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Rosalind Blackwood.

My nose wrinkled. Must be dust in the room.

I pulled out my phone to text Sorsha about the photograph.

My thumb went to Nell's detail instead.

Current status.

The response took ninety seconds. Ninety seconds was not a long time in most contexts. In the context of a detail that had been responding in under ten seconds all evening, ninety seconds was a different kind of time entirely.

We lost visual. Approximately five minutes ago. She went off path. We're conducting a sweep now.

I read this twice. I was out of my chair before the second reading finished.

I was aware, distantly, of the meeting stopping around me. Of Vidar's voice saying my name with a sharp edge. I was not in the room anymore in any way that mattered. I was in the stairwell and then in the lobby and then in my car. The car was moving before the door was fully closed.

Nell was missing. Ten minutes now. The Volki had military-grade weapons. Even before that they had claws.

Or maybe it was Sorsha. Had the Lobos spotted us coming out of Vidar's place? Had they sensed the tension that night?

Or maybe they'd seen me storming into the office the next morning. Or maybe it was the unknown player. Darius Omondi had sat in her office today. He'd kissed her hand. He had her scent.

I needed to get my head clear. The likely culprits were the Volki. I reached for my phone as I took a sharp turn.

Viktor answered on the third ring. "Blackwood."

"What did you do with Nell?"

A pause. "What the fuck is a Nell?"

I hung up.

Not the Volki.

Sorsha was not a woman who left variables unmanaged. She had been watching the Blackwood situation since before the council meeting. She had the instincts of a predator who had survived decades of pack politics by identifying problems before they became crises. Perhaps she knew. Had known the moment I agreed to her timeline without the negotiation she had been expecting. A man who signs in under thirty seconds is a man who needs what he's being offered badly.

I palmed the phone. Deciding whether or not to play my hand. I knew I couldn't have Nell and Rosalind. There wasn't a choice. I had signed my life away. I'd be a fool to grasp for a few more days of freedom.

My phone rang.

"We have her."

The relief that ran through me had me drifting too close to the guardrail on the highway. Nell was fine. She was safe. She wasn't under the Volki's or the Lobo's claws.

"She went off path, went over the embankment near the drainage channel on the east side. Twisted ankle. Cracked phone. She's — " a brief pause that told me her guard was dealing with something — "she's declining the ER."

I wanted to demand she go to the ER. But I wanted her to myself. I'd evaluate her ankle and see if she needed to go.

"We're transporting her back to the residence now."

I was on the FDR doing seventy in a fifty zone. I moved to the center lane and breathed for the first time in ten minutes. The wolf was still running hot. The adrenaline of the last quarter hour sat in my system like a lit fuse with nowhere to go.

My phone rang again. I looked at the screen. I switched lanes and answered.

"Magnus." My father's voice was its usual even register; the baritone that had been the weather system of my entire childhood.

"Dad."