Chapter 149

Chapter 149: Chapter 149

Drake’s pov

I stood in front of the wall-sized digital array, my arms crossed over my chest, staring at the high-definition grid map of the northern territory. A thin, red laser line divided my land from the main city where humans were. It was a thin line that my blood warded to protect my house.

And yet, his scent had been on Lysander’s collarbone.

Faint. Scrubbed raw with cedar soap and hot water, hidden beneath a desperate layer of domestic performance, but unmistakably there.

My knuckles cracked as my fist tightened into a knot.

"My Lord."

Vane, my chief intelligence operative, stepped out of the shadows near the tactical terminal. He was a silent, gray-eyed vampire who had served my bloodline for three centuries. He didn’t offer fake pleasantries; he knew better than to speak when the air in the room was vibrating with the cold, dense pressure of my aura.

"Report," I commanded, my voice dropping into a low, quiet rasp that rattled the glass displays on the console.

Vane tapped the glass interface, pulling up the raw diagnostic logs from the mountain estate’s perimeter grid.

"The blood wards were never breached by force," Vane said smoothly, his finger tracing a blue line across the digital map. "There were no violent spikes in the energy field. No physical force attempted to cross the northern boundary from the outside."

"Then how was he there?" I growled out, the crimson in my eyes darkening until the room’s ambient light seemed to dim around us.

Vane didn’t flinch, but his throat worked once before he answered. "The wards didn’t trigger because the breach originated from the inside. The outer boundary parted smoothly at 00:42 last night. It recognized royal clearance."

He pulled up a magnified thermal playback. A small, pale heat signature moving through the wet pine trees behind the north terrace.

Lysander.

He was carrying the silver blood-token I’d given him for his own protection. The token keyed to my own essence. The key meant to let him move freely around my land without triggering the internal security alarms.

He had taken my gift, my trust, and used it to unlock the front door of my fortress.

I closed my eyes for three long seconds, taking a slow, deep breath that burned all the way down into my lungs. Pain sliced through my chest, but I shoved it down beneath a heavy slab of tactical focus.

Lysander had stood in our bedroom, his eyes wide and glossy with tears, looking at me with that soft, fragile innocence he wore like a shield. He had laid his cheek into my palm, spun a smooth, beautiful story about rusted wire and nightmares, and let me hold him.

He had lied to my face and so well his pulse hadn’t even skipped a beat under my thumb.

He thinks he hid it, I thought, my jaw clenching until my back teeth ached. He thinks I believed him.

I opened my eyes, the pale, icy red returning to my irises with lethal clarity.

"Darius didn’t break in," I murmured, staring at the thermal feed of my mate running into the dark forest. "He didn’t need to. He lured him out."

"Should we mobilize the perimeter legion?" Vane asked, his hand hovering over the red deployment protocol on the desk. "If Darius is operating within five miles of the estate, we can level his forward outpost by midnight."

"No."

Vane paused, his gray eyes lifting to meet mine. "My Lord?"

"If I send the legion, Darius burns his paper trails and pulls his operatives back behind his main territory lines," I said, stepping closer to the glass array. "And Lysander... Lysander will retreat deeper into his own head. He’ll build more walls and double down on the performance."

I leaned my palms flat against the steel edge of the tactical table, looking down at the layout of Darius’s hideout.

"I don’t just want to destroy the outpost, Vane," I rasped, my voice dropping into a register so dark it sent a ripple through the room’s energy field. "I want to know every word that was spoken in that room. I want to know what Darius promised him. I want to know what weapon he used to make my mate break his own bond and walk into the dark."

Vane straightened his spine, understanding instantly. "You want shadow coverage."

"Deploy the Raven Unit," I ordered. "I want continuous, high-spectrum audio and optical surveillance on Darius’s study, his communications grid, and every operative who steps within two miles of his boundary."

"And the estate, Lord Drake?"

"Double the internal guards," I said, my voice hardening like cooling iron. "Keep them inside the lower corridors. Lock the studio doors from the central network every morning after I leave. If Lysander breathes near a window, I want a log generated. If he touches a terminal, I want the keystrokes mirrored straight to my personal device."

Vane bowed his head. "It will be done immediately. What about the Lysander’s movement?"

"He stays inside," I said, my chest heaving with a low, heavy breath. "He wants to play the fragile, obedient mate? He can sit in my house and play the part until I tear Darius’s empire to ground."

I turned away from the display array, walking toward the heavy iron doors of the command room.

My mind flashed back to four hours ago, standing in the kitchen, watching Lysander hold his coffee mug with trembling hands. I remembered the way he had tilted his head into my touch, giving me that submission, begging me with his eyes not to look too closely at the raw skin beneath his collarbone.

He thought he was being clever. He thought he was manipulating a beast twice his age, using my possessive nature against me to cover his tracks.

He had no idea that every step he took, every breath he drew, and every shadow he cast was now being watched by a hundred unseen eyes.

I stopped at the threshold, my hand resting on the cold steel frame of the doorway.

"Vane."

"Yes, My Lord?"

"If Darius’s men make contact with him again," I purred softly, the icy red in my eyes flashing bright in the dim corridor light, "do not intercept the message. Let it reach him. Then bring me the messenger’s head."

"Understood."

Lysander had wanted answers so badly he had stepped straight into a viper’s nest to find them. Now, I was going to give him the truth and when I finally brought Darius down to his knees in front of him, my broken little bird would realize there was nowhere left to run.