicles that match. We’re working through them now. Three are already eliminated. The remaining nine are being physically checked.”

“How long?” I asked.

“Two hours at most,” he said.

“Faster,” I said.

He went back out.

I stood at the window and looked at the city and thought about the fact that she was in it somewhere and I was standing in a hotel room and the distance between those two things was the worst thing I had felt in a long time.

My wolf was not still.

He had not been still since I’d gotten the call. He wanted out. He wanted to run the city himself, grid by grid, nose to the ground, the way wolves found things when tools weren’t fast enough. I held him in because he would cover ground faster with the systematic approach, because emotion was not the same as effectiveness, because she needed me to be effective right now and not just furious.

I was both.

“Find her,” he growled. Just that, over and over, a low steady pressure. “Find her. Find her. Find her.”

“I know,” I told him.

I turned back to the room.

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_Rowena’s POV_

I woke up to a horrible smell.

Damp concrete. Something old underneath it. The closed-air type of a room that didn’t get enough ventilation and hadn’t for a long time.

I was on a metal bedframe with no mattress. Just the frame, with whatever I had been wearing when they took me still on, no restraints, which told me either they weren’t worried about me running or the room itself was the restraint.

I sat up slowly.

The room was small. There were stone walls, old ones, the kind that had absorbed decades of whatever had happened in them. One door, metal, no visible handle on my side. High on the wall, two small windows, barely bigger than my forearm laid flat, letting in the grey light of what might have been early morning or overcast afternoon. I couldn’t tell.

The only other thing in the room was a dirty cup of water on the floor near the door.

I didn’t touch it.

I sat on the bedframe and looked at the room carefully, methodically, the way I looked at any space, identifying what was useful and what wasn’t and what the dimensions of the problem were.

The windows were too high and literally too small.

The door was solid.

I was not tied.

“Kyra,” I called out.

It took a while before her voice came through.

“I’m here,” she said.

“Are you alright?” I asked carefully.

“Weak,” she replied. “Whatever they used to take you down. It’s still in your system. I can’t move properly yet.”

“How long until you can?”

There was another pause, and it was longer.

“I don’t know,” she said quietly. “I don’t know what comes next, Rowena.”

I had never heard her say that before.

This was going to be a lot. I just knew it.