Chapter 5: The Scent of Treason

The tires of the armoured SUV screamed against the wet asphalt as we hurled around another blind hairpin turn. Outside the heavy, bulletproof glass, the jagged black peaks of the Swiss Alps rose like crooked teeth against a starless sky.

Inside, the cabin was a pressure cooker.

The air was thick with the smell of hot leather, heavy diesel, and the crushing, suffocating weight of Reymond Smith sitting less than two feet away from me. My chest felt hollow, like someone had reached inside and carved out my lungs.

Adrenaline is a liar. It makes you feel invincible right up until the moment it leaves your system, and when mine burned out, the crash was brutal.

My head throbbed in time with the roar of the engine. The rapid climb in altitude was pressing against my eardrums, but it was the Apex Alpha sitting beside me that was actually making my blood boil. The sheer heat radiating off his body was unreal. It washed over me in waves, mocking the freezing Alpine night pressing against the windows.

My hands were shaking violently. I shoved them deep into the pockets of my oversized black hoodie, my breath coming in short, ragged hitches.

I need them. I need them right now.

My fingers brushed against the familiar, rigid plastic bottle tucked into the seam of my pocket. My safety net. My poison. The silver-bark suppressants.

If I didn't take two pills right now, the sheer stress of the night and the proximity to a male Alpha was going to break the chemical dam in my blood. I couldn't let that happen. If my royal scent leaked out, if my wolf woke up, I wouldn't just be his prisoner, Id be exposed to every tracker within a fifty-mile radius.

I tilted my body slightly away from him, turning toward the door. I unslid the childproof cap with a quiet click, trying to be subtle. My knuckles were pale, my palms slick with cold sweat. I shook two chalky, bitter tablets into my trembling palm and raised them toward my mouth.

A hand like a steel clamp shut around my wrist.

The shock of his touch was electric. His skin was burning, his grip so tight and sudden that my fingers reflexively snapped open. The two white pills tumbled onto the black floor mats.

"What are you doing?" I gasped, my head snapping around to glare at him.

Reymond didn't look at me at first. He was staring down at the orange prescription bottle still held loosely in my left hand. His molten silver eyes were dark, unblinking, and entirely devoid of mercy.

"Giving myself a chance to breathe," I spat, trying to yank my wrist out of his hold. It was like trying to pull my arm out of solid concrete. "Let go of me, Reymond!"

"No more hiding," he said softly.

His voice wasn't loud, but it carried a terrifying, flat authority that made the hair on my arms stand up.

Before I could process what he was doing, his free hand reached out and casually ripped the pill bottle from my fingers. He didn't even look at it. With a flick of his thumb, he hit the master control on his armrest.

The heavily tinted rear window glided down three inches.

A blast of sub-zero Alpine air hit my face, smelling of pine, ice, and miles of empty drop-off.

"No!" I shrieked, lunging forward with every ounce of strength I had left. "No, give those back! You don't know what you're doing!"

Reymond didn't argue. He didn't yell. He simply tossed the plastic bottle out into the black night.

I watched in absolute horror as my seven-year lifeline vanished over the edge of a three-thousand-foot gorge, swallowed by the dark. The window slid closed with a quiet, sickening hiss, sealing us back inside the warm, quiet cabin.

"You lunatic!" I screamed, turning on him, my fists slamming hard into his chest. The impact bounced off his heavy muscle like I was hitting a brick wall. "You absolute bastard! That was seven years of my life! I need those!"

"You need to stop poisoning yourself," Reymond replied, his voice dead calm. He caught both of my wrists in one hand, pinning them effortlessly against his sternum. "That garbage is rotting your wolf from the inside out. It ends tonight."

"It keeps me hidden!" I yelled, tears of rage and helpless terror burning behind my eyes. "It keeps my father from tracking me! It keeps me alive!"

"I am keeping you alive," he growled, leaning down until his face was inches from mine. His breath was warm, smelling of dark cedar, wrapping around my senses like a physical net. "Look at me, Natalia. Look at what those pills are doing to you."

I wanted to curse him. I wanted to tear his eyes out with my bare fingernails. But the words died in my throat as a sudden, horrific wave of nausea slammed into my stomach.

The world tilted sideways.

The room didn't just spin, it buckled. My heart gave a violent, jarring thud, and then my veins felt as if they were suddenly filled with liquid fire.

The chemical collapse had begun.

Without the steady stream of silver-bark to keep my wolf dormant, seven years of suppressed magic and accumulated toxins shattered all at once. The withdrawal hit me like a freight train.

My knees buckled, snapping together as a violent spasm wracked my spine. A sound escaped my throat, a raw, wet gasp of pure agony that didn't sound human at all. My skin felt like it was peeling off my bones, alternate waves of scalding heat and bone-chilling ice rushing through my blood.

"Natalia?"

Reymond's voice lost its cold edge, replaced by something sharp and immediate.

I couldn't answer. I couldn't breathe. My hands flew to my throat as I curled into a tight ball on the leather seat, shivering so violently my teeth were audibly clicking together. Sweat poured off my forehead, freezing against my skin in the drafty air of the car. Deep inside my chest, where a quiet darkness had lived for seven years, something was clawing its way out. My wolf was waking up, thrashing against the broken cage of my ribs, furious, starved, and completely out of control.

"Get... away from me," I choked out through clenched teeth, my vision blurring into streaks of red and black. "Don't... touch..."

I didn't finish the sentence. Another spasm tore through my stomach, and I doubled over, my forehead hitting the floor mat as I gasped for oxygen that refused to enter my lungs. I was going into shock. I could feel my organs locking up, my body panicking as the poison flushed out of my system all at once.

Suddenly, two massive, burning arms slid under my body.

Reymond hauled me off the floor like I weighed nothing. Before I could fight him, he shifted me onto his lap, pulling my shivering, sweating frame flush against his massive chest.

"Let me go!" I sobbed, weak hands shoving blindly against his collarbones. "Get off me!"

"Shut up and hold on," he growled into my hair.

He didn't loosen his grip. Instead, he wrapped his arms tightly around my back and waist, dragging me completely against him until there wasn't a breath of air left between us.

The heat coming off him was terrifying. It wasn't just human warmth, it was the scorching, furnace-like aura of an Apex Alpha. The second my freezing skin made contact with the solid heat of his chest, my body traitorously leaned into it.

It was pure survival instinct. I was freezing to death from the inside out, and he was a bonfire.

"I hate you," I wept, burying my wet, trembling face into the notch of his neck because I couldn't stop my chin from shaking. "I hate you so much."

"I know," he murmured, his hand sliding up to grip the back of my head, holding me firm against his pulse point. "Keep breathing, little wolf. Fight it."

"It burns," I gasped, clutching at his black suit jacket, my fingernails digging through the expensive fabric until I could feel the hard muscle beneath. "Reymond, it burns..."

"I've got you," he muttered, his voice low and vibrating right through my ribs. "Let the poison burn out. I'm not letting you go."

For the next twenty minutes, the world vanished into a blur of pain, heat, and dark cedar. I thrashed in his arms, weak and feverish, fighting him every time my mind cleared enough to remember who he was, only to collapse back against his chest when the next spasm hit. And through every second of it, Reymond held me with a terrifying, unyielding strength, burying his face in my hair, absorbing my tremors, using his sheer physical presence to force my body back from the edge of shock.

The SUV began to slow down.

The heavy crunch of gravel beneath the tires signalled we had left the main road. I forced my swollen, heavy eyelids open, peering weakly through the tinted front windshield.

We were passing through a set of towering, wrought-iron gates set into a twenty-foot stone wall. Beyond them stood the Alpine Chateau.

It looked like a dark, gothic fortress carved directly out of the mountain side. Jagged stone towers reached toward the clouds, illuminated by flickering orange torches mounted along the heavy courtyard walls. Dozens of heavily armed guards in black tactical gear stood at attention along the perimeter, their eyes following the vehicle as it pulled to a stop in the centre of the snow-drenched courtyard.

The driver killed the engine. The silence that followed was heavy, absolute, and suffocating.

"We're here," Reymond said softly against my ear. His chest heaved with a deep breath.

I tried to pull back, my limbs feeling like lead weights. "I can... I can walk."

"You can barely hold your head up," he countered flatly.

Before I could protest, the rear SUV door was yanked open from the outside by a guard. The freezing alpine wind rushed into the heated cabin, smelling of pine, snow, and raw mountain air.

Reymond stepped out of the vehicle in one fluid motion, holding me securely in his arms. My oversized hoodie bunched up around my waist, my worn sneakers dangling uselessly as he carried me toward the sweeping stone steps of the chateau entrance.

"Put me down," I whispered, my voice barely a thread in the howling wind. "Reymond, please..."

My feet hit the snow as he lowered me slightly to adjust his grip, preparing to carry me up the stairs.

And in that split second, as the freezing mountain air hit my bare ankles and filled my lungs, the last chemical wall inside my blood snapped.

It didn't break quietly. It exploded.

Seven years of suppressed royal magic, seven years of deadened scent, shattered instantly under the shock of the mountain cold and the proximity to the Alpha holding me.

A physical wave of scent erupted from my skin, blowing outward into the freezing courtyard air like a bomb detonating.

It wasn't a subtle aroma. It was the rich, intoxicating, and undeniably royal signature of the true Walker line: crisp, electric ozone, backed by the sweet, dark bite of crushed cinnamon. It hit the courtyard like a physical shockwave.

Every single guard standing along the perimeter gasped in unison.

I watched in stunned, feverish disbelief as five hardened syndicate soldiers, men built like brick walls, armed to the teeth, staggered backward. Their weapons clattered against the icy cobbles. One by one, driven down by the sheer, unadulterated weight of a royal Lunas awakened scent, they dropped to their knees in the snow, bowing their heads in involuntary submission.

The air in the courtyard smelled entirely of me.

Reymond froze on the second step of the grand entrance.

I looked up at his face. His jaw was clenched so hard the muscles were bulging against his skin. His eyes had turned entirely molten gold, his nostrils flaring as he dragged a deep, greedy breath of my scent into his lungs. The chest beneath my head expanded, a low, subterranean rumble rising from his throat that vibrated straight into my teeth.

He didn't say a word. He just tightened his arms around me until I could barely breathe, asserting his claim over the scent now filling the mountain air, and turned to carry me inside his fortress.

Fifty miles away, at the dark base of the Alpine mountain range, the storm raged in silence.

A massive, battle-scarred grey wolf stood knee-deep in a snowbank, its thick coat matted with frozen mud and old blood. Behind it, a dozen smaller shadows moved through the tree line, the vanguard of the Walker Pack hunting party.

The grey wolf lifted its head suddenly. Its ears twitched, pinning back against its broad skull.

The mountain wind shifted, veering north, carrying a fresh draft down from the high peaks.

The monstrous wolf froze. Its yellow eyes snapped open wide, nostrils flaring as a faint, distant trail of scent cut through the smell of pine and wet fur.

Ozone. And crushed cinnamon.

A low, brutal snarl ripped from the beast's throat, shaking the snow from the surrounding pine branches. The wolf turned toward the looming Alpine peaks, threw its head back, and let out a long, bloodcurdling howl that echoed into the night.

The disguise was gone. The scent was airborne.

And the hunt had finally found her.