Chapter 368 Whatever It Fucking Takes

Beta Cross shifted back into human form and dropped to his knees.

He held up a piece of fabric.

Dark cloth. Torn at the edge, still carrying the particular weave of the cloak Agnes had been wearing when she left the castle. The thorn had caught it mid-sprint.

“This confirms she was running,” Cross said.

Garrett took the fabric. His fingers closed around it. The material was still carrying her scent, and the scent was still carrying fear, which meant she had been afraid for hours, and he had been standing in a courtyard watching a dragon land on an execution block while the woman he loved was running through trees with her father’s men behind her.

The master mage arrived.

Theron, Darkhowler’s senior mage, walked the perimeter of the clearing with both hands extended, palms down, reading the air the way a cartographer reads a map.

He stopped at the eastern edge. His hands held position. Gold magic pulsed once from his palms, illuminating a residue in the air that was invisible to the naked eye and unmistakable to anyone trained to see it.

“Portal residue,” Theron said. “Dark-channel. Recent. The signature is consistent with forced extraction rather than voluntary transit.”

“Forced,” Garrett repeated.

“The anchor point is wrong for a cooperative portal. The aperture was widened after the initial opening, which suggests the target was moving away from it rather than toward it. The portal was expanded to pursue.”

Garrett stood. His hand was still closed around the torn fabric. His face had moved past every expression it usually wore, past the earnest warmth, past the tactical focus, past the steady confidence that made his men trust him and his allies respect him. What was left was something his castle had never seen, because Garrett Darkhowler had never had a reason to show it.

The man standing in the clearing, holding a piece of his mate’s cloak, was a man who had arrived at the precise intersection of love and fury where the two became indistinguishable, and the result was terrifying in its stillness.

“Cross.”

“Sir.”

“War room. Now.”

✦✦✦

WAR ROOM – DARKHOWLER

The table was oak, built for maps and strategy, scarred by the knives of commanders who had planned campaigns across its surface for three generations of Darkhowler kings. Garrett’s fist hit it hard enough to add a new mark.

“She did not leave willingly.”

Seven men stood around the table. Cross, Theron, four senior captains, and the head of castle intelligence, a wolf named Brenn whose face was built for silence and whose career was built on knowing things nobody else did.

“With respect, sir,” Captain Aldren said, choosing his words with the care of a man who understood the king’s mood and was proceeding anyway because his job required it, “the evidence shows she was meeting with Reginald Viremont behind your knowledge. Consistently. For weeks. The possibility that she—”

“Chose to leave.” Garrett’s voice cut through the sentence before it finished. “That is what you are about to say. That she saw the execution, panicked, and used her father’s portal to run.”

Aldren held the king’s gaze. To his credit, he held it well. “It must be considered, sir. She has ties to Viremont. She was operating without your knowledge. The cloak fragment could indicate haste rather than flight.”

“She wanted to be here.” Garrett’s hand was flat on the table, the torn fabric pressed beneath his palm. “I could feel her emotions, Captain. Every morning she crawled back into our bed, I felt what she was carrying through the matebond. Fear, yes. Guilt. But underneath all of it, every single time, the same thing: she wanted to be here. She wanted us. She was choosing us.”

The room absorbed that.

“She was meeting her father because he was giving her orders she was finding ways to disobey,” Garrett continued. “She was feeding him defanged intelligence. She was protecting Serena Drakenfell by omitting information that would have sold her location to Orosia. She was running a double operation inside my territory, without my knowledge, because she was raised by a man who taught her that carrying things alone was the only way to carry them.”

Cross, who had known about the secret meetings because Garrett had told him, said nothing. His silence was confirmation enough.

“I knew,” Garrett said. He said it to the room. To his captains. To the men whose trust he was built on and whose trust he was about to test. “I have known for weeks. I chose to let it play out because the woman in that clearing was becoming the woman I knew she could be, and confronting her before she was ready would have destroyed the progress. That was my decision. It was mine. And if any man in this room has a problem with it, you can file it with Cross after I get her back.”

Silence.

“She would never leave me.” The sentence came out with a certainty that had nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with the matebond still humming in his chest, carrying the phantom signal of a woman whose emotions he had memorized the way other men memorized maps. “Her father took her. The portal was forced. She ran, and they caught her.”

He looked at Theron. “Can you trace the portal?”

“Dark-channel portals leave decay signatures for approximately forty-eight hours. The origin point can be extrapolated if I can get a read on the anchor frequency.” Theron paused. “I will need to work from the clearing. Give me two hours.”

“You have one.”

Theron left without arguing, because the tone of voice that delivered the timeline was the tone that turned requests into orders and hours into constraints.

Garrett turned to Brenn. The intelligence chief was already standing with a folio open, because Brenn had been compiling a file on Reginald Viremont since Garrett had told him to start, and the file was thick enough to constitute light reading for a long campaign.

“Everything you have on Viremont. Every property. Every ally. Every asset. I want to know where he sleeps, where he eats, where he conducts business, and which of those locations has wards strong enough to hold a wolf who doesn’t want to be held.”

Brenn nodded once. “I have three probable locations. Two estates and a fortified compound in the eastern reach. The compound has the ward infrastructure for containment.”

“Get me a portal to Viremont.”

The sentence landed on the table with the weight of a declaration of war, because that is what it was. Garrett Darkhowler, the man whose reputation was built on patience and precision and the kind of honor that made other kings look careless, was about to storm a compound controlled by the most dangerous political operative on the continent to retrieve a woman who had been lying to him for months and whom he loved with a ferocity that made the lying irrelevant.

Cross studied his king’s face. The study lasted two seconds.

“Full assault or extraction?”

“Extraction.” Garrett’s jaw set. “I am going in. I am bringing her out. And if Reginald Viremont is standing between me and the door when I arrive, I will walk through him, and I will do it with the full understanding that the man I am walking through is my mate’s father, and I will lose zero sleep over the decision.”

“Rules of engagement?” Aldren asked.

Garrett looked at him. The look carried the full weight of a king who believed in honor and teamwork and the specific value of doing things the right way. But this time, the right way and the necessary way were not the same road.

“Get her home. Whatever it takes.”