Chapter 6
TATE’S POV
Nicole had been unusually quiet for days. I noticed. I notice everything – Caesar made sure of that from the time I was old enough to stand.
That morning she handed me the wrong tie. Her fingers moved too fast and her eyes didn’t meet mine. Storm flagged her scent immediately, something underneath it was off, and I looked at her a second longer than I needed
But the North Maple discussions were at a critical point and I had a pack to run. She was an omega without a wolf, what could she possibly do?
I went to my meeting and told myself it was nothing.
The beta’s report came through the mind link mid-morning on the fourth day, during a break between sessions. Unauthorized movement on the western border a small cluster of wolves who scattered the moment our elite squad arrived.
Probably rogues testing the perimeter, it happened twice a year and rarely amounted to anything. I told Jonathan to monitor and returned to the conference room.
I was forty minutes into the afternoon session when Tracy link hit me.
“Nicole is missing.”
Storm was on his feet before I had consciously processed the words. I excused myself from the table, walked into the corridor, and kept my voice low when I replied through the link. When did you last see her?
This morning. Early when she brought my medication but she hasn’t come back.
I told Jonathan to quietly end the session and followed Storm’s instinct toward the mansion at a pace that was not quite running but was not anything else either.
The mansion was in controlled chaos when I arrived. Servants standing in doorways.
I called her name and my own voice surprised me. There was nothing of command in it. Storm had been telling me for days that something was wrong, and I had chosen, deliberately, not to listen because listening would have required me to admit that I was watching her more carefully than I had any intention of admitting.
That when she handed me the wrong tie that morning I had stood still for two seconds longer than necessary, not out of irritation but because something in the way she moved had changed, and I had noticed but had dismissed it immediately.
I called her name as my own voice surprised me. I had not raised it for Nicole in a way that was not contempt or command in three years. This was neither. I called it again.
The silence that came back was deafening.
I asked every person I encountered, where she was. When did anyone last see her? What time. Where. Nobody had a clear answer. Nobody had been watching closely enough because nobody considered her worth watching.
She was the omega, she was the locksmith’s daughter. She was the pack’s penance and the pack’s shame and she had spent three years making herself so small that everyone had learned to look straight through her. Including
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I told myself the fury rising in my chest was at her. For the disruption, for the audacity.
She tried to escape several times in the past two years, and each time my warriors caught her. Each time she was brought back, I would lock her in a dark basement for 24 hours. This was the best way my father taught me to make wolves obey; I don’t know how many times I was put in solitary confinement as a child. At first, you’ll howl, then you’ll cry and beg for forgiveness, then you’ll be terrified, as if the whole world has abandoned you. In the pitch-black confinement room, you lose track of time, you don’t know what’s happening outside. Fear engulfs you, and finally you surrender. That’s how I learned absolute obedience, and I hoped Nicole would learn it too. I thought she had already learned it, but today I realized she’s still as cunning as ever.
I led the search myself. Storm was not calm about any of it, which I told myself was the bond. It was always the bond.-It had nothing to do with the fact that I had memorised the sound of her footsteps in the east corridor, or that I knew exactly which window she stood at when she thought no one was watching. Those were security observations, nothing more.
I split the elite squad across all four borders and covered the inner pack territory myself with the senior warriors. We searched through the afternoon and into the evening. Every building but we found nothing.
By nightfall I was standing in the empty room she had occupied for three years. She was gone. She had planned it, she had stood in front of me this morning with the wrong tie in her hands and something hidden behind her eyes and I had looked directly at her and decided she was not worth the second thought.
Storm lay down in the corner of my mind and pressed his face to the ground and made a sound I had never heard from him before.
The next day, Jonathan came to me with the report, a patrol squad covering the northern forest perimeter had found something.
Jonathan brought it to me personally, which told me before he opened his mouth that it was not good.
A pool of blood at the treeline. The quantity of it left very little room for interpretation.
Storm pressed his nose to the ground of my mind and went very still. “Is it hers,” I asked.
Jonathan didn’t answer immediately, he didn’t need to. The bond had already told me, Storm had already confirmed what no one needed to say aloud.
“With that volume of blood loss,” Jonathan said quietly, “even if she reached the border on her own, she would not.”
“Continue the search,” I said.
“Alpha”
“In the forest, all sectors. Continue.”
I walked back to the mansion alone and did not speak to anyone for the rest of the evening.
They came on the third day. I was already in a poor mood when I walked into that room and the mood did not improve as Elder Crane led it. “The search parties are pulling warriors from border rotations all for an omega.”
“I am aware of what she ranked,” I said.
“Then you understand the optics.” Crane folded his hands on the table. “Resources committed at this scale signal to the pack that the matter carries weight it should not carry and it raises questions about your
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“Careful,” I said quietly.
He was careful, he waited and then continued. “About the pack’s priorities, there is also the matter of closure. For the pack, for your ability to move forward on the Luna question, which cannot remain open indefinitely.”
I listened to all of it. When the last voice finished I said, “Three more days.”
Crane’s expression shifted, just slightly. “Alpha, the evidence”
“Two days more,” I said again, and looked at him until he closed his file.
They filed out, Sophia was waiting in the corridor, which meant she had known the meeting was happening and had positioned herself accordingly. She waited until the council members were out of earshot and then she turned to me with an expression I had seen before.
“They’re right,” she said. “You know they’re right. End the search, Tate. She’s gone. And when you’re ready when you’ve had whatever time you need I’m here. I’ve always been here, make me your Luna. We both know it was always going to be me.”
I looked at her for a moment. “You are not my mate,” I said. “You were never going to be Luna.”
Something flickered across her face like surprise, then something harder underneath it. “That’s not what you said when you were in my bed, what is this? Guilt?” She tilted her head. “You allowed the entire pack to treat her the way they did. You allowed it for years, don’t stand there performing grief over a bitch who”
“Don’t.” The word came out very quiet. “Do not use that word for her, not in front of me. Not ever.”
Sophia blinked.
“She was Luna of this pack,” I said. “Whatever else she was or wasn’t, she held that title. You will not refer to her that way.”
“Tate.” She shifted, moving toward. “I only meant”
“I know what you meant.” I held her gaze. “But don’t you ever talk to your Alpha the way you like, Also I want to be clear about something, Sophia. Everything you have, your position here, your access to this pack, the respect you receive in these halls I gave you that. Every piece of it and I can take it back with a single word. Do not mistake proximity for permanence.”
She held my gaze, something calculating moving behind her eyes, and then she straightened. “I’ve already arranged for the servants to start clearing Nicole’s things from the mansion. It needed to be done sooner or later.”
I was already moving before she finished the sentence.
I heard the noise before I reached the corridor as I stopped in the doorway.
The room was a mess, books pulled from the glass case and thrown on the floor, the small chair knocked on its side, clothes dragged from the wardrobe and piled in the centre of the room. One of the maids was standing directly on top of that pile, her full weight on Nicole’s folded things, reaching for the high shelf, while the step stool was right beside her. She was standing on Nicole’s clothes because she wanted to.
“Stop.” My voice came out low as all three froze. “Put it back, every item. Exactly where it was. If you don’t remember where it was, you stand in that corridor until you do.”
“Alpha,” the nearest one said carefully, “Luna Tracy gave the order, and Miss Sophia confirmed.”
“I am the Alpha of this pack,” I said. “Not Luna Tracy, not Sophia. Put it back.”
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They moved. I watched them go and stood in the corridor for a moment, breathing.
I finally stepped into the room, It looked as I remembered it simple, barely personalized.
“Alpha.” One of the maids appeared behind me, hesitant. “While we were, when we were clearing I found something. Under the sink in the bathroom. I thought you should see it before I”
She held it out as I took it from her and turned it over. Two lines.
I stood completely frozen in the middle of the room and looked at the test in my hand for a long time without speaking, without moving, without being able to do either. Positive.
“Leave,” I said as the maid left.
The door closed. I was alone in Nicole’s room with a positive pregnancy test in my hand.
“She’s pregnant,”
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Chapter 6.5
Tate pov
Storm slammed back into my mind like a wall.
For days he had stayed silent and pressed flat in the back of my head. He did that when something felt too big and I wouldn’t let him deal with it. I had missed him like a missing limb, but told myself I could manage without him.
Now he returned with everything he had been holding back.
She was carrying our child, his voice in my mind was unlike anything I had heard from him – not the pacing restlessness, not the low growl, not the impatience with my decisions that had been the background noise of my entire adult life. This was something older and rawer and considerably more dangerous. She was carrying our child and you felt something was wrong and you chose your meeting. You chose it.
I didn’t answer him, I stood in the room with the test in my hand and let him say it.
Three days you felt it, for days she was moving differently, smelling differently, and you dismissed every single signal I gave you because admitting you were watching her meant admitting something you were too proud to.
“Not now,” I said, aloud, quietly.
When, then. When she’s on the ground?
I had no answer for that either. The door opened. Sophia came in without knocking, the way she always had, and I did not have the capacity at this moment to address that habit.
She saw my face, then the test in my hand, and her expression went through several stages very quickly before it settled on something I recognized as calculated recovery.
“That’s” She stopped. “That’s not possible.”
“Leave,” I said.
“Tate.” Her voice sharpened. “I have been in your bed for two and a half years and I have never, she’s an omega, she’s practically human without her wolf, the birth control.”
“The birth control failed.” The words came out of me angrily. “Obviously it failed. Leave, Sophia.”
“You cannot restart the search over a”
“Get out of this room.” I turned and looked at her, and whatever she saw in my face made her stop. “Now.”
She left as I heard her heels in the corridor,
I restarted the full search the same evening. Jonathan didn’t argue with me, which meant he had either heard about the test or read my face accurately enough to know that arguing would accomplish nothing useful.
Three weeks. Every border, every forest sector, every rogue network our intelligence had a partial line into. I pulled warriors from rotations I shouldn’t have pulled them from and I was aware of every operational consequence and I did it anyway.
I stood in briefing rooms at six in the morning and received reports that said nothing, found nothing, returned nothing, and I sent the teams back out.
Storm drove me through all of it. He was not calm and he was not quiet and the sustained weight of his presence in my mind during those three weeks was the most honest I had ever allowed him to be. I did not push him down. I
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did not tell him it was the bond and nothing more, I just let him run.
It produced nothing, she was not found.
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It was past midnight when someone knocked. “Come in.”
Johnathan came in, he looked at me then sat across the desk without being invited, which told me this was not a routine report.
“Alpha.” He folded his hands on the table. “I need to speak plainly.”
“Then do it.”
He exhaled slowly. “The search needs to stop.’
I said nothing.
“I know that’s not what you want to hear, I know why you restarted it. I saw what was on that test and I understand what it means.” He held my gaze steadily. “But we are into the third week of full deployment across sectors that cannot sustain it. I have border captains telling me their rotations are compromised, I have warriors pulling double coverage and making errors because they’re exhausted. The allied packs are asking questions about our operational stability.” He paused. “And there is no result. Three weeks of nothing.”
The room was quiet, outside the window the pack grounds were dark and still.
“The probability,” Jonathan continued, more carefully now, “given the blood evidence, given the three weeks of searches even if she survived long enough to reach cover, without her wolf, without accelerated healing, without anyone to” He stopped. “I am not saying it easily, I want you to know that.”
“I know,” I said.
“You are the Alpha of this pack.” His voice was steady and direct in the way it only was when he had decided something mattered enough to risk my displeasure over it. “Not just Tate, the Alpha. Hundreds of wolves depend on your decisions being made clearly and without – without this.” He gestured at the desk, at the towering stack of files that had been accumulating for three weeks of neglect. “That is not a criticism. It is a fact that you know better than anyone.”
He stood. At the door he paused, and something shifted in his expression. “Go home tonight. Shower, sleep if you can. You look like you haven’t been properly taken care of in a week.” He hesitated. “I don’t say that lightly, An Alpha shouldn’t look like this, Sophie has been” He stopped himself. “Please just go home.”
He left as I sat with his words in the quiet for a long time.
The one who took care of us, Storm said, from somewhere very deep, was Nicole. Every morning for three years. The suit pressed, the breakfast ordered, the medication sorted. You treated it like it was nothing and she did it anyway, every single day. And I told you – I told you something was wrong – and you sat in your meeting.
I pressed my hand flat on the desk and said nothing.
You were happy when she was near, Storm continued, quieter now. Don’t pretend otherwise. Every time she came into a room you were aware of her in a way that had nothing to do with contempt and you chose, deliberately, every single time, to call it something else. And now she is gone and our child is gone and you.
“Enough,” I said.
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You have caused the death of our mate. Storm’s voice settled into something final And our child. Say it plainly, at least once, to yourself.
I sat with that for a long time, the files on my desk did not diminish, the border reports did not file themselves, the pack did not pause because I was sitting in the dark not moving.
I was the Alpha of South River Pack with hundreds of wolves. Borders, succession, alliances, the daily machinery of a territory that did not stop requiring decisions because I had lost the ability to make them cleanly.
I reached across the desk and pulled the nearest file toward me.
I did not believe she was dead, Storm did not believe it, the bond had not given me the severing silence that came with a mate’s true death, the particular quality of absence that every alpha who had ever lost a mate described in the same language.
But I was the Alpha. And I had run a three week full deployment search that had produced nothing, and I had men at compromised borders making exhausted errors, and the pack was watching, and Jonathan was right about all of
I opened the file, picked up my pen. I would stop the search in the morning. Not because I believed she was dead but because I was the Alpha, and the Alpha was responsible for every wolf in this territory, and I could not burn the pack down around me looking for one person – even if that person was carrying my child.
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