Chapter 25: The Hunter

Ryder's POV

I had almost convinced myself she was dead.

Almost. That was the word I kept coming back to in the months after the rejection. I was almost able to wake up in the morning without checking my wrist before I opened my eyes.

The rejection bond mark was supposed to fade. Everyone knew this. The Pack doctrine, The Elder teaching, and basic biology. A rejected bond died. The mark went gray, then pale and gone.

The way all things that were ended were supposed to be finished.

Mine had gone gray.

Then it had stopped.

For six months it sat on my wrist, not fading, not changing, just gray and present and irritating in the way that things are irritating when they refuse to behave according to the rules everyone has agreed on. I covered it. Wore long sleeves. Told the two people who noticed that it was a training scar.

Then three weeks ago it had started pulsing.

Not gray anymore. Violet. Faint, the way a signal is faint when the source is far away but getting closer. I had sat in my study at two in the morning looking at my own wrist and felt something I had no interest in examining directly.

She was alive.

The informant's message had arrived four days later, confirming what my wrist had already told me. Violet-blooded omega, new maid, Iron-Claw palace. Alive. Hidden. Apparently under the protection of three Alphas who had, for reasons that made my jaw tighten, decided she was worth protecting.

I had arranged the delegation visit in forty eight hours. The Elder Council had been easy to bring along. Three old men and a terrifying woman who believed they were here for territorial discussions, which we were, technically, also doing.

The territorial discussion was not why I came.

I came because she was here and the bond mark on my wrist was violet and I needed to understand what that meant before anyone else did.

I sat at the second day's dinner and ate the excellent food and made the appropriate conversation and watched everything.

Ryker was good. I would give him that. He sat at the head of his table and managed every thread of the room simultaneously, warm enough to be hospitable, cold enough to be a warning, giving nothing away. His brother Cax was smoother, all charm and careful questions, handling the Elder representatives with the practiced ease of someone who had done this for years.

The third one, Zephyr, was interesting. He was quiet in a way that felt less like diplomacy and more like something contained. He looked at me twice during dinner, both times briefly, both times with an expression I couldn't fully read.

I filed all of it away.

"The Iron-Claw territory has expanded its eastern border by considerable distance," I said to Ryker, between courses. "Since your father's time."

"We work hard at it." He cut his meat without looking up. "Stability attracts growth."

"Mm." I picked up my wine. "I heard there was a border dispute two seasons ago. Northern territory, wasn't it? Some trouble with a smaller pack making claims."

"Resolved." He looked up. "Quickly."

"Of course." I smiled. "You're known for resolving things quickly."

"We are." He held my eyes for just a moment. "It's one of our better qualities."

We understood each other. We had understood each other since the moment I walked into his throne room and he had smiled with his mouth and watched me with flat cold eyes. Two Alphas in the same room always understood each other, regardless of what they were pretending to discuss.

He knew I wasn't here for territory.

I knew he knew.

Neither of us said so.

Elder Greta was talking to Cax at the other end of the table, her small voice carrying the specific quiet authority that very old and very sharp people developed over decades. I watched Cax's face while she talked. He was good. Almost perfect. But I had spent my life reading men across tables and I saw the fraction of extra stillness that crossed his face at something she said.

Something she said had landed.

Interesting.

My man Dex was three seats down on my left, positioned there deliberately. He was good at not existing in rooms. Forgettable face, quiet hands, the ability to move through spaces without anyone registering his passage. I had cultivated this quality in him over four years and paid him well enough that his loyalty had never once wavered.

He had been inside this palace for eighteen hours before my delegation arrived.

At precisely the moment between the third and fourth courses, when the servers were moving and conversation had fragmented into smaller exchanges and nobody was watching the whole room at once, his hand came to rest on the table beside my plate.

He slid a small folded paper under the edge of my napkin.

I didn't look down. I finished what I was saying to the man on my right, something about harvest projections, and laughed at the appropriate moment, and picked up my napkin to dab at my mouth.

The paper came with it. Hidden in my palm.

I dropped my hand to my lap.

Unfolded it below the table edge, by feel, keeping my eyes on the room and my face on the conversation happening around me. Then I looked down once and read it in three seconds.

The Room number, servants' deep quarters, east corridor and last door on the left.

I folded it again and Tucked it inside my jacket.

I looked up.

Ryker was watching me from the head of the table.

Just watching, the way he watched everything in his room, with that complete steady attention that took in all information and returned none.

I met his eyes.

Smiled.

He smiled back. Same quality and same thing behind it.

"Lovely palace," I said pleasantly. "Very safe feeling."