Wolf Princess Sold to the Dragon King

The session ended the way every session ends when one bastard walks away with the whole fucking pie and forty-seven other men are busy acting like they still have dicks and didn’t just get bent over.

Handshakes that were pure bullshit. Nods that meant ’I hope you choke.’ Alphas that were mindlinking their Betas the only real post-game plan: we just got played like whores and now we’re going to throw darts and shit-talk Shadowfell for the next solid hour.

The rookie Beta dipped out of the chamber before Nicholas pulled his token, which meant he had received a mindlink. Damon watched him move and was already mindlinking Guinevere’s security.

At that moment, Nicholas pulled the Shadowfell token from the map and the territory dimmed. Then the matebond went dead.

The sensation was so sudden and so total that his hand froze around the token mid-lift.

Every nerve went off like fireworks from hell. His lungs locked. His teeth clenched so hard his jaw popped. The absence wasn’t gradual, wasn’t a dimming. It was amputation. One heartbeat she existed inside him, and the next there was a wound where she’d been, raw and screaming and so goddamn wrong that his body rejected the reality of it the way a host rejects a poisoned organ.

His wolf lunged so hard against his ribs that his vision whited out for a full second. Then he was through the council chamber doors and mindlinking his men. He hit the east wing stairwell at a pace that was three seconds from a full shift. His boots echoed off the stone walls like gunshots.

His pulse was a war drum. Every second without her was a second too long, and his brain had already started the clock.

Damon matched him stride for stride and had the good sense to say absolutely nothing because the expression on Nicholas’s face was communicating everything at a volume that made words redundant.

Second floor. Third floor. Legs eating the stairs three at a time. Inside his head his wolf was howling like a goddamn air-raid siren, drowning every useful thought under the pure animal conviction that shit had just gone extremely, irrevocably wrong.

He rounded the fourth-floor landing and heard voices above him.

Her Beta was already on the sixth floor grilling three very confused Lunaris wolves with questions that were getting progressively more fucked with every reply.

"When was the last time any of you opened this door?"

"I checked twenty minutes ago, Beta. She was in there," the youngest one said.

"Have you heard anything from inside the room?"

The three exchanged a look. "Yes. I heard her balcony doors hitting the wall. That’s when I opened the door and saw she was gone."

Gavyn was already moving in the room.

"Did any of the Shadowfell guards check?" he called to the three Lunaris warriors.

"They did a perimeter walk ten minutes ago. Corridor only. They confirmed the door was untouched and left."

Nicholas hit the sixth floor at the same second Reed’s mindlink came through.

Reed: Full sweep of the floor is done. She is not in any room on this level. None of our men have seen her leave.

Nicholas didn’t break stride. He moved past the three Lunaris wolves, past the eight Shadowfell guards who were now standing at rigid attention with the dawning horror of men who were about to discover that the most important assignment of their careers had failed while they were staring at a closed door.

He slammed the door open so hard it bounced off the interior wall and came back at him. He caught it with one hand and didn’t feel it.

The lack of her scent hit him first, a fading ghost of it, so faint it was almost cruelty. His chest seized. His wolf threw itself against his ribs with enough force to fracture bone, and for one horrifying second Nicholas couldn’t tell if the thing clawing through his insides was the animal or the grief.

The bed was empty.

The blanket was gone.

Gavyn was sniffing the room.

The balcony doors were wide open. Both of them. Swinging lazily in the night wind with the casual indifference of doors that had been unlatched from the inside and left that way by someone who had no intention of closing them.

Nicholas crossed the room in four strides and stepped onto the balcony. The wind hit his face and carried nothing. No scent. No trail. The mountain air had scrubbed the room clean, and the night had swallowed every molecule of evidence.

He gripped the balcony railing with both hands. The stone cracked under his fingers.

Six floors beneath him, the mountain hummed with the low vibrations of a fortress full of wolves who didn’t yet know what had happened. In twelve minutes they would. In fifteen, every exit would be sealed. In twenty, the forest would be swept. Because Nicholas Shadowfell was about to make this everyone’s damn problem.

But right now, in this second, he was standing on a balcony holding broken stone and she was out there somewhere in the dark, and the matebond was dead, and he couldn’t feel her, couldn’t reach her, couldn’t hear her heartbeat, and the silence where she used to be was so loud it was eating him from the inside out.

His vision tunneled. His claws punched through his knuckles. Fuck the protocol. Fuck the council. Fuck every second I spent in that chamber while they carried her out of my goddamn territory.

Behind him, Gavyn appeared in the doorway. "The balcony doors were locked. We made sure. But she wouldn’t leave without us."

Nicholas didn’t acknowledge Gavyn. He was too pissed at the guards, too pissed at the council, and beneath all that noise, absolutely livid with the one person who had truly fucked this up: himself.

Reed: Nick. Whoever took her came through the balcony. Sixth floor. No external access. The door was never opened from the inside. The guards did their job. She was taken from above.

Nicholas’s hands were still on the railing. The cracks were spreading under his grip.

His wolf was no longer howling. His wolf had gone quiet in the way that only happens when an animal stops warning and starts hunting.

"Someone climbed six floors of my mountain, walked into her room, and took her. I will find her. Whatever it takes. And when I do, whoever did this learns why no one has ever successfully stolen from Shadowfell and lived."