Pursuing My Rejected Luna by Cara Anderson novel Chapter 197

Chapter 197

Jaxon

Noah is mid-sentence about some paperwork I sent over when my phone buzzes. When I look at the screen and see the text from Nicolai, my blood runs cold.

Something’s wrong. Meet me now.

“I have to go,” I spit at Noah.

“Jax-” He starts to protest.

But I’m already moving.

I don’t have long to wonder what has Nicolai so concerned. I know before I reach the garden. I’m moving through the east hallway when it hits me-Skye’s scent in the air, which is always present in this house, but today it has something different underneath it.

Something that reaches into a specific memory: Before any of this, before the divorce and Nicolai and everything that came after. The particular quality of Skye’s scent in the days before her heat.

I haven’t smelled that since before the pregnancy. Since before Benji was conceived. But it nearly brings me to my

knees now.

I’m running by the time I reach the garden door. Nicolai is standing in the garden holding his phone. His expression is the one I’ve learned means it’s taking every ounce of self-control he possesses not to explode.

“I know,” I say before he can speak. “I smelled it in the hallway. She’s going into heat.”

His jaw tightens. “Yes.”

“Where is she?” I ask, understanding his urgency but not what he’s doing out here with me when he should be

with her.

“Gone,” he says. “That’s the problem.”

I stop. “What?”

“She went out. An hour ago, maybe more. Rena said she mentioned an errand. Alone.” His voice is controlled and underneath the control something that isn’t. “She didn’t tell either of us.”

The full weight of it lands in sequence: Skye is going into heat. She’s alone. She left knowing and didn’t tell us. And we are in the operational radius of a man who has to have been watching this house for months. Otherwise, how could Volkov know so much about what’s happening here?

“How long?” I demand.

“Twenty minutes since I noticed. She’s been gone longer.”

We both move at the same time. Inside. The kitchen table becoming a command center inside of sixty seconds.

I’m already on my phone-the family location sharing I’ve had active since the co-parenting arrangement. The app takes fifteen seconds to load. I count every one.

“Last ping at a shopping district,” I relay the second the information loads. “Forty minutes from the estate. Her phone hasn’t moved in-“I check the timestamp. “Ninety minutes.”

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“Why would she go there?” Nicolai growis, tapping away on his own phone, calling Mikhail.

by there? I have no clue but I think I might know how to find the answer. If she’s in a shopping district, let’s hope she spent some money.

We have a shared family account-not romantic, just practical, the kind of administrative overlap that happens when three adults are managing one child’s life and occasionally the same household purchases. She has access to it. So do 1.

I look at her browsing history. A boutique. Small shop, specific inventory. The kind of place that sells-

I close my eyes for one second and take a deep breath. She was going to buy lingerie because she was going to come home and-

“She went shopping,” I grit out.

Nicolai looks up from his phone. I hand him mine and watch his face move through a myriad of emotions I don’t have names for. The specific grief of understanding what she was doing-the tenderness of it-and the fury underneath. Not at her. At the situation. At the unknown of it all and the helpless feeling we’re left with.

“We don’t know anything yet.” My voice holds more confidence than I feel. “She may be fine and not answering because she wants to surprise you with where she’s been.”

The incredulous look on his face says he doesn’t believe that anymore than I’m pretending to. He hands the phone back. Doesn’t say anything until Mikhail calls back.

The security team reaches the shopping district in twenty-two minutes. It took all my restraint not to strangle Nicolai when he insisted we shouldn’t go with them, arguing that we should be here in case she comes home or, Goddess forbid, she’s been in an accident and we need to be poised to go where she’s found. In the end, I conceded but it’s doing nothing for the Alpha rage broiling in my chest.

Mikhail reports back sooner than expected. The boutique owner remembers Skye. She would-Skye is memorable, and she came in and bought several things and was pleasant and left maybe ninety minutes ago. Toward the car park.

One of Mikhail’s men finds her car in the car park moments later. When he reports seeing her phone lying on the front seat, my knees buckle and I have to grab onto a chair back so I don’t fall.

Mikhail’s gruff voice comes over the speaker: “Two unfamiliar scents near the driver’s side. Eastern pack markers. Not local.” He barks.

Nicolai and I look at each other across the kitchen table, the truth that’s slowly sinking in reflected on his face.

They had eyes on her. They’d been watching the estate, watching the gaps, and when she left alone for the first time in months when she went out without guards, without either of us, for a private errand she didn’t tell anyone about they moved.

“The waystation,” Nicolai says. His voice has gone to the specific flatness that means he’s operating in callous, professional mode now. Feeling nothing that would interfere with what comes next. “Savin’s network uses a property forty miles east of the district for interim holding,”

“You have confirmation?” I ask, doing my best to push my own fear and nausea aside and focus with him.

“Seventy percent. I need it higher before we move.” He looks at me. “I need to be one hundred percent sure. Otherwise we’re just wasting time and resources”.

“Then let’s get it there,” I nod sharply.

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The calls take two hours of precious time not knowing where my mate is or how she’s being treated.

Nicolai works his network. I work mine-the relationships built over years at Ironwood, the eastern territory contacts that predate even his, the wolves who owe favors to the Vale name rather than the Woolf name.

Some doors close. Two Alphas with questioned leadership, one running an arrangement that’s been turned into a scandal, asking for support invading eastern territory grounds is a risk some aren’t willing to take. Some allies who should step up look at the optics and find reasons not to.

Nicolai handles these refusals with cold efficiency and says nothing about what it costs.

I call people he can’t call. Alpha Hale, who owed my father a debt I’ve been holding for six years. Elena Voss, who runs a pack on the eastern border that’s had good relationships with Ironwood for fifteen years. Dmitri Koval, who is technically neutral but has reason to want Savin’s network weakened-they’ve been encroaching on his territory for two years.

Doors open. Not all, but hopefully enough. And I have to focus on that to keep from losing my shit completely.

“How?” Nicolai asks, when I confirm three additional intelligence contacts. It’s all I can do not to roll my eyes at the bewildered look on his face that I might have loyalties he hasn’t managed to secure.

“Different methods,” I say pointedly. “Different relationships. This is why it’s useful to have two networks.”

He nods once. Doesn’t say anything else. Neither of us has time to feel anything about how well we work together.

Skye’s heat is building.

Every second matters.

Cara Anderson Author

Thank you for reading!

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