Chapter 8: Ashes and Instinct

(Sienna's POV)

The photograph burned itself into my eyes.

Flames eating the roof of the river house. Orange and white against black tree line. The kind of fire that does not start by accident.

Kade took the phone from my hand before I could do something with it that I would regret, like throw it through the window or crush it into pieces just to feel something break that was not inside me. His thumb moved over the screen, studying the image with the focus of someone reading a map.

"Timestamp," he said quietly. "This was taken eleven minutes ago."

"Which means whoever sent it was standing there watching it burn." My voice came out flat.

Controlled. I did not recognize it as my own. "And they wanted us to know that."

Dax glanced in the rearview mirror. "River house is twenty minutes from the estate on a normal night. Fourteen if I push it."

"Push it," Kade said.

The car accelerated into the dark. Tree line closed around us on both sides, the headlights still off, just the pale spillover of a cloud-covered moon pressing through the branches. I watched the shadows blur past the window and pressed one hand flat against my thigh to keep it from shaking.

My wolf was not pacing anymore. She had gone completely still inside me, the way animals go still before something terrible, all instinct compressed into a single point of focus.

'He is not in that house,' she told me. 'Feel it. He is not there.'

I wanted to believe her.

I wanted to believe her the way I had once believed Kade when he whispered forever into my throat on a rain-soaked night seven years ago, and look how that had ended.

But she had never been wrong about Milo. Not once in six years. Every time he had a fever before the thermometer confirmed it. Every time he had a nightmare before the crying started. The bond between a wolf mother and her child ran older and deeper than any fated mate connection, and right now every inch of it was telling me my son was alive and frightened and not inside a burning building.

I exhaled slowly. "He is not there."

Kade looked at me.

"Milo is not in that house," I said again, steadier this time. "This is the second misdirection tonight. First the east wing, now this. They keep moving us. Pointing us somewhere and then using the time it takes us to get there."

Kade was quiet for a moment. I could see him working through it, the same calculation behind those storm-gray eyes that had always made him the most dangerous person in any room he entered, not because of his wolf, but because of the mind underneath it.

"If you are right," he said carefully, "then the question is not where the fire is. The question is what is happening back at the estate while we are racing toward it."

The words landed and neither of us moved for a second.

Then I turned around and looked through the rear window at the dark road unspooling behind us, at the distant glow just barely visible above the tree line where the estate sat, and I felt it.

That pull. That invisible thread the bond wove between a mother and her child, faint but present, tugging gently in the opposite direction from the fire.

Pulling me back.

"Dax," I said. "Stop the car."

"Sienna—" Kade started.

"Stop the car." I was already unclipping my seatbelt. "He is behind us. He is still on the estate grounds. Somewhere they knew we would not look because they sent us running in the opposite direction the moment Harlan's will ended."

Dax stopped the car on the shoulder without another word. The engine idled.

Kade looked at me for a long moment. Really looked at me, the way he used to before everything broke, when we were nineteen and stupid and certain and the whole world felt like it existed just to be the backdrop for whatever was happening between us.

"How certain?" he asked.

"Completely."

He held my gaze for one more second. Then he looked at Dax.

"Turn around."

The car swung back onto the road.

We did not speak for the first few minutes. The estate reappeared through the trees, lit up against the dark sky, all that stone and glass and old money looking deceptively calm. Three cars still sat in the circular drive. Lights burned in the upper windows.

"The east wing," Kade said quietly, working through it aloud. "We assumed it was a lure because the girl showed herself too deliberately. But what if showing herself was the lure? What if she wanted us to decide it was a trap so we would rule it out and stop looking there?"

I felt the pieces shift. "A lure inside a lure."

"They counted on us being smart enough to see the first layer," he said. "Which made the first layer the distraction."

Dax pulled through the gates without slowing. He took the service road around to the east side of the estate, away from the main entrance, and killed the engine in the shadow of the groundskeeper's building.

We got out into the cold.

The east wing rose in front of us, dark windows, no movement, the same sealed and forgotten face it had shown the world for years. But I could smell it now, standing close, in the night air where the wind came from the east.

Baby shampoo. Faint. Almost nothing.

But there.

My wolf surged forward so hard my vision doubled, every protective instinct I owned slamming to the surface at once. Kade caught my arm before I could move.

"Controlled," he said, low and urgent. "We go in controlled or we get him hurt. Nod if you understand me."

I nodded. Barely.

He kept his hand on my arm as Dax moved ahead to the east wing's service entrance, produced a key from somewhere that surprised me until I remembered that Kade had grown up inside these walls, that there was probably not a lock on this estate he did not have access to in one way or another.

The door opened without a sound.

Dark corridor. Cold air that had been closed in too long. The smell of dust and old wood and beneath it, faint and terrible and real, my son.

We moved through the dark in single file, Dax leading, Kade's hand at my back, my own heartbeat so loud in my ears I was certain it would give us away.

Three doors down the corridor, a thin line of light showed under a closed door.

Dax stopped. Held up one fist.

We stopped.

Voices from the other side. Low. Male. Two of them.

And underneath the voices, so small I almost missed it, the specific pattern of a child trying very hard not to breathe too loud because he had been told to be quiet and he was a good boy, he was always such a good boy.

I pressed my hand flat against the door.

Kade's fingers closed over mine against the wood, warm and steady, and for one suspended second we stood there together on opposite sides of six years of silence and distance and grief, and it felt like the most honest thing that had happened between us since we were nineteen.

Then Dax moved.

The door came open.

Everything happened very fast and then it was over, and when the noise settled and the corridor light flickered on from somewhere above us, Milo was standing in the far corner of the room with his stuffed wolf pressed against his chest, gray eyes enormous, still wearing his dinosaur pajamas.

He looked at me.

Then he looked at Kade, who was breathing hard beside me, jaw tight, something cracked open in his expression that he was not even trying to hide.

Milo looked between us slowly. The particular calculation of a child who is frightened but also paying very close attention.

Then he walked straight to Kade.

Not to me. To Kade.

He stopped in front of him and looked up with those storm-gray eyes that were his father's eyes in miniature, and he said in a very small, very serious voice, "Are you the man from Mommy's dreams?"

The sound Kade made was not quite a breath and not quite a word.

His knees hit the floor before his mind caught up with the movement and he was eye level with our son for the first time, six years collapsing into a single corridor in the dark wing of a house that had held too many secrets for too long.

I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth.

Dax turned very deliberately to look at the wall.

Kade's voice, when it finally came, was wrecked and quiet and the realest thing I had ever heard come out of him.

"Yeah, buddy," he managed. "I think I might be."

Milo considered this with the gravity only six year olds can bring to impossible things.

Then he held out his stuffed wolf.

"You can hold him if you want," he said. "He helps when things are scary."

The corridor went very still.

And from somewhere above us, deep in the estate, a door slammed.

And every light in the east wing went out at once.