Charlotte's POV
The bag came off her head, and Charlotte gasped.
Cold air hit her face. Her wrists were zip-tied behind her back. Her silver dress was torn at the shoulder. She was sitting on a metal floor, and the metal floor was moving in a van, she realized, and it was moving fast.
Her heart slammed against her ribs so hard it hurt.
Think. Think. Think.
She forced herself to breathe through her nose, slow, steady. Panic would get her killed. Panic was for people who didn't know how to read situations. Charlotte knew how to read situations.
Okay. Two men in the front. One in the back with her, sitting against the side door, watching her with flat eyes. She didn't recognize him, but she recognized the way he held himself, military training, enemy division, the kind of soldier who followed orders without asking questions.
The van smelled like gun oil and pine trees. They were leaving the city. The road had gone bumpy ten minutes ago, which meant they'd passed the main highway exit. Which meant they were heading north.
North. Toward the borderlands.
Charlotte's chest tightened.
She thought of Daemon. The way his hand had felt, warm and certain, when he'd pulled her to his side. The way his voice had shaken, just slightly, when he said I've been waiting so long.
She thought of the mate bond that silver thread connecting them and tested it now, the way she'd been learning over the past few hours. It was still there. Faint. Like a radio signal from very far away.
But it was there.
He's looking for me, she told herself. He's already looking.
The man watching her shifted. "Stop doing that."
Charlotte blinked. "Doing what?"
"Whatever you're doing with your eyes." His voice was flat. "You look like you're calculating something."
"I'm not," Charlotte said calmly. "I'm scared."
She was scared. That part wasn't a lie. But scared and useless were two different things, and Charlotte Harris had never once been useless.
She looked around the van as naturally as she could. Bolt cutters on the far wall, hooked to a rack. A black case near the driver's seat that looked like communications equipment. And on the floor, half-kicked under the passenger seat, a phone.
Someone's phone. Dark screen. Unlocked, by the look of the dim green light at the corner.
Don't look at it again, she told herself. One look. That's all they need to notice.
The van hit a bump, and Charlotte used the jolt to shift three inches to the left. The man watching her didn't react.
She thought about what Daemon had told her two days ago, in the palace study, his voice low and serious: "The borderlands are outside Royal jurisdiction. If they cross with you, Charlotte, I cannot follow the law. Everything I'm doing right now is designed to stop that from happening."
She hadn't fully understood the weight of those words then. She understood them now.
She had maybe forty minutes before that line.
The van slowed for a bend in the road. Charlotte felt the mate bond pulse, sharp and sudden, like something squeezing her heart from the inside. She almost gasped.
Daemon. Close. Getting closer.
He's coming. He's actually coming.
Hope cracked open inside her chest, bright and terrifying, because hope was dangerous when you weren't safe yet. Hope made you wait instead of acting.
Charlotte didn't wait.
She twisted her wrists hard, testing the zip tie. It bit into her skin, but there was just a little give, just enough because whoever had tied her hadn't expected a five-foot-three analyst to do anything worth worrying about.
Nobody ever expected her to do anything worth worrying about.
She shifted again, slowly, and her fingers found the edge of a metal seam on the van floor. Thin. Sharp.
She started working.
The man watching her spoke into an earpiece. "Forty minutes out. The package is secure." He glanced at Charlotte. She stared at the floor like she'd given up completely.
He looked away.
She pressed harder against the seam.
The van hit another bump. The communications case near the driver's seat rattled, and the driver swore. For exactly four seconds, both men in front were distracted.
Charlotte lunged sideways. Her tied hands found the phone on the floor, and she flipped onto her back and sat up with it between her fingers before the man in the back could register what she'd done.
"Hey"
She'd already punched in the emergency frequency. The one Daemon had made her memorize three times in the palace, testing her, which she'd found annoying at the time and was now deeply grateful for.
She hit send.
The man ripped the phone from her hands. She didn't fight him. She'd already done the only thing she needed to do.
"She used the phone!" he shouted to the front.
"Smash it."
He smashed it.
Charlotte sat very still, her heart pounding so hard she could feel it in her teeth. She'd had it for maybe eight seconds. Maybe less.
Was that enough? Did it go through?
The mate bond pulsed again. Stronger this time.
Yes, she thought. It went through.
She almost laughed. She didn't. She kept her face blank and her breathing steady and her bound hands still, because these men were watching her now, really watching, and she needed them to think she was done.
She wasn't done.
Twenty-two minutes later, the van screeched to a stop so hardthat Charlotte slammed into the side wal.l.
Gunfire.
One shot, then two, then silence.
The back doors burst open, and cold air flooded in. Charlotte blinked against the sudden light of headlamps behind them, and then she saw him.
Daemon.
He was standing in the road with ice on his boots and blood on his knucklse and an expression on his face that she had never seen before on him, not cold, not controlled, but raw like something had cracked him open from the insid.e.
He crossed to her in three steps, and his hands were already on her face before she could speak.
"You're hurt." His thumb brushed the cut on her temple, and she hadn't even noticed.
"I'm okay." Her voice came out shaking. She hadn't known it was going to shake. "I sent the signal."
"I know." He was already working on the zip tie. "I felt it before the signal came through. The bond. He stopped. The zip tie broke. He held her wrists gently for a moment, looking at the marks. "I should have been faster."
"You got here before the border."
"By six minutes."
Six minutes. Charlotte stared at him. "You were tracking me the whole time."
"Every second." His voice was rough in a way she'd never heard before."I watched them take you, and I couldn't get to you fast enough, and I" He stopped again, jaw tight. "I am the Alpha King of the Northern Territories. I have not been afraid of anything in eight years."
"And?"
His gray eyes met hers. "I was afraid tonight."
Charlotte's chest did something complicated. She reached up and took his hand, and the mate bond flared between them that silver thread, warm and certain, nothing like the faint signal she'd been clinging to in the back of that van.
"I'm here," she said. "I'm okay. We're okay."
He exhaled. It was a long, careful exhale, like he'd been holding his breath for twenty minutes.
Reyes appeared at the van doors. "Sir. We've secured both men. But " He paused. "You should see this."
Daemon didn't let go of Charlotte's hand. He moved to where Reyes was standing, and Charlotte followed, because she was not sitting in a van by herself while something important happened ten feet away.
Reyes held up the communications case from the front seat. Open. Inside was a transmitter, already active, and a second device she didn't recognize at first.
Then she did.
"That's a recording unit," Charlotte said quietly.
Both men looked at her.
"It's been broadcasting," she said, her analyst brain clicking on, the fear quieting under the familiar hum of pattern, connection, meaning. "The whole time. Someone wasn't just extracting me. They were listening."
Daemon went very still.
"Not to me," Charlotte continued. "I barely said anything. They were listening to the bond. They have tech that can track the mate frequency." She looked up at Daemon. "They know you came for me. They recorded it. They know where you are right now."
Daemon looked at the device for a long moment.
Then he looked at Reyes. Something passed between them, silent and fast.
"Get her to the safe house," Daemon said. "The secondary one. Not the palace."
Charlotte's stomach dropped. "What are you not saying?"
He turned to her. His expression was back to controlled now, but his eyes weren't his eyes were still that raw, cracked-open look, and she understood suddenly that this wasn't over. Whatever had just happened in that van wasn't the crisis.
It was the beginning of one.
"Daemon." She kept her voice even. "What aren't you telling me?"
He was quiet for two seconds. Just two.
Then: "Vivian Kane didn't run the signal that got you taken tonight."
"I know. One of Marcus's men."
"Marcus's men were already in custody." He looked at her directly. "Someone else gave the order, Charlotte. Someone who knew exactly where you were in the ballroom, exactly when to move, exactly which frequency our comms use."
The cold in her chest had nothing to do with the night air.
"Someone on your side," she said.
He didn't answer.
He didn't have to.
Reyes opened the car door,r and Charlotte got in, because her legs were doing something unreliable and because she understood, in her bones, in the pattern-reading part of her mind that never slept, what Daemon wasn't saying yet.
The conspiracy wasn't just in the military. It wasn't just Marcus and Frost and Vivian Kane.
It was in the palace.
It was close to Daemon.
It might be the closest person he had.
The car started moving. Through the window, she watched Daemon stand in the road alone, looking at the transmitter in his hand, and for just a moment, she saw what he really was underneath the crown and the authority and the eight years of cold steel control.
A man who had trusted the wrong person before.
A man who was terrified of doing it again.
I need to know who it is, Charlotte thought, pressing her palm flat against the cold glass. Before they try again. Before Daemon finds out in the worst possible way.
The mate bond pulsed one long, aching beat.
She pressed harder against the glass.
Hold on, she told him silently. I'm going to find them.
I promise.
The car turned a corner. The road went dark. And somewhere in the palace they'd sent her away from, the traitor who had sold her to enemy agents was still walking free.
Still trusted.
Still close.