Chapter 4

Half an hour passed, and the monitor still showed a flat line.

Vivian kept refreshing the terminal, and for the first time, her confidence began to crack.

"Daniel, why did the room temperature reading turn red? Why is it showing a question mark?"

"It's been holding at the setpoint this whole time, hasn't it?"

"It's probably the snow outside. There's no way the room temperature hasn't changed at all."

Daniel took the tablet and quickly scrolled through the back-end logs.

A line of red text flashed across the screen: [Temperature sensor offline. Current reading is the last cached value.]

The hallway went quiet.

The color drained from Vivian's face all at once.

She crouched and pressed her palm flat over the gap beneath the door.

White frost was creeping through the gap from the other side.

"Daniel, open the door." Her voice began to shake. "The temperature in there could have been below the safety threshold for hours."

Daniel went still, his hand on the terminal.

He had seen the frost too, of course.

But admitting he'd lost control of the equipment meant admitting that the model he'd built to prove the strength of the Mercer bloodline had been wrong from the very beginning.

"Check it one more time," he said through gritted teeth. "The cold could be coming from her wolf as it awakens, couldn't it?"

But the certainty had gone out of his voice.

I watched him and thought about the day I got lost in the Nightwood.

He had stood in front of a screen exactly like this one, telling everyone over and over to wait a little longer because I was going to find my own way out.

He always trusted his own judgment.

My mother shoved past both of them. "Open it!"

Daniel still refused to believe anything was wrong. "It's probably just an equipment malfunction! If Chloe were really in danger, the emergency bracelet would have—"

He didn't get to finish. Another error message flashed across the screen.

[Family mind-link isolation duration: seventeen hours, forty-seven minutes.]

[Distress signals not delivered: twenty-six.]

The bowl of soup fell from my mother's hands and shattered on the floor.

"Twenty-six times..."

She was shaking all over, hammering on the door as if she'd lost her mind. "Chloe! My baby, answer me!"

No sound came from inside.

My mother put her ear to the door.

A werewolf could pick up the faintest breath through two walls. But right then, there was nothing at all behind that door.

No heartbeat. No footsteps. Not even the muffled sobs I used to stifle when I was sulking.

Only the cold-air vent, still running, still making the same flat sound.

I looked at her hand pressed against the door, and everything inside me was calm. Frozen over.

I had pounded on that same door just like that, over and over, the night before.

That was when my father got back.

He was holding a dark blue velvet box in both hands and was still catching his breath. "Chloe, Dad brought you the moonstone pendant."

Inside the open box lay a small wolf carved from gold moonstone, with fur so finely detailed it looked real and a blue stone set into one eye.

But the shop owner had said it was only an ordinary pup.

The first time I saw it as a child, I thought it looked like me.

We were ordinary, but we could still shine.

But my father said I would only be worthy of a Mercer gift once my wolf awakened and proved strong enough.

Nobody answered him.

My mother grabbed his arm, crying. "She called for help twenty-six times... Michael, twenty-six times... Open the door!"

The smile slowly faded from my father's face.

He pushed the velvet box into her hands and rounded on Daniel. "Release the lock."

"Dad, forcing the door will interrupt—"

"I told you to release the lock!"

My father grabbed Daniel by the collar. "She's your sister, not a problem for you to solve just to prove you're always right!"

Daniel opened his mouth and, for the first time in his life, nothing came out.

My father's Alpha pressure burst through the hallway.

Daniel staggered back and the terminal hit the floor.

The next second, my father put his fist through the lock.

The door flew open.