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“Basically.” He shrugged, and I hated how nonchalant he was.
“What was your plan after that?”
“Take you down. I was ordered to kill you if given the chance. I underestimated your abilities, especially in your partial-beast form. It takes energy and concentration to maintain that sort of shift, but you handled it just fine.” Ledger raised his eyebrows in question, but I bit my cheek, refusing to explain.
The truth was, I wasn’t entirely sure how I’d managed to maintain the partial form for so long, but I suspected it was because of my wolf. Both of us working together were able to hold our form while fighting, which, until then, was completely unheard of.
My wolf huffed his agreement. It hadn’t always been an easy road for us, but we’d pushed through. Now, we were here—alpha of our own pack and mated to the Alpha Seeker, which meant we would unite the packs.
‘One step at a time,’ my wolf admonished in a gruff voice.
Speaking of the Alpha Seeker, I reached for Pearl through our bond and found it completely quiet. Had she fallen asleep that quickly? She’d only left a couple minutes ago, but maybe she’d been able to avoid Arden and go straight to bed.
I tried to shrug it off, but a nagging part of me was convinced that something wasn’t right.
“Everything okay?” Deacon asked, watching me intently. He was always good at reading my body language.
“It’s nothing. The bond with Pearl is just quiet.”
“Could she be asleep?”
“Yeah, it happened really fast…” I trailed off, reaching through the bond again and finding nothing there.
My wolf squirmed uneasily, also picking up on the strangeness.
“I need to go make sure she’s okay.” I thought we were ready, but maybe we should have stayed in our secret place for longer. I couldn’t be the alpha my pack needed if I was obsessing over my mate all the time.
The urge to see her and make sure she was all right grew with every passing second. I stormed to the door and wrenched it open, nearly ripping the whole thing off of its hinges. Taking a breath, I found my mate’s scent in the air, telling me she had walked through this area recently.
Heading down the path, I didn’t bother to see if Deacon or my cousin were following. I was sure they were.
Halfway between the cellar and the cabin, her scent disappeared. I backtracked, wondering if her and Estella had turned around to return, but there was no indication that they had changed direction.
Panic started to build in my chest, but the logical side of me was trying to think rationally. A scent trail didn’t just disappear into thin air without a reason.
A frustrated growl rumbled through my chest as I ran through every possibility. Pearl and Estella had definitely come this way, but now they were gone.
“Do you smell that?” I asked Deacon, who was standing to my right.
“Yeah,” he confirmed, his own frustration clear in his voice.
“Where’d they go?” Ledger murmured from my left side.
I called on my wolf sight and studied the grass. There were two distinct sets of footsteps. They continued for a couple more feet before they disappeared entirely. I backed up, retracing their steps again, praying that I was missing something. But I came to the same conclusion as before.
“We should go search the cabin just in case,” Deacon suggested, already making his way toward the building.
“Don’t bother.” Ledger stood off to the side, his hands outstretched. “They’re both gone.”
“Gone? Gone where?” Deacon demanded, but I could sense the answer.
“They’ve been taken.”
“What? How?”
“If I had to guess, I’d say it was the shadows.” Ledger waved his hand through the air, causing some sort of disturbance.
“What the fuck is that?” Deacon’s grip on his control was slipping.
