Chapter 367 Missing Luna Protocol Hit Like A Bitch

Garrett Darkhowler had just watched his batshit ex-girlfriend turn her own execution into a full-blown roast, verbally eviscerating him, Fin, and half of Drakencrest—only for his best friend to get temporarily possessed and then reboot with the memory of a drunk goldfish.

He needed Agnes.

The woman was a chaos gremlin with a PhD in sarcasm, and right now that was the only cure. The last four hours had been so insane they required her special talent for reducing an apocalyptic shitshow into one devastatingly funny sentence. He needed her to make him laugh and point out how stupid all of that was.

He had fallen for that girl a long time ago, but he hadn’t realized how bad it was until now. He’d only been gone a few hours, and he missed her.

He pushed open his chamber doors. Empty.

He trusted his instincts the way other kings trusted their advisors. His instincts had never lied to him and right now they were telling him something was wrong.

“Agnes?”

His voice carried through the chambers. The bathing room was dark. The dressing room was undisturbed.

He reached for the mindlink.

Garrett: Agnes.

Nothing.

Garrett: Agnes, I’m back. Where are you?

Silence. The particular silence of a connection that should carry a response and was returning dead air, which meant either she was out of range, she was unconscious, or she was ignoring him.

Garrett’s jaw tightened.

He left the chambers. Walked the eastern corridor. Checked the kitchens, the library, the private dining room where she sometimes read when the main hall was too populated. Empty. Empty. Empty.

He found Matt Cross in the lower gallery.

“Where is Agnes?”

His Beta read his face in under a second. The shift from advisor to operator happened in the space between one word and the next, Cross’s posture straightening, his eyes sharpening.

“I haven’t seen her since before you left for Drakenfell, Alpha.”

“She isn’t in our chambers. She isn’t answering the mindlink.”

Cross didn’t ask follow-up questions. The Alpha King of Darkhowler was standing in a corridor telling his Beta that his mate was unreachable, and the Beta understood the math immediately: the window between “she stepped out” and “castle lockdown” was measured in the king’s heartbeat, and the king’s heartbeat was accelerating.

Cross stood. “I’ll check the gate logs and staff. How long has she been—”

“Mindlink the watch captains. All of them. Full sweep of the grounds. Now.”

“On it, Alpha.”

The lockdown hit Darkhowler in under three minutes.

Agnes had not been crowned yet.

But none of that mattered.

Every guard, every patrol captain, every wolf in Darkhowler’s chain of command treated the situation as a missing Luna, because Garrett Darkhowler’s mate was Garrett Darkhowler’s mate whether or not a crown had been placed on her head, and the man issuing the orders was issuing them with the full weight of a king whose voice had gone quiet in the way that preceded very loud consequences.

✦✦✦

Garrett shifted.

The wolf that replaced him was large, dark-furred, moving with the ground-covering stride of an Alpha whose body had been built for pursuit and whose mind was running calculations that his human form processed too slowly. Cross shifted beside him, a leaner wolf with the efficient gait of a Beta who had been running formation sweeps since he was old enough to hold a rank.

The grid formation spread outward from the castle in concentric rings. Wolves fanned across the grounds in pairs, covering the gardens, the stables, the outer walls, the training yards. Every corridor inside the castle was being checked simultaneously by guards whose mindlink reports were streaming into Cross’s awareness in a continuous feed of negatives.

South garden, clear.

Armory, clear.

East wall, clear.

Kitchens and service quarters, clear.

Every negative tightened the coil in Garrett’s chest by one revolution. She was here. She had been here hours ago. Her scent was in the chambers, in the corridors, fading at the edges.

He ran south.

Through the outer gate. Past the patrol rotation. Into the tree line where the canopy swallowed sound and a father waited for his daughter in clearings that a mate was never supposed to know about.

Garrett knew. He had known for weeks. He had followed her. He had heard every flat, efficient report delivered to a handler who kissed her forehead like a clerk stamping documents. He had chosen to let it play out because the woman running the double operation was protecting Serena, protecting him, protecting everyone except herself, and confronting her before she was ready would have broken the only honest thing she had ever built.

He regretted not confronting her.

The thought hit him mid-stride with a force that almost broke his gait. He should have pulled the rug weeks ago. Should have sat her down and said I know, and I love you, and you never have to go back to that clearing again. Should have given her the safety to stop lying instead of the space to keep going.

He hadn’t, and she was gone, and the distance between “strategic patience” and “I waited too long” was the distance between this forest and wherever she was right now.

He reached the clearing.

The smell hit him before the visual did. Pine. Frost. The mineral scent of dark soil. Agnes’s scent, strong, recent, carrying the elevated cortisol signature of fear. And underneath all of it, threaded through the soil like poison through water, a scent that made his wolf snarl: Viremont.

He shifted to human form. His knees hit the forest floor.

His hands were on the ground where her scent was strongest, and his eyes were reading the clearing the way a commander reads a battlefield after the battle is over: boot prints, displacement patterns, the specific choreography of bodies that had moved through this space in a sequence that told a story.

Her prints led in from the north. Steady stride. She had walked here with purpose, the way she always walked here, the memorized confidence of a woman who had mapped every route.

The prints changed at the center. The stride shortened. The weight shifted. She had stopped. Faced the direction her father’s scent was coming from. Stood there for a period long enough to leave deeper impressions in the soft earth.

Then she ran.

The prints heading east were spaced for a sprint. Full speed.