Chapter 6: The Price of Blood

(Sienna's POV)

The phone nearly slipped from my fingers.

"Milo." His name tore out of me like a wound. "Baby, are you hurt? Where are you right now?"

The line crackled. His small voice came back thinner this time, threaded with the specific kind of fear that only children carry, the kind that has no understanding of why, only the raw terror of what.

"I'm in a car, Mommy. A black one. Mrs. Alvarez is sleeping on the floor and she won't wake up."

My vision went white at the edges.

Kade moved before I did. He was at my side in two strides, head bent close to the phone, jaw carved from stone. His hand found the small of my back again, grounding me before my knees could finish buckling.

"Milo," he said, voice dropping to that low controlled register that somehow carried more danger than a shout. "My name is Kade. Your mommy is safe and she is coming for you. Can you tell me if the car is still moving?"

A pause. Then, "Yes. There are trees outside."

"Good boy." Something in Kade's voice cracked, just barely, just enough that only I caught it. "You are so brave. Keep talking to us, okay?"

The second voice cut back in. Cold. Satisfied.

'Time's up, darling. Come alone if you want your son back in one piece.'

And then the line went dead.

The room was still erupting around us. Brielle was screaming something at the lawyers. Marcus Hale had his phone pressed to his ear, silver brows drawn tight. Vanessa stood exactly where she had been standing, composed, unhurried, the faintest smile playing at the corner of her mouth as she watched me fall apart.

I crossed the room in four steps and got in her face.

"Call them off," I said. My voice came out quieter than I expected, which was worse. "Call them off right now or I swear on the bond, on Harlan's blood, on everything in that will, I will burn every single thing you love to the ground before morning."

Vanessa blinked slowly. "Darling. I have no idea what you are talking about."

"There are two voices on that call and you are standing in front of me." I held the phone up between us. "Pre-recorded. You planned this before you even walked into this room. You knew exactly what Harlan's will was going to say and you had a contingency waiting in Los Angeles before the reading even started."

Something shifted in her eyes. Just for a second. Not guilt. Something colder. Calculation. She was measuring how much I had figured out and whether it was enough to be a problem.

Kade appeared at my shoulder. "The grounds team is already on it," he said quietly, for my ears only. "I have people in LA. They are thirty minutes from your building."

I turned to look at him. "You have people watching my building?"

"I told you." His eyes didn't flinch. "I never stopped."

There were a hundred things I wanted to say to that. A hundred things I wanted to feel about it. Instead I turned back to Vanessa. "Who has my son?"

She smoothed one hand down her silk sleeve. "Even if I knew, Sienna, why would I tell you here, in front of lawyers and cameras? Use your head, sweetheart. You always were the smarter one when you weren't busy being blinded by that boy." Her gaze cut to Kade with a look of pure contempt. "Come to me privately. Leave him behind. And we can discuss terms."

"Terms," I repeated.

"You are Harlan's biological heir." She said it the way someone might say a diagnosis. Something unpleasant and unfortunate but manageable. "That makes you a problem. But problems can be negotiated. Sign over the inheritance rights tonight. Let the council confirm Brielle's child as the Blackwood successor. Walk away with Milo and your little design business and I will make sure no one ever comes looking for either of you again."

The room had gone quiet behind us. Even Brielle had stopped shouting. Everyone was listening now, and Vanessa knew it, and she did not care at all.

Because she was telling the truth about one thing. She had the leverage.

My wolf paced in furious circles, claws raking at my ribs. 'Don't you dare. Don't you dare give her what she wants.'

I felt Kade's hand press firmer at my back. Not pushing me in any direction. Just there. Reminding me he was there.

"I need an hour," I said to Vanessa.

Her brow lifted.

"One hour," I repeated. "You want me to sign something? I am not signing anything in front of an audience while my son is in a car somewhere with your people. Give me one hour. Then we talk. Privately."

Vanessa studied me for a long moment. Then she smiled, smooth and slow, and it was the most frightening thing I had seen all night.

"One hour, darling. Do not waste it."

She turned and glided out of the study, and the room exhaled around her like she had been holding everyone's oxygen hostage.

Marcus Hale followed without a word, phone still pressed to his ear.

Brielle lingered. Her eyes found mine across the wreckage of the room, and for just a second the society mask slipped completely. What lived underneath was not jealousy. It was desperation. The particular desperation of someone who has bet everything on one hand and just watched the cards turn wrong.

Then she pressed her hand to her stomach and walked out.

The lawyers began gathering their papers in silence.

I turned to Kade. "Talk. Fast."

He pulled me back into the alcove, away from the last of the staff filtering out. The corridor was dim and smelled of old wood and candle wax. Oil portraits watched us from the walls, generations of Blackwoods who had made terrible choices and called it dynasty.

"Marcus Hale has three enforcers he operates outside the council's official reach," Kade said, hands on my shoulders, voice low and urgent. "Ghost wolves. They do not appear in any pack records. He has been using them to run operations Vanessa funds and the council ignores because they benefit from the results. I think he is the one who has Milo."

"Why?" The word scraped out of me. "Milo is six years old."

"Because Harlan just named him the true heir on camera in front of witnesses and lawyers and a recorded will." Kade's grip tightened. "Milo is not a child to Marcus Hale right now. He is a liability that needs to be removed before the full moon when the will enters probate."

The full moon. Four days away.

"Your people in LA," I said. "How good are they?"

"The best I have." His jaw ticked. "But Sienna, if Marcus's men are already moving, they will not stay in LA. They are going to bring him somewhere the pack can reach him. Somewhere they control."

I went very still.

"Here," I said. "They are bringing him here."

Kade nodded once, slow and grim.

"Then we are not leaving," I said. "We are not running. We stay inside the estate, we play Vanessa's game long enough to find out where in this house or on these grounds they plan to bring him, and then we take him back."

Kade stared at me for a moment.

Then something in his face shifted, something that had been wound tight for seven years, and it looked almost like relief.

"There she is," he said quietly.

"Do not," I warned him.

"The girl I fell in love with."

"Kade."

"I know." He exhaled. "I know. Later."

He pulled out his own phone and stepped back to make a call, and I leaned against the wall in the dark corridor and pressed both hands flat to the cool plaster and breathed.

Mrs. Alvarez was unconscious on a floor somewhere. My son was in a moving car with wolves I had never met. My mother had just offered to buy back her own crime in exchange for my silence, and the man I had spent seven years trying to stop loving was three feet away making calls to save our child.

Our child.

A door opened at the far end of the corridor.

I looked up.

A woman I did not recognize stood in the threshold, young, dark-haired, wearing the plain uniform of house staff. She looked directly at me, glanced once at Kade's back, and then held up her hand.

In her palm sat a child's stuffed wolf. Gray. Worn at one ear.

Milo's.

My blood turned to ice.

She closed her fingers around it, turned, and disappeared back through the door.

"Kade," I said.

He was already turning, phone dropping from his ear.

The door at the end of the corridor swung shut with a soft, deliberate click.

And from somewhere deep inside the Blackwood estate, in a wing I had never been allowed to enter as a girl, I heard the faintest sound drift through the old walls.

A child crying.