Chapter 101: Where Is She?

Xander Ashwood

I was already annoyed by the time I left training, and not the good kind of annoyed either. Astrid had said she’d be around after class, and I’d planned to drag her back to the apartment before Reed got there and started acting like the responsible one again. I checked my phone. No new messages. I smirked to myself, figuring she was probably still sulking about something, or Reed had already found her and was hovering over her like she might disappear if he blinked.

I sent her a message. Where are you?

Nothing came back. I didn’t worry yet, not really. I walked toward the building where she usually finished class, nodding at a few students who greeted me without really registering their faces, and reached the classroom just as it was emptying out. No Astrid.

I stopped one of her classmates. "Have you seen Astrid?"

"Not since class," they said, shaking their head, and I checked the time. She should have been done by now. I sent another message. Don’t make me come looking for you.

Still nothing. My smile started to slip.

I turned a corner and found Reed standing perfectly still, looking around like he was waiting for something to appear out of thin air, and something about the sight of him made my stomach tighten before I’d even said a word.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Have you seen Astrid?" he said, not answering my question at all.

My expression changed. "No." A beat. "Why?"

He looked down the hallway. "She wasn’t in her last class."

I tried to keep it light. "Maybe she’s avoiding you." He didn’t react at all, and that silence told me more than anything he could have said.

"Reed?"

"I checked with her instructor," he said, and I stopped smiling entirely.

"Maybe she’s with Ivy."

He paused, just for a second, long enough that I felt it in my chest before he even spoke. "Ivy isn’t answering either."

Neither of us said anything for a moment. I pulled out my phone and called Ivy. Nothing. I called Astrid. Nothing. Whatever casual mood I’d walked in with was completely gone now.

I told myself there were explanations. Her phone could be dead. Ivy could have dragged her off somewhere without thinking to tell anyone. They could both be ignoring us on purpose, which wouldn’t be the first time. But something inside me felt wrong in a way I couldn’t argue myself out of.

I closed my eyes and reached for her through the bond. At first there was nothing, just emptiness where she should have been, and my eyebrows pulled together as I reached again, harder this time. Then it hit me. Fear, sharp and sudden, not mine.

Hers.

My eyes flew open. Reed was staring at me. "What?"

I couldn’t answer right away, my heart pounding too hard. The fear had been brief, but it had been unmistakably her.

"She’s scared," I said quietly.

Reed went completely still. I reached again, and this time there was nothing at all. The connection was gone. Blocked.

"I can’t feel her," I said, my breathing changing.

Reed reached for her too, and I watched his jaw tighten, his eyes darken in a way I’d rarely seen. "Neither can I."

That was when I actually got scared.

There was no more waiting after that. Reed started walking immediately, and I fell in step beside him.

"Where are we going?"

"Everywhere."

We split up to cover more ground, asking students, checking classrooms, the library, the cafeteria, the dorms. Nobody had seen Astrid. Nobody had seen Ivy. I felt anger building in my chest, not at anyone else, at myself. She’d been strange lately, quiet, distracted, and I’d noticed. I’d even joked about it instead of pushing harder. Reed had noticed too, and both of us had accepted her one-word answer without question.

I’m fine, she’d said.

I remembered her looking at her phone and hiding it the second she caught me watching. I remembered asking if she was okay and letting her lie stand because I hadn’t wanted to push. I cursed under my breath.

Reed glanced at me. "What?"

"Nothing," I said, and he clearly didn’t believe me, but neither of us had time to argue about it.

My phone buzzed with a message from Reed a few minutes later. East wing. I ran the entire way there, and by the time I arrived, he was already standing outside the old building, and one look at his face told me everything I needed to know. Something had happened here.

I slowed as I approached, my wolf pacing restlessly under my skin. The air smelled wrong, familiar in some distant way but twisted, distorted, like something had been layered over the top of it.

"What is it?" I asked.

Reed pointed at the ground. Astrid’s phone lay there, the screen cracked down the middle. I stopped breathing for a second. I walked toward it slowly, like moving too fast might somehow make it worse, and Reed picked it up before I could. The screen lit up, showing her name, her messages. His eyes moved down the screen and stopped.

"What?" I said, stepping closer.

He handed me the phone without a word. I read through message after message from an unknown number. You shouldn’t have gone back there. Some places only feel safe until they aren’t. My chest tightened with every line, and then I found it. You should have told them.

My jaw clenched. She’d known. Something had been wrong, and she’d known, and she’d been scared this whole time and hadn’t said a single word to either of us. My fingers tightened around her phone.

"She didn’t tell us," I said.

Reed looked toward the east wing, his voice low. "No."

I swallowed hard. It wasn’t anger at her, not really. It was guilt, because we had noticed, we just hadn’t understood what we were noticing.

I looked at the old building. "She came in here."

"Yes," Reed said.

"Then where is she?"

He didn’t answer. I walked toward the entrance and stopped when something on the ground caught my eye. A bracelet, small and simple, and the second I picked it up I recognized it instantly. Ivy’s. Astrid had pointed it out to me weeks ago, some gift from home she never took off.

I looked up at Reed slowly. He’d already seen it too, and the silence between us changed into something heavier. Ivy wasn’t ignoring us. She was gone too.

"Ivy," I said quietly.

Reed’s jaw tightened further. I looked toward the dark hallway stretching out behind the entrance, then back down at Astrid’s phone in my hand, and everything clicked into place at once. The messages. Her fear. Ivy vanishing. All of it here, in this exact building.

Someone had planned this.

Reed finally spoke, his voice far too controlled. "Someone took her."

I looked at him, my chest hollowing out completely. Then something else moved in to replace the fear, something colder, sharper. My wolf. My anger. My determination.

"Then we’ll find her," I said.

Reed looked back toward the east wing without a word, his expression unreadable. But I knew him well enough to understand exactly what that silence meant.

Someone had taken our mate.

Someone had taken Astrid.

And whoever it was had absolutely no idea what they’d just started.