Kael's POV
We'd been riding for maybe two hours when the first scout came back.
He was bleeding from a cut on his shoulder. His clothes were torn. His eyes had that wild look that came from seeing something your brain couldn't quite process. He practically fell off his horse when he reached us.
"Sir," he gasped. "We found something. Or something found us. I don't know anymore."
I was off my horse before he finished talking. "What happened?"
"There's a girl. Young. Midnight hair. Grey eyes." The scout was breathing hard, like he'd been running instead of riding. "She's in the forest about three miles north. But sir, something's wrong with her. Something's very wrong."
The bond in my chest tightened. My wolf went rigid.
"What do you mean, wrong?" I asked.
The scout looked at the other warriors gathering around us. He looked like he wanted to tell them to leave. Like whatever he'd seen was too strange, too impossible to say out loud in front of this many people. But he took a breath and continued anyway.
"She has power we've never seen before. Dark power. Ancient power. Her skin was covered in black veins. Her eyes were glowing like fire." He paused, swallowing hard. "When she touched Marcus, he just... broke. He started crying. He said he couldn't fight anymore. He couldn't do anything anymore. It was like she drained something from inside him. Something essential."
The other scouts were arriving now. There were five of them total, and they all looked shaken. One of them had a burn mark on his arm like he'd been touched by something hot.
"What's her name?" I asked, though I already knew.
"We don't know, sir. She ran before we could get close enough to identify her. But the way she moved, the way she fought..." The scout looked at me with something like fear in his eyes. "She was almost inhuman."
Captain Devon stepped forward. "We should contact the Council immediately. This sounds like a rogue threat. We need authorization before we hunt something with that kind of power."
"No," I said.
"Sir?"
"No Council. No authorization. No discussion with the elder Alphas." I was already moving back toward my horse. "This is pack business. Internal business. We handle it ourselves."
"But sir, the scouts are saying she has forbidden power. Power that was outlawed centuries ago." Devon looked genuinely concerned. "If the Council finds out we encountered this and didn't report it—"
"Then they won't find out," I said. "Because we're going to find her first."
The bond was pulling so hard I could barely think straight. It was showing me her location like a beacon inside my chest. North. Deeper north. She was moving away from the compound, moving into the wilderness, moving toward somewhere I couldn't follow with a large hunting party.
Or maybe she was running. Maybe she was scared. Maybe she didn't understand what she'd become.
The scouts started talking over each other, trying to give me more information about what they'd seen. Dark veins. Glowing eyes. Power that seemed to come from nowhere. A girl who'd moved so fast they could barely track her.
A girl who matched the description of someone I'd rejected three weeks ago.
Something clicked inside my chest. Not just the bond. Something deeper. Something in my instincts that suddenly made sense of everything. Sienna Graves had always felt weak to me. But not because she was weak. Because she'd been suppressing something. Hiding something. Keeping something locked away inside herself so carefully that even her own wolf didn't know it was there.
Until the rejection broke her open.
Until pain became rage became power.
"Find her," I ordered the entire hunting party. "Lock down the territory. No one leaves. No one enters. And when you find her, you bring her back to me. Unharmed. Do you understand?"
"Sir, shouldn't we—" Captain Devon started, but I cut him off.
"You bring her back. That's all you need to know. That's all you need to do." I looked at each warrior in turn. "Anyone who hurts her answers to me. Anyone who tries to execute her answers to me. She comes back alive and intact or you don't come back at all."
The warriors looked shocked. This wasn't how you talked about a threat. This wasn't how you hunted a dangerous rogue. This was how you talked about something precious. Something that mattered.
Something that was yours.
Raven appeared on horseback, riding up to join us. She'd followed the hunting party, which I should have expected. She looked furious.
"This is insane," she said, pulling her horse beside mine. "You're mobilizing the entire pack for one girl. One weak girl from the lower bloodlines. The Council will never allow this."
"The Council doesn't need to know," I said.
"They'll find out. Word spreads. And when they do, they're going to demand answers about why you're protecting a rogue with forbidden power." Raven leaned closer, her voice dropping. "Unless that's not what you're doing. Unless you know exactly who this girl is."
I didn't answer. I didn't have to. The way my body was reacting to her existence, the way the bond was pulling me toward her like she was the only thing that mattered in the world, would tell Raven everything she needed to know.
She went pale.
"No," she whispered. "Not her. Not the weak one from the gathering. Not the girl you rejected."
"Get back to the compound," I said. "Tell them I'm leading a personal hunting expedition. Tell them anything you want. But tell them I'll be back when I've found what I'm looking for."
"Kael, this is a mistake. If you're doing this because of some twisted sense of responsibility over the rejection, you need to let it go. She's dangerous now. She's a threat. You should execute her and be done with it."
I looked at Raven for a long moment. I saw the way she was looking at me. The way she wanted me to turn away from this hunt. The way she'd probably been waiting for something like this, something that would force me to choose between duty and obsession.
She wanted me to choose duty.
She wanted me to choose her.
"Go back," I said quietly. "And don't follow me again."
I kicked my horse forward and the hunting party followed. Behind us, I could hear Raven shouting something, but I didn't listen. The bond was pulling so hard now it was like physical pain. It was showing me Sienna clearly. Showing me the power she'd awakened. Showing me the fact that she wasn't trying to hurt the pack.
She was trying to survive.
And for some reason, my wolf understood that on an instinctual level that my brain was only just catching up to.
We rode through the night. The scouts tracked her by scent, but I didn't need them. The bond was a map inside my chest. The bond was pulling me straight toward her like nothing else in the world mattered.
Around dawn, we found the first sign. A clearing where she'd rested. Her scent was all over it, and it was different now. Darker. More powerful. Layered with something ancient and hungry.
Captain Devon knelt and examined the ground. "She was here maybe six hours ago. There's another scent. Another girl. They're traveling together."
"How far?" I asked.
"Maybe three miles. They're moving slower now. Either they're exhausted or they're trying to hide their trail."
I felt something shift in the bond. It was pulling in a different direction now. It was showing me that Sienna knew we were coming. That she could feel me hunting her. That the connection between us was strong enough that she understood, on some level that went deeper than words, that I was following.
And that changed everything.
If she could feel me coming, then she would either run faster or she would stop and wait. She would either disappear into the forest completely or she would turn and face me. Either way, the next time we met, everything would be different.
The rejection would finally be answered.
The bond would finally be acknowledged.
And whatever was growing inside Sienna Graves would finally be unleashed.
I looked at the sunrise and felt something dark settle over my shoulders. The hunt was on. And I had no idea if I was hunting to protect her or to claim her.
Maybe both.