Chapter 6

Marcus’s POV

“She’s gone,” said Aaron.

“Who?”

“Natalie. Her bed’s empty. Her car left the ridge at ten thirty. And Marcus.” His voice went tight over the phone. “Serena’s number just pinged a tower at Kranji.”

I was sitting in my car at the foot of Aisyah’s block in Woodlands, with the engine off and my head against the wheel, trying to work out why I felt like I’d been kicked. I had just apologized to a woman in her socks. I had never been so terrified in my life.

I sat bolt upright.

“When?”

“Twenty minutes ago.”

“Where’s her phone now?”

“It stopped pinging.” Aaron swore. “Marcus, listen. The two of them together, on the same night, at Kranji, three weeks after Natalie was seen with...”

“I know.”

“It’s a trap.”

“I know, Aaron.”

I started the engine.

Kai was already howling. It wasn’t a sound I could describe. It was a deep, ragged, broken thing, as if all the air in me had turned to glass and he was throwing himself against it.

Go, he said. Go, go, go.

I went.

~

The road to Kranji was empty and wet.

I drove with both hands white on the wheel through a stretch of dark reservoir land, mangroves and marsh and long black water, the rain coming down in sheets. Somewhere behind me, Aisyah’s little Toyota flashed its headlights. She’d woken when I banged on the door. She’d taken one look at my face and grabbed her keys without a word.

We reached the reservoir car park at eleven forty.

It was a gravel lot at the end of a lonely lane, with one flickering lamp and a rusted sign that said NO SWIMMING. The rain had turned it into a black lake. A single blue car sat under the light, the driver’s door hanging open.

Natalie’s.

I jumped out. The rain hit like needles.

The car was empty. The engine was cold. On the front seat lay a pink lipstick and an unopened pack of gum, and a small green leather purse, and nothing else. No note.

“Serena!” I roared.

The night swallowed it.

Aisyah came running from her car in a raincoat and a nightshirt, her hair plastered to her skull. “Where is she? Where is she?”

“I don’t know.”

“Her phone?”

“Gone.”

“Marcus.” Aisyah grabbed my arm. Her nails dug into the leather. “You have to find her.”

“I know.”

“She left a note. On my fridge. I woke up and saw it. It said, Gone to talk to Natalie. Back soon. She didn’t even take her jacket. She always takes her jacket.”

I closed my eyes. I breathed. I let my wolf rise up to the top of my mind and pushed my senses out across the gravel, the mud, the black wet trees.

Rain. Diesel. Mud. Marsh. Fear. Natalie’s jasmine, cold and sharp.

And under it, so faint I almost missed it, ink and oranges and warm paper.

Serena.

“There,” I said.

I dropped to my knees in the mud. A few feet from the blue car, half hidden in the wet gravel, lay a small green shape. I picked it up. It was a bracelet. A single band of pale jade, cracked clean through.

I closed my fist around it.

“That’s her grandmother’s,” Aisyah whispered. “She never takes it off.”

“I know.”

A light flashed at my feet.

A phone. Not hers. A cheap black burner, propped against a rock, its screen lit and glowing in the rain. A message hung on it, one line of white text.

I picked it up and read it.

The wrong sister for the right ring. Alone, Goh. The quarry at dawn. Bring the seal, or she goes in the water.

The seal.

The ring of the Alpha of Mandai Ridge. The heavy gold band my father had worn for thirty years and his father before him, engraved with the pack’s crest. The one thing every wolf on the ridge must obey. Whoever wore it commanded the pack, and whoever held it could open the gates.

I looked at it. Then at my own hand, where it sat on my middle finger.

“He wants your ring,” Aisyah said. “For Serena?”

“He wants everything.”

Headlights swept the lot.

Aaron’s black truck slid to a halt behind us, followed by three more. Warriors piled out in rain jackets and boots, twelve of them, all armed. Aaron strode across the gravel in a black jacket with a rifle over his shoulder and a look on his face I had never seen before.

“Tell me it’s not what it looks like.”

I handed him the phone.

He read it. His jaw worked.

“We go in,” he said. “Now. All of us. A hundred wolves. We surround the quarry and...”

“And he cuts her throat the second he sees us.”

“Then we go quiet. Small team. Two in front, six on the flanks.”

“He said alone.”

“You are not going alone.”

“I am.”

“Marcus.” Aaron caught my shoulder. He was shaking. “You are the Alpha of six hundred wolves. You cannot hand your seal to a rogue in a quarry in the middle of the night for a girl you’ve known for a week.”

“I’ve known her eleven years.”

“That’s not the same...”

“It’s the same.” I turned. Rain ran down my face. “She sat in the dark for me. She wrote I’m here, when she could have said her own name and saved herself. She stood in her sister’s line because nobody ever asked her for anything.” My voice cracked. “Eleven years she watched me, and never once asked for a thing. And the first time she took a thing for herself, they threw her in the mud.”

“You’re in love with her.”

“I don’t know what I am.”

“You’re in love with her.”

I didn’t answer.

Aaron closed his eyes. He put his forehead against the barrel of his rifle and sighed, a long, ragged sigh, like a man saying goodbye to a plan.

“The elders will tear you apart,” he said.

“Let them.”

“If you hand over the seal, the ridge is open.”

“I won’t hand it over.”

“Then what?”

I looked at the ring on my hand. Then I twisted it off, slowly, and set it in Aaron’s palm. It was warm from my skin.

“You take this,” I said. “Keep it. Guard it with your life. If I don’t come back, it goes to you.”

“That’s not...”

“And I go in with a fake.”

Aisyah stared. “A fake?”

“There’s a jeweler at Bugis,” I said. “Uncle Lim. He made a copy of the crest for my father’s fiftieth. Twenty years ago. It’s gold plate over brass.” I dug in my jacket, and my fingers closed over a small velvet pouch. “I keep it in my glove box. For sentimental reasons.”

I slid the ring out of the pouch. It looked almost the same. It glinted in the lamplight.

Aaron let out a shaky laugh. “You’re insane.”

“Probably.”

“And if he checks?”

“He won’t check until it’s on my hand.”

“And if he does?”

“Then I’ll have about ten seconds.”

Aaron looked at me for a long, long moment. Then he took the real ring, tucked it deep inside his shirt, and put a hand on my chest, over my heart.

“Then don’t waste them,” he said.

I walked to my car. Rain hammered on the roof. I sat behind the wheel with the fake gold on my finger and the broken jade in my pocket, and I turned the key.

Kai was quiet at last. Not in fear. In a cold, steady, deadly calm that I had felt only twice in my life. Once when my father died. Once when I took the pack.

I’m coming, I told the dark.

I didn’t know if she could hear me.