Chapter 7: Wolves in the Walls

(Sienna's POV)

The crying stopped as suddenly as it had started.

That almost made it worse.

Kade was already moving toward the door at the end of the corridor, but I caught his arm. "Wait." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "If they wanted us to find him they would not have sent the girl. They wanted us to hear him. They are herding us."

Kade went still. His eyes swept the corridor, slow and deliberate, reading the shadows the way only a man who had spent years in pack politics could. Then he exhaled through his nose.

"The east wing," he said quietly. "It has been sealed since my father died. Harlan never reopened it. The security system in there runs on a separate grid from the rest of the estate."

"Meaning your people cannot monitor it."

"Meaning whoever planned this planned it here. Inside this house." His jaw tightened. "Someone on my staff."

The words landed between us like a stone dropped in still water. We both watched the ripples.

I thought about the girl's face. Young. Calm. Not frightened at all. The kind of calm that comes not from innocence but from certainty, from knowing exactly which side of a war you are standing on and believing it will win.

"How long has the east wing been accessible to staff?" I asked.

"It should not be accessible to anyone." Kade pulled out his phone again, typed something fast, sent it. "I am pulling the access logs now. But Sienna, if someone has been using that wing without my knowledge for any length of time..."

"They have had time to set it up however they want," I finished.

He looked at me. The chandelier light from the main hall barely reached us here, and in the half dark his face looked the way it had at nineteen, stripped of the careful control he wore like armor in daylight. Raw. Furious. Afraid in the specific way that only fathers are afraid, even fathers who had only just learned the word applied to them.

I felt the bond respond to it, a deep involuntary pull in my chest, like something inside me reaching for something inside him across the small distance between our bodies.

I stepped back before it could take hold.

"We cannot go charging in," I said. "Not without knowing the layout and not without knowing who else in this house is working with Marcus."

Kade nodded once. "There is someone I trust. Completely. He has been with me since we were boys and he has never touched council money." He was already typing again. "I am bringing him in now."

"And Vanessa?" I asked. "She gave me an hour. That was—" I checked my phone. "Fourteen minutes ago."

"Let her wait." Something cold moved through Kade's expression. "She wants the meeting on her terms. In her timeline. In whatever room she has already prepared for it. We do not give her that."

I almost smiled despite everything. "You have gotten harder."

"You left," he said simply. Not as an accusation. Just a fact, stated plainly, the way you might describe weather.

It hit me somewhere behind my sternum and stayed there.

A door opened further down the main hall and a man appeared, broad across the shoulders, a few years older than Kade, with a crooked nose that had been broken at least twice and the kind of eyes that were always counting exits. He moved fast and quiet for his size, the particular economy of motion that belonged to wolves who had spent time as enforcers.

He looked at Kade first, then at me, and something in his expression settled.

"Sienna Blake," he said. "I was starting to think you were a ghost story Kade told himself to get through bad nights."

"Dax," Kade said. A single word of warning.

Dax raised both hands briefly and turned back to business. "Access logs for the east wing. Someone pulled a maintenance override fourteen days ago. Logged under a junior groundskeeper named Fen Alcott. Hired eight months back with a reference from—" he paused, and the pause was its own sentence, "the Hale family."

The name dropped into the corridor like a match into dry grass.

Marcus Hale had planted someone inside the estate eight months ago. Before Harlan died. Before the will. Before any of this was supposed to happen.

Which meant this was never a reaction to tonight.

This had been the plan from the beginning.

I pressed my back against the wall and made myself think. Milo's stuffed wolf. The crying that stopped too fast. The girl who had shown herself deliberately and then disappeared. They were not hiding my son in the east wing, not truly. They were making us think they were. Making us move in one direction while something else happened in another.

"Kade," I said slowly. "Where is Vanessa right now?"

He glanced at Dax.

Dax pulled out his phone, checked something. "East drawing room. She has been there since she left the study. Alone, far as we can tell."

"And Marcus?"

Another check. Dax's expression shifted slightly, the professional stillness cracking at one edge. "Marcus Hale left the estate grounds six minutes ago."

The silence that followed was very loud.

"He left," I repeated. "Right after the will reading. Right after Harlan named Milo on camera."

"His car took the north road," Dax said. "That road goes to two places. The private airfield or—"

"The river house," Kade said. His voice had gone very quiet. "Harlan's old hunting property. Pack owned. Off the estate system completely."

I pushed off the wall. "That is where Milo is."

Neither of them told me I was wrong.

Kade turned to Dax. "Get the car. Quietly. Not the main drive." He turned back to me and his eyes held something that was not quite a question and not quite a command, something in between that only existed in the specific language of people who had loved each other a long time.

"You are not leaving me here," I said before he could try.

"I was not going to suggest it."

"Good."

We moved back through the main hall, keeping close to the walls, away from the open sightlines of the grand staircase. The estate felt different now, the same rooms and the same smell of old money and stone, but threaded through with something watching. Every doorway felt inhabited. Every shadow felt occupied.

We were almost to the side entrance when I heard it.

Heels on marble.

Precise. Unhurried. Coming from the drawing room.

Vanessa's voice drifted through the half open door, not directed at us, directed at someone on the other end of a phone call she had not bothered to take privately.

'He is already there,' she said, her tone the particular warmth of someone discussing good news. 'Yes. Both of them. The wolf and the woman. No, she has no idea yet. The boy is just insurance, Marcus. We will not need him past the full moon once the council votes.' A pause. The sound of her setting down a glass. 'Of course I am certain. She came back, didn't she? She always comes back for the things she loves. That is her weakness. It always has been.'

The call ended.

I stood absolutely still in the hallway, Kade's hand pressing flat and warm against my spine.

Vanessa stepped out of the drawing room.

She saw us immediately.

Her eyes moved from my face to Kade's hand at my back to the direction of the side door. A perfect social smile appeared, thin as paper.

"Leaving so soon?" she said pleasantly. "You still have forty-three minutes, darling."

I looked at my mother, this woman who had handed my son to wolves to use as a bargaining chip, who had just spoken about him on the phone as insurance, and I felt something inside me go very, very quiet.

Not defeated.

Something beyond that. Something that had no name but felt permanent.

"Keep the hour," I said. "We are done negotiating."

Her smile did not waver. "Then I suppose we are done pretending this ends gently."

She stepped aside and gestured toward the door with one graceful hand, the way you might show a guest out after tea.

I walked past her without another word.

The cold night air hit my face as we cleared the estate steps and I pulled it into my lungs like something I had been underwater without.

Dax was already pulling a dark car around from the side yard, headlights off.

Kade opened the door for me and I got in, and the estate disappeared behind the tree line, and neither of us spoke for a long moment because sometimes there is nothing to say that the silence does not say better.

Then Kade's phone buzzed once on the seat between us.

He turned it over.

A single message from a number I did not recognize, different from the ones before, a local number, a landline.

The message was four words and a photograph.

'You are too late.'

The photograph was of the river house.

It was on fire.