Chapter 95: Caught In The Act

BANG. BANG. BANG.

Three loud knocks sounded at the door.

Nova jolted, her hand flying to her mouth, just now realizing how loud she was being.

Derek went rigid behind her. His mouth pulled away from her neck an inch. His arms didn’t release. His breathing was ragged, each exhale hitting her skin in bursts that were too fast, too hot. His whole body was shaking.

Tavian’s voice came from the other side of the wood. "Derek, we have a problem. Landon needs you. Now."

The growl that came from under Derek’s ribs could have shaken the walls.

BANG.

There was a fourth overly loud knock.

"I will remove that door from its hinges and beat you with it, Tavian."

"Understood. Landon still needs you."

"Tell Landon I’m busy."

"Derek, I’ve never pulled you out of a room before. If this could wait, I’d be downstairs finishing my drink."

✦✦✦

DEREK’S CHAMBERS - ONE HOUR LATER

There’s a specific silence that fills a room when a man leaves and doesn’t come back right away.

Nova wanted to wait for Derek. But it had been almost an hour. She was nowhere near recovered and she was already exhausted. Derek’s bed was too comfortable. Her eyelids were losing the war.

Each blink lasted longer than the last, the darkness between them deepening, the room softening at the edges. She was going under.

She was almost gone when the shadow appeared.

A dark line beneath the door. Moving. The silhouette of boots on stone, visible in the gap between the door and the floor, backlit by the corridor’s ivy glow.

Derek.

Her chest warmed. He was back. Whatever Landon had needed must have been quick, which was a relief because Nova’s body had been making plans for his return that her brain hadn’t been consulted on.

The shadow stopped.

No knock came.

The shadow shifted. Something slid beneath the door with a soft hiss against stone. Then the boots moved. Retreating. The sound faded down the corridor and was gone within seconds.

Nova sat up in bed, blinking the sleep from her eyes. The fog receded like a tide pulling back, revealing sharp sand underneath.

She pulled the silk robe off the bedpost and slipped it on, tying it at the waist. Slippers on.

She crossed the room to the door. On the floor, half under the door and half in the room, sat a large envelope. Cream-colored. Heavy stock. The kind of envelope that carried documents people were supposed to take seriously.

She picked it up. It weighed more than paper should.

Nova carried it to the side table and turned on the lamp. Amber light filled the corner of the room and threw her shadow against the far wall, long and solitary. She turned the envelope over.

NOVA

Written on the back in clean, blocky handwriting. Not printed. Handwritten. Someone had held a pen and spelled her name with the specific intention of making sure she knew this was for her and nobody else.

Only a few people used her name. Derek. Maria. Seraphina. Astra, when she wasn’t downgrading to the barcode. Everyone else used 7709 or didn’t address her at all. Whoever had left this envelope knew her name and had chosen to use it instead of the number, which was either a kindness or a trap dressed as one.

She broke the seal and tilted the contents onto the bedspread.

Photographs. Four of them. Printed on thick stock that felt expensive between her fingers.

The first one punched the air out of her lungs.

An image captured from a security camera of a man in a mask carrying a body. Nova recognized the cloak as her own. The image was grainy, the angle slightly elevated, the timestamp in the lower corner reading a time that Nova recognized as the night before the Moonfire.

Her hands started to shake. She set the photo down and picked up the second.

Same man. Same mask. Same cloak-wrapped body. This one was taken from a street-level security camera, the angle lower, the resolution sharper. She could see the man’s boots hitting pavement mid-sprint. Could see the way his arms were locked around her unconscious body. Snow was visible on the ground, which placed it at the right date. But the background showed a hover station she didn’t recognize.

The third photograph was taken from above. A drone shot. The resolution was military-grade, sharp enough to count the stitches on the man’s mask. He was moving across an open area between two structures and the timestamp had advanced by several minutes.

She could see the outline of a yacht’s docking clamps in the corner of the frame. The vessel was blurred but recognizable to anyone who had spent time on it, and Nova had spent considerable time on it, sleeping on a man’s chest and throwing up in its bathing chamber and getting her cuffs removed on its sky deck.

Her blood ran cold.

Nova had found the board and rope in that closet. But there was no more denying it. This was without question the Thunderfang yacht.

The fourth photograph was the clearest of all. Close range. Taken from what looked like a fixed camera at eye level, the kind mounted on a building entrance or a security checkpoint. The masked man was walking directly towards the lens. Nova’s body was draped across his arms. Her hood had shifted. A sliver of her face was visible, just enough to confirm identity, jaw and cheekbone and one closed eye.

His face was fully covered. Black mask. Hood up. No skin visible. No identifying marks. Built like an Alpha but that described half the ranked wolves in Helix.

Nova turned the photograph over. Her hands were shaking badly enough that the image trembled.

Written on the back, in the same blocky handwriting as her name on the envelope:

EAST WING. FOURTH FLOOR. ROOM 412. NOW.

She stared at the words until they stopped being words and became a dare.

Someone knew about the abduction. Someone had evidence of it. Someone had waited until Derek left this room and slid an envelope under the door with photographs that could end Nova’s life and that someone was currently waiting in a room in the east wing and expected her to walk there alone in a silk robe and slippers at midnight.