Chapter 4

Chapter 4

XENOIS

"Lumina!"

I shouted the name into the smoke-choked hallway, my voice cracking on it, raw from shouting it for the last ten minutes straight. The pack house was in chaos around me—guards running past with weapons drawn, someone's voice on the radio crackling with static, the acrid smell of something burning drifting up from the lower floors.

"She was in the safe room," Silvia said, appearing at my shoulder, her face pale. "Thorne said the portal came out of nowhere, that they took—"

"Took who?" I demanded, spinning to face her. "Took her where?"

My mother's mouth opened, then closed. Something crossed her face I didn't have time to name. "I don't—Xenois, I need you to help me search the east wing, some of the younger guards are still unaccounted for—"

"Not until I find her," I said, already moving again, pushing past a knot of pack members clustered near the stairwell. "Lumina! Where are you!"

I didn't know why I was so certain something had happened to her. I didn't even know, in that moment, if I could picture her face clearly—just a sense of wrongness, a hollow place where a name should have meant something solid, urgent, irreplaceable.

I turned a corner into the west corridor, and that's when I heard it.

"Xenois."

Her voice. Relief slammed into me so hard my knees nearly buckled.

I turned, and Sophia was standing there.

She looked shaken—hair coming loose from its braid, a streak of soot across one cheekbone, her dress torn at the hem like she'd been running through underbrush. But she was alive. Whole. Standing in front of me with her hands pressed to her chest like she couldn't quite believe she'd made it back either.

"Sophia," I breathed, and I crossed the distance between us in three strides and pulled her into my arms so hard she gasped.

"I thought I lost you," I said into her hair, my voice breaking apart. "Zade said Jerome's men had you, that they'd taken you from the safe room, and I couldn't—I couldn't think straight, I just kept running—"

"I'm here," she said, her arms coming around my waist, gripping the back of my shirt like she needed the anchor as much as I did. "I got out. I don't even know how. One second there were hands on me, and the next I was just—free. Running."

I pulled back enough to look at her face, cupping her jaw, checking for injuries with the kind of frantic, clinical urgency that came from loving someone too much to trust your own eyes the first time. A bruise forming along her cheekbone. A shallow cut above her eyebrow. Nothing that wouldn't heal.

"I have to find—" I started, and then stopped.

The sentence just fell apart in my mouth, mid-thought, like a rope with no other end to hold onto.

"Find what?" Sophia asked.

I frowned. There had been a name in my head a second ago. I was sure of it. Someone else. Someone I'd been shouting for through the smoke and the chaos, a name that had felt as necessary as breathing.

"I don't know," I admitted, and the confusion embarrassed me, made my stomach twist in a way I couldn't explain. "I thought—I thought there was someone else. In the safe room. Besides you."

Sophia's brow furrowed. "The maid, maybe? Or one of Zade's people who was helping guard the room?"

"Maybe," I said slowly, though the word didn't sit right in my mouth. A maid. Was that it? Someone whose face I should know, whose voice should have meant something to me, reduced to a job title I wasn't even sure was accurate.

I tried to hold onto the shape of the missing thing, the way you try to hold onto a dream in the seconds after waking, and it slipped through my hands exactly the same way. There one moment. Gone the next. And the harder I reached for it, the less certain I became that it had ever been there at all.

"Are you all right?" Sophia asked, touching my face now, her thumb brushing my cheekbone in a gesture so familiar it settled something in my chest even as it left something else unsettled. "You look like you've seen a ghost."

"I'm fine," I said. "Just—it's been a long day. Jerome's forces hit three of our safe locations at once. I thought I was going to lose you."

"You didn't," she said firmly. "I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere."

I kissed her then, hard and desperate, the kind of kiss that came from adrenaline and relief tangled together until you couldn't separate one from the other. She melted into it, her hands fisting in my shirt, and for a moment the chaos of the pack house faded into background noise.

When we broke apart, she rested her forehead against mine, breathing hard.

"The boys," she said suddenly, panic flaring fresh in her voice. "Riley, Ollie—are they safe? Where are they?"

"Thorne has them," I said. "Shawn's with them too, up on the roof, if you can believe it. Apparently they held off half of Jerome's assault force themselves."

"Of course they did," Sophia said, and there was a warmth in her voice, pride threaded through the exhaustion. "They're your sons. Stubborn as their father."

"And their mother," I said, smiling despite everything. "Riley gets that tactical streak from somewhere, and it's certainly not from me."