Fin woke to an empty bed.
He hadn't planned on being awake. What dragged him out of sleep was the absence of her, his arm sweeping across cold sheets where Serena should have been. His hand found nothing. His body registered the wrongness before his mind caught up.
"Serena?"
The silence that answered was worse than any alarm.
Then it hit. A searing, bone-deep agony that ripped through his chest and radiated outward, the same savage frequency he'd felt the night he saved her life. His lungs locked. His vision whited at the edges. This was her pain, bleeding through their matebond with the subtlety of a war drum.
He was dressed and moving at alpha speed before his next heartbeat. Shirt, boots, weapons belt, all of it muscle memory while his nose tracked her scent down the corridor. The forest and moon fire.
