Chapter 5

Nicole's POV

The next morning, I was cleaning Tate office study, gathering papers from the edge of the desk into a neat stack without reading them, because reading Tate's documents was one of the few transgressions he had made explicitly clear he would not forgive.

But the highlighted text caught my eye before I could look away, and the name on the page stopped my hands completely.

"Marlon West, a young talent at the Federal Research Institute, and his team are conducting in-depth research on the psychological trauma and physical harm resulting from the unexpected death of a werewolf mate — a topic that has long plagued the medical community."

Marlon.I set the papers down very carefully and read the sentence again. The Federal Research Institute.

Something moved in my chest that I hadn't felt in so long, years in this house had worn the memory down.

The girl who had packed her bags and left for the institute overnight, too frightened of her bullies to say goodbye to anyone, arriving on that campus with nothing but her grades and the terrified, certainty that she had earned her place there.

The Federal Research Institute, the highest academic institution in the entire werewolf alliance. Independent of every pack, beholden to no alpha, protected by a barrier that neutralised all scent and severed every mental link to the outside world.

Inside the institute, you simply ceased to exist to anyone looking for you.

I stood in the middle of Tate's study and felt the shape of a plan forming next.

My belongings. First, my belongings. I knew where they were — locked in the glass bookcase on the far wall, the one Tate had sealed after I arrived and guarded with the wariness of a man who understood that information was power and had no intention of letting me access any of it.

For the first year I had approached it twice and been met with such precise, quiet fury that I had learned to walk past it without looking. Lately, though the last year or so — I had been careful to show no resistance to anything, and gradually the wariness had softened into assumption. He had decided I was broken enough to be safe.

He wasn't entirely wrong, he just hadn't accounted for the fact that broken things sometimes have sharp edges. I took out my hair clip.

The lock was old but of good quality, my father had started teaching me at eight years old, how to pick locks. In his words, it might come in handy someday

He taught me lock picking and survival skills, and I had thought for years it was simply the particular anxiety of a poor man trying to give his daughter something money couldn't buy but I understood it differently now.

The pins aligned as the barrel turned. I eased the case open without a sound.

My old phone was at the back, behind a stack of my high school certificates and a small notebook I had kept during my first weeks at the institute. I took the phone, relocked the case, and went back to my room.

The institute's internal app loaded slowly on the old battery, each second stretching out interminably while I sat in my bedroom closet with the door pulled almost shut and my heartbeat loud in my ears.

The pack mansion had no privacy that I trusted, but the closet had always been something Tate never bothered to enter .

I found Marlon's profile and typed a message with hands that were not entirely steady.It's Nicole Locker. I don't know if you still have this account, I need to reach you.

I stared at the screen. The message sat on sent for seconds, a minute, two minutes, and I told myself that three years was a long time, that people moved on, that there was no reason in the world he would remember a girl who had simply never come back from personal leave.

The reply came in under three minutes.

Nicole?? Where are you? Professor Parkville has been asking about you since the day your leave ended.

We saw you on the broadcast — the ceremony — we couldn't understand— he fainted, Nicole. He actually fainted.

I pressed my free hand against my mouth.Professor Parkville, my mentor. The man who had pulled me out of every academic disaster in my first semester with affection.

He had lost his wife years ago — a road accident, he'd told me once, quietly, on a late night in the lab and had no children of his own, and had treated me with a warmth as if I was his own child.

I can't explain everything now, I typed. But I need help, I need to get out. Can you talk?

The video call request came through before I finished reading his reply.

I accepted it, and the screen filled with Marlon's face — older, more tired, but immediately and recognisably him — and behind him, in a chair, with a blanket across his lap and his hands folded and his eyes already wet before he had said a single word, was Professor Parkville.

Something inside me came completely undone.

"My dear girl. What on earth has happened to you?"

I opened my mouth to give him a composed, functional summary of the situation, and instead I cried.

He let me. He sat in his chair and waited, and when I finally got myself back to something functional he simply said, "Tell me what you need,"

I told them, not everything — not the pregnancy, not yet, the risk of that information travelling before I was safe was too great. I told them that I needed to disappear completely, that Tate would look, that the bond would make distance complicated, that I needed somewhere scent-proof and signal-dark and completely outside his reach.

Marlon listened without interrupting, which had always been his best quality."The barrier," he said, when I finished. "You're thinking about the institute's barrier."

"Inside it I wouldn't exist," I said. "To anyone outside, I'd be gone."

"We can get you in." He glanced at Parkville, something passing between them. "But Tate will look for you. If you just disappear from the pack boundary, he'll track you before you reach the forest edge, the bond alone"

"Then I don't disappear," I said. "I die."

A silence.

"There are ways to make it convincing," I said carefully. "If there was a body. Something that would pass an initial examination. Injected with my blood, similar build — in a fire, in the northern forest, close enough to the tree line that the story makes sense." I heard my own voice delivering this with a steadiness that should have frightened me but somehow it didn't. "If the pack believes I'm dead, Tate closes the investigation, he doesn't chase a dead woman."

Marlon was very quiet for a moment. Then: "You've been thinking about this."

"I've been thinking about this all night."

Professor Parkville cleared his throat gently. "Three days," he said. "We'll need three days to arrange everything safely. North forest edge, just past the second boundary marker — Marlon knows the location. We'll handle the rest." His eyes found mine through the screen. "Can you hold on for three more days?"

I thought about the baby. About two months, maybe less, before my body answered questions I couldn't afford to have asked in this house. About Tracy's sharp nose and Sophia's sharper instincts and Tate's complete and total certainty that I was nothing and nowhere and going nowhere.

About the fact that I had been held together, for three years, by the belief that I deserved all of it.

I wasn't sure I believed that anymore.

"Yes," I said. "Three days."

Parkville nodded, and something in his expression shifted — grief, I thought, and then recognition, and then a resolve that matched my own. "We will be there," he said simply. "I promise you."