The sun had not yet risen but the palace was already breathing. Silas lay on the silk sheets with his eyes on the ceiling and his mind already working while his body stayed perfectly still.
Beside him Alaric was finally asleep. His arm lay across Silas's waist with the unconscious certainty of someone who had decided this was where it belonged.
The mark on Silas's neck pulsed gently. Every time his thoughts moved toward the door a wave of warmth pulled him back. He had been fighting it quietly for the past hour.
He reached into the hidden seam of his discarded boot and found the small glass vial he had carried since before the mission. The Neutralizer.
He swallowed it without hesitating.
The warmth of the bond went silent immediately. Cold and hollow replaced it. He could think clearly again. He could think like the Ghost.
He moved carefully. Each shift of his body calculated against the weight of Alaric's arm and the sound of his breathing.
He freed himself slowly and gathered what he needed in silence and did not look back at the bed because looking back was something he could not afford.
The hallway was not an option. The royal guards outside were trained past the level of most military units.
He went to the balcony instead.
He pulled the signal jammer from his belt and pressed it once. The red lights on the security cameras across the garden flickered and died. Sixty seconds.
He stepped onto the stone railing, found the ivy trellis running down the palace wall and went over the edge.
Hand under hand. Body pressed close to the stone. Halfway down a guard's flashlight swept the wall.
Silas went completely still and held his breath until the light moved on.
He dropped onto the grass without a sound.
Two guards stood at the garden gate with rifles on their shoulders. He reached into his pocket and threw a coin hard into the bushes on the far left.
Both guards turned toward the sound. Silas moved in the opposite direction through the blind spot between the spotlights, low and fast, leaving nothing behind.
He found the drainage pipe on the east wall that he had noted before the mission and went up it quickly and swung over the top and paused for one moment on the edge.
He looked back at the palace.
The windows were dark. The gardens were quiet. Behind one of those windows a man was asleep with his arm in the space where Silas had been lying.
The Neutralizer had silenced the bond but it had not silenced everything and what remained in his chest was not something he had a name for.
He dropped into the dark forest and the mist took him and he did not look back again.
The morning bells began to ring behind him as he disappeared into the trees.
An hour later Alaric's eyes opened.
He reached across the bed before he was fully awake and his hand found cold silk. He lay still for one second.
The bond was silent. Not quiet. Absent. A dark empty space where something warm had been.
"Silas."
He was out of the bed before the word finished leaving him. The balcony door was open. A hairline crack ran through the nightstand glass.
On the desk beside the silver drive sat a folded note.
He did not read it.
He walked to the door and pulled it open. The guards outside came to attention immediately.
"He is gone," Alaric said. His voice did not need volume to fill the corridor.
"He walked out of this suite and over that wall and none of you saw it."
"Your Highness the cameras had a fault, sixty seconds of—"
"He is a Vane Ghost," Alaric said. "He was built for this. That is not an excuse."
He looked at the lead guard with eyes that had shifted into the deep midnight color that every person in the palace had learned meant something different from his usual anger.
"Close every port. Lock every border. Alert every station between here and the North."
He paused.
"Tell my father I am unavailable. Tell him my mate is gone and I am going to bring him back. And anyone who thinks they have the authority to stand between me and that should think carefully before they try."
He walked back into the suite and picked up the tactical blade from the desk and moved to the balcony and looked out at the direction the forest ran.
The trees were dark and the mist was thick and somewhere inside it the Ghost was moving fast and putting distance between himself and everything that had happened in this room.
But the Ghost had a mark on his neck.
And the Neutralizer would not last forever.
Alaric looked at the treeline with the patience of someone who already knows how the story ends and is simply waiting for it to catch up.
The hunt had begun.