Chapter 5

DERICK MONDRAGON'S POV

The office had gone quiet for the night, most of the staff already gone, the hum of the building settling into that particular stillness that comes after everyone else has left.

I was at my desk, going over a stack of reports I'd been putting off for days, when my phone rang. The sound cut through the silence sharply enough that I knew before I'd even answered it that something was wrong.

"It's Lucas," my second in command said, tense, his voice clipped in a way that told me he was already moving as he spoke. "We're under attack."

"Who?" I asked, already on my feet, the chair scraping back behind me.

"Night Walkers. They caught us off guard, but we're holding. We need you here."

My stomach dropped. The Night Walkers hadn't so much as tested our borders in years, and the sudden break in that silence felt like the first crack in something much larger.

"How bad?" I asked, grabbing my keys off the desk and already moving toward the door.

"Bad enough that I wouldn't be calling otherwise. Hurry, Alpha," he said, and the urgency in his voice told me everything his words hadn't.

"I'm on my way."

I didn't waste time explaining as I passed through the office. I pulled Mia from her desk on the way out, my hand closing around her wrist as I steered her toward the elevator. "We've got a problem. Night Walkers hit the pack house. Get in the car," I said.

"Night Walkers? Here? That doesn't make sense. We've had a truce with them for years," she said, hurrying to keep pace with me, her heels clicking rapidly against the marble floor.

"Apparently not anymore," I said, the words coming out flatter than I intended.

We didn't speak again until we were in the car, the city lights blurring past the windows as I pushed the speed limit further than I usually allowed myself.

"Do you think this is Blake's doing? Personally, I mean?" she asked, breaking the silence, her eyes fixed on the road ahead rather than on me.

"I don't know yet. That's what worries me," I admitted, and I meant it. Not knowing, in my position, was its own kind of danger.

When we arrived, the damage was worse than I'd braced for. The pack house grounds, usually orderly even at night, had been torn apart.

Wounded pack members were scattered across the lawn, some still in shock, others being carried toward the house by whoever could reach them fastest, and the smell of blood hung thick in the cold night air, mixing with smoke from somewhere near the eastern fence line.

"What happened?" I demanded, finding Lucas near the front steps, his shirt torn at the shoulder, a shallow gash still bleeding beneath it.

"They came in fast. We fought them off, but it was close," he said, his breathing still ragged.

"How many got through the outer line?" I asked, my eyes moving over the wreckage as I spoke, trying to piece together the scale of it.

"More than should have. I want to know why, same as you do," he said, frustration plain in his voice, the failure of it clearly weighing on him as much as it was starting to weigh on me.

He hesitated for a moment, glancing toward the tree line before he spoke again. "I think I've seen one of them before. At your company."

That stopped me cold. "Are you certain?" I asked, going very still, every other detail of the attack suddenly secondary to that single sentence.

"I'm not certain of anything right now. He got away from me before I could get a good enough look. We're still working it out," Lucas said.

"Find out," I said, my voice hardening. "If someone's gotten inside our walls without me noticing, that's a failure I can't afford to repeat."

"I'm on it, Alpha," he said, already turning to relay orders to the others nearby.

I forced myself to focus on what mattered most in the moment, the wounded still being tended to across the grounds. "How many wounded?" I asked, scanning the lawn, counting bodies without meaning to, each one a name I knew.

"Eleven, Alpha. Two of them badly. We got the healer in already," he said.

"And the Night Walkers? Any losses on their side?" I asked, needing to understand the shape of what we were dealing with.

"A few, but they pulled their dead and injured out before we could confirm numbers. Whoever led that attack knew exactly when to break off," Lucas said, and something about the precision of it unsettled me more than the violence had.

"That's not the work of an ordinary rogue pack. Someone trained them," I said, more to myself than to him, the thought settling into place like a piece of a puzzle I didn't yet have the rest of.

"Stay alert. This isn't finished," I added, and he nodded before heading back toward the wounded, leaving me standing alone for a moment amid the wreckage of a night that had started as any other.

We spent the rest of the night tending wounds and shoring up defenses, extra rogues posted at the tree line, the wards along the eastern boundary reinforced by hand, the whole pack house humming with the particular tension that follows a near miss.

I was helping Lucas with the last of the wounded, kneeling beside a young rogue whose arm had been set in a splint, when Mia came over, something clearly bothering her, her arms crossed tight against her chest.

"What is it?" I asked, noting the tightness in her expression, the way she kept glancing back over her shoulder as if to make sure no one else was listening.

"I found something out. About the Night Walkers." She lowered her voice, stepping closer. "Their Alpha, Blake, his mate is Sophia."

The name landed harder than I expected, and for a moment I said nothing at all. "Sophia? You're sure?" I asked finally.

"That's what I heard from one of the wounded, actually, before the healer pulled him away. He recognized her name the second I said it. If it's true, she could be the one feeding them intel. Maybe she's been working with them the whole time," Mia said, the words tumbling out quickly now that she'd started.

"That's not possible," I said, though even as I said it, I could hear the uncertainty creeping into my own voice. "She's a rejected mate. Her own pack banished her."

"Or that's what she wants everyone to believe. Think about it. What better cover than the whole company thinking she's an outcast with nothing to gain?" Mia pressed, watching my face carefully.

"You've thought about this a lot in the last hour," I said, studying her in turn.

"I notice things, Alpha. It's why you keep me around," she said, a faint, humorless smile crossing her face.

"You're not wrong about that. I just wish you were wrong about this," I said.

"Me too, honestly," she admitted, and for once there was no satisfaction in her voice at all.

"We need to confirm it before we do anything else," I said, forcing myself to think past the unease settling in my chest.

"How? She's not exactly going to admit it if she's lying," Mia said.

"We watch her. Carefully. Until we know for certain," I said.

Lucas called us over before either of us could say more, another wounded pack member needing attention, and we lost the next hour to the work of tending to our own, though the news about Sophia never fully left my mind, sitting there at the edge of every other thought like a splinter I couldn't quite work free.

Once we'd finished, once the worst of the wounded had been settled and the grounds had gone quiet again, I pulled Lucas aside, keeping my voice low so the others wouldn't hear. "Mia says our new cleaner might be Blake's rejected mate."

He looked at me, half surprised, half disappointed, the kind of look that made me feel like a much younger Alpha than I actually was. "You hired a Night Walker?"

"She needed work. She looked qualified. I didn't know where she was from, my secretary handled the paperwork," I said, hearing how thin the excuse sounded even as I gave it.

"That's a serious oversight, Alpha," he said, not unkindly, but not gently either.

"I'm aware. It won't happen twice," I said.

"We'll have to look into her," he said. "We can't take the risk."

"Agreed. Let's gather intel. Quietly, until we know for certain," I said.

"And if it turns out she's innocent in all of this?" he asked.

"Then I owe her an apology and a great deal more than that. But I'm not counting on it," I said, though something in me hoped, without quite knowing why, that it might turn out that way after all.

Before the night was out, I called in reinforcements from the wider pack, Jacob of the Black family, Ivy of the Seawater family, Seth of the Vley family, and stood before them near the tree line as they gathered, the moon cutting pale light through the branches overhead.

"Nothing's getting past us, Alpha," Jacob said, and the others nodded their agreement around him.

"Thank you. All of you," I said. "We protect our own."

"Always, Alpha," he said, and the phrase settled something in my chest, a reminder of exactly what all of this was for.

I turned to Mia, who was already heading toward the car, the first light of dawn just starting to touch the horizon. "Let's head back. We need to find out if Sophia's really involved."

"And if she is?" Mia asked, not slowing her pace.

"Then we deal with it. Carefully," I said.

"Careful isn't usually your first instinct," she said, arching a brow at me over her shoulder.

"It is when the wrong move could start a war I can't win," I said, and she seemed to accept that, falling silent as we climbed into the car.

We were nearly back to the city when traffic stopped us at a light, the kind of ordinary red light that shouldn't have meant anything at all, except that a car rolled past in the opposite lane that I recognized instantly, the shape of it enough to set my pulse racing before I'd even fully registered the driver behind the wheel.

"Is that who I think it is?" Mia said, going rigid beside me.

"It's him." Unease crawled up my spine, cold and immediate. "What's he doing in this city?"

"Should we call it in? Warn the others?" she asked, already reaching for her phone.

"Not yet. Not until we know what he's here for," I said, my eyes fixed on the taillights disappearing into the intersection.

"And if we lose him?" she pressed.

"We won't. Not twice in one night," I said, already pulling into the lane behind him the moment the light changed.

"We have to follow him," she said, unnecessarily, since I was already turning the wheel.

I pulled out and gave chase, weaving through the early morning traffic, but he was gone within a few turns, vanished into the grid of streets before I could close the distance, and I was left gripping the wheel with nothing to show for it but frustration.

"He's gone," I said, pulling over at last, frustrated, my hands still tight on the wheel.

"He didn't come here by accident," Mia said quietly.

"No. He didn't." I sat there a moment, remembering the last time I'd crossed paths with Blake, at a gathering of Alphas years ago, before the other leaders had physically pulled us apart to keep the meeting from turning into something worse.

"What happened between you two?" Mia asked. "You've never actually told me."

"He told me to watch my back that day. And he meant it," I said, the memory still sharp enough to unsettle me even now.

"That's not exactly a friendly warning," she said.

"It wasn't meant to be one," I said.

Mia's hand landed on my shoulder, steady and grounding in a way I hadn't realized I needed. "We'll find out why he's here," she said.

"He's not here for nothing," I said. "And I want to know what he's here for before he makes his next move, not after."

"We'll find out," Mia said again, quieter this time, and something about the repetition settled me more than the words themselves.

I put the car back into drive, the city waking up slowly around us as the sun climbed higher. "The Night Walkers aren't going to get away with this," I said. "Not the attack, and not whatever Blake's doing skulking through my city."

"You really think it's about the attack? Or something else?" Mia asked, watching me carefully.

"I don't know." I put the car back into gear. "But I have a very bad guess about who that something else might be."

"Sophia," she said, following my thought exactly.

"Sophia," I agreed. "Let's go find out if I'm wrong."

"And if you're not?" she asked.

"Then Blake picked the wrong city to come looking for her in," I said, and pulled back out onto the road, the morning light stretching long and pale across the pavement ahead of us.