Chapter nine

Alpha King Jake POV

“Cancel the council session.”

My steward stopped so abruptly that the papers in his arms slid sideways. In six years, through two border disputes, one assassination attempt, and a rogue incursion that cost us forty warriors, I had never once cancelled a council session.

“Your Majesty, the northern delegates arrived last night. Alpha Rennick has waited three weeks for—”

“Then he can wait one more day. Cancel it.”

I turned back to the map table before he could argue. Behind me I heard the careful silence of a man rearranging his understanding of his king, and then the door closing softly.

The map showed the capital and its districts, marked with pins my guards had placed through the night. The club. The streets around it. The hotel. And beyond that, nothing. She had walked out of my room at dawn and dissolved into a city of two hundred thousand wolves like smoke.

Liya. Half a name, given deliberately. I’d known it the moment she said it — the small hesitation, the choice being made behind her eyes. I hadn’t pushed. People came to places like that club to be someone else for a night. The Goddess knew I had.

I turned the little crescent moon earring over in my fingers. Dark cherries and woodsmoke. Even the memory of the scent made my wolf surge against my ribs, pacing, furious with me for sleeping, for letting her slip out while I dreamed like a boy.

Ours, he kept growling. Ours, ours, ours.

“She isn’t,” I told him, and even I could hear the lie in it.

There was no bond. I would have felt a bond — I’d witnessed enough matings to know how it took people, like lightning finding the tallest tree. There had been no lightning. Only a pull, low and constant, like deep water. Only my wolf pressing at my skin all night, restless in a way he’d never been with anyone.

Only a child that every law of my bloodline said could not exist.

A knock. Callan, my head of security, a scarred grey-haired wolf who had guarded my father before me and had earned the right to look unimpressed by kings.

“Report,” I said.

“The club’s staff confirm she arrived with another she-wolf. Dark hair, mid-twenties, they left separately. We’re pulling the door footage now.” He hesitated, which Callan never did. “Majesty. The men are asking what she’s wanted for.”

“She isn’t wanted for anything.”

“Then, respectfully, what do I tell them they’re hunting? Because they’re hunting like it’s war, on your face alone, and rumors breed fast in a barracks.”

I looked at him for a long moment. Callan had carried my sister on his shoulders when she was small. He had led the search parties, all those years ago, until there was nothing left to search. If any man alive had earned the truth, it was him.

“You tell them,” I said, “that the woman they’re looking for is under crown protection, whether she knows it or not. You tell them that if a single hair on her head is harmed, I will take it out of the hide of every wolf between her and me.” I set the earring down on the map, in the center of the city, a tiny silver moon over everything. “And Callan — pull the file room duty roster. I want the Chain investigation moved to my private study. All of it.”

His brows drew together. “You think she’s connected to the Chain?”

“I think a woman with fear that deep in her bones learned it somewhere.” I could still see it — the way she’d flinched when I reached for her mask of a face too quickly, the way she’d watched the exits without knowing she was doing it. Someone had taught her that the world was a trap. In my experience, there was one organization above all others that taught women that lesson.

“And if she’s just a girl who wanted one night and no morning?” Callan asked quietly. “You’ve never chased a woman in your life. The council will notice. The kingdom will notice.”

“Let them notice.”

He studied me, and something in his old scarred face shifted — not quite a smile, but the memory of one.

“You’re not going to tell me the rest,” he said.

“No.”

“Because if I knew the rest, I’d have the whole army in the streets.”

I said nothing. The empty test results of fifteen years said it for me, filed in a drawer no one else had ever opened. The men of your line are not lucky with heirs, Majesty. Doctor after doctor, year after year, until I’d stopped asking and started planning a succession that skipped me entirely.

One night. One woman. One impossible, unmistakable scent.

“Find her,” I said. “Quietly, and fast. And Callan — put a second detail on it. Whoever she is, whatever she’s running from…” I looked down at the small silver moon. “I don’t think we’re the only ones looking.”