Chapter Twenty Four

Running Out of Time

Emily's POV

We worked through what remained of the night.

Adam, Lucas, and I sat around the study table with Aden's drive open on the laptop and Lena's folder beside it and George's testimony already transmitted to the archive. By three in the morning we had built something that the council could not ignore, a financial and operational record stretching back twenty years, connecting Troy directly to the rogue group's founding, to the Ashveil fire, to the imprisonment of my parents, and to every attack that had followed since Lucas brought me to Ironblood.

It was thorough. It was damning. And it was useless if Troy left the territory before the council could act on it.

"Where would he go?" I asked.

"He has property outside the regional boundary," Lucas said. "Two days' drive north. Once he crosses the boundary he is outside council jurisdiction." He looked at the clock on the wall. "If he left when Olivia's message suggests four hours ago, he has a significant head start."

"Can the council issue a travel restriction?"

"They can. If enough of them move quickly enough." Adam was already on his phone. "I have three council members on the line. They are reviewing the materials now."

I stood and walked to the window. The hills outside were still dark but the darkness had the particular thin quality of the hour just before dawn, not quite night, not yet morning. My wolf was calmer than she had been all night. Not settled, but no longer urgent. The immediate threat to the packhouse was gone. What remained was the longer, slower threat of Troy escaping the consequences of everything he had built over two decades.

I thought about my parents. About my mother carrying that letter in the lining of her coat for sixteen years through every bad day and worse night of captivity because she had believed that one day there would be a moment to use it. I thought about what it cost a person to hold on to something that carefully for that long.

I was not going to let Troy walk away from what that cost her.

"There is another way," I said. I turned from the window. Both of them looked at me. "He does not know what I can do yet. Not fully. The two attackers who escaped tonight saw the light and saw the bond disruption but they could not have understood what it meant because they do not know what I am." I looked at Lucas. "If I can get close enough to him within range, I can read his bond to the rogue network that still exists. His instructions to them, his location, his direction of travel. I can track him."

Lucas was quiet. Caius, I could tell from the particular tension around his eyes, was not quiet at all.

"How close?" he asked.

"I do not know exactly. In the building it was about thirty metres. It might be further now. The binding is completely gone, my range may have expanded." I held his gaze. "I want to try."

"If you are right about the range expanding," Lucas said slowly, "and if we take the northern road, the route Troy would most likely use toward the boundary, there may be high ground about an hour out where you could reach wide enough."

"Then we go now," I said. "Before dawn makes us visible."

Adam looked up from his phone. "Council members are still deliberating on the travel restriction. They want more time to review."

"We do not have more time," I said.

Adam looked at Lucas. Lucas looked at me. Something passed between the three of us, not words, just the particular understanding of people who have been through a long night together and know when argument is finished and action is all that is left.

"Alena," Lucas said into his earpiece. "Get the car."

I went to the medical wing before we left. My parents were awake, I was not sure they had slept at all. My mother looked at my face when I came in and read it the way only a parent who has not seen their child in sixteen years and is therefore watching every expression with desperate attention can read it.

"You are going after him," she said.

"Yes."

She reached out and held my face in both her hands. Her palms were warm and rough and familiar in a way that made no rational sense given how little I consciously remembered of her. Bone memory, maybe. The kind that lives below thought.

"Come back," she said simply.

"I will," I told her.

I meant it as a promise. It felt like something more than that, like a declaration. Like the first time in my life I had said those two words and genuinely believed that coming back was something that belonged to me.

We were five minutes down the northern road when my wolf locked on to something through the dark ahead of us.

It's not one presence, it's many moving fast toward us.

"Lucas," I said.

"I feel it," he said. His hands tightened on the wheel.

Troy had not run.

He had turned around.

My parents were asleep when I went to check on them before we left. Both of them, my mother in the bed that Yoana had established as hers in the medical wing's second room, my father on the narrow cot that had been moved in alongside it because neither of them had been willing to sleep separately since the extraction and neither had been asked to. They slept the way people who had spent sixteen years sleeping badly in conditions that were not designed for rest, deeply, immediately, without the usual preliminary movement that preceded sleep in people whose bodies trusted the environment they were in. They had started trusting Ironblood's environment within days of arriving. That was one of the things about safety that nobody told you, the body recognised it faster than the mind did. The mind needed time and evidence and repeated confirmation. The body simply knew.

I stood in the doorway and looked at them for a moment. My father's sharp face relaxed in sleep. At my mother's hand, loose on the blanket rather than kept to her chest the way she held herself when she was awake, the specific small protection of a woman who had learned to guard her own centre and had not yet fully unlearned it, but who was, in sleep, temporarily free of the habit.

Yoana had told me that the physical recovery would take months. That the nutritional damage alone required sustained attention and time. That the specific kind of exhaustion that came from years of inadequate conditions was not something that a few weeks of proper care could fully reverse. She had said all of this with the professional directness that was her characteristic mode and had added, in the same breath, that both of them were doing better than she had expected and that the specific quality of their resilience was not something she could account for medically and so she was going to stop trying and simply document it.

I pulled the door gently closed and went to find Lucas.