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Louis picked something up off the floor, his grin wide. A laptop. “If this belonged to Dubois, we scored big. Who knows what information he has on it?”

Pierre grunted. “Looks like Dubois hadn’t quite cracked our security.” Alain stood behind him as Pierre brought up the camera feed from the external surveillance, clicking from camera to camera. In every image, the Langeais wolves had triumphed. His pride in his pack near burst out of his chest. They were too powerful for the Faucherians, and the DGSE had underestimated them as a threat. They hadn’t sent enough men.

Pierre stopped on an image. Langeais wolves had a bunch of Faucherians restrained in the east corner of the estate.

“All Faucherians? No DGSE?” asked Alain.

“The DGSE all gave us the slip,” confirmed Pierre. He frowned. “Where’s Maxime? We’re going to need to know what to do with these guys.”

Grace put a tentative hand on his arm. “I don’t know where he is, but he saw someone on the security feed. A woman. When he left, he gave me a message to give to you. He said to tell you he’s taking his second chance.”

Alain shared a look with Pierre and Louis. That could only mean one thing.

Pierre scrolled through the remaining camera feeds. He stopped on the camera monitoring the back gate. For a split second, Alain’s heart stopped beating. There was Maxime, alive but weak, with thick shackles around his wrists and throat. Silver. It had to be. Two men dragged him to a waiting van and shoved him inside. Watching on was Regis Veilluex, the current leader of the Faucherians. Standing beside him was the woman from Alain’s vision.

“Putain de merde,” said Louis.

Truer words were never spoken.

“Is that who I think it is?” asked Pierre.

“If it is, it’s one fucked-up second chance,” said Louis.

Oui. The woman in Alain’s vision, the woman on the camera feed, was Maxime’s mate.

The Kings may not have got the grimoire, but the Faucherians had left with something else. Perhaps something more valuable to them and the DGSE. He pulled Grace into his arms, relieved she didn’t resist. All they could do now was trust in his vision and hope they’d get their alpha back alive.

* * * *

Cordelia glared at Bernard’s shade. Beaten, with claw marks across his shirt and chest where a wolf had taken a swipe at him, he dripped phantom blood on her carpet. Years this sting had been in the making, and it had all come to nothing. And two of her kin were dead. Promising witches that were of no more use to her. “You’ve failed me.”

“Not entirely,” countered Bernard.

She narrowed her eyes at his audacity. The fool thought he was safe. That she couldn’t hurt him because he wasn’t in this room with her, rather somewhere in France. Her magic crackled beneath her skin. “You had my grimoire at your fingertips, and you didn’t retrieve it. Tell me how that isn’t a failure.”

She needed her grimoire. Time was slipping through her fingers.

Bernard’s eyes gleamed. “The Faucherians have the alpha, Maxime d’Louncrais.”

Maxime d’Louncrais. The direct descendant of Alexandre, the man she’d cursed. The first of the Langeais wolves. “That could be helpful,” she conceded. “Stay with Veilluex. And keep me apprised.”

To remind him of her power, she released a spell that forced Bernard’s shade back into his body. Via an uninhabited sub-Antarctic archipelago south of New Zealand.

Cordelia stared out over San Francisco, the late afternoon sun casting a warm glow over the city. It’d been decades since she’d set foot in France. With Maxime d’Louncrais in custody, maybe it was time for her to return.

* * * *

Maxime had known it was a trap the moment he’d spotted her on the security cameras in his office. His mate, Joséphine Veilleux. But he’d had no other choice. Not when Regis Veilleux had held a knife to her throat, threatening to cut her open. It’d been a challenge his wolf couldn’t ignore.

His head thumped against the van as they hit a bump in the road. He tried to sit up, to get into a more comfortable position, and the muzzle of a gun was thrust against his temple. Silver bullets, without a doubt. He didn’t think they’d kill him. They hadn’t gone to all the trouble of binding him in silver if that’s all they wanted, but one silver bullet to the brain would do it. He didn’t need to be alive for them to experiment on his body.

In the front seat, Veilluex was on the phone organizing his containment. There was mention of The Doctor. Veilluex was smiling, triumphant. They might have him, but from what he could piece together, they didn’t have the grimoire, thank the Fates. And it wasn’t all bad. She was here.

Joséphine sat scrunched up in the corner, a smear of blood on her neck where her father’s blade had nicked her. He didn’t need his wolf senses to know she was hurting from her father’s betrayal, and while that boded well for him, it tore at him to see her like that.

He closed his eyes and let his head rest against the side of the van. He had to trust fate. It had worked for Gabriel, Pierre and Louis, and now Alain. And there was Alain’s vision. Maxime had never known him to be wrong.

Chapter Thirty-Five