Page 34 of Ulfar

If the situation weren’t so strange, I’d be impressed.

“Whoa.” I pull up on the reins, signaling Enebris to slow down. I want to see what she’s come all the way out here to say. Maybe she even knows something about Sarah.

The woman pulls up beside us at last, hair wild and windswept as she pants for breath. She looks familiar but my brain is too frazzled to remember.

“What is the meaning of this?” I ask.

“You’re Ulfar, right?”

“I am.” Another jolt of adrenaline. Oh stars, what if something really did happen to her?

“I’m Vi, Sarah’s friend. We’re both surrogates. She asked me to deliver a message to you.”

My eyebrows rise. I nearly drop the reins. “A message? Why? What’s wrong?”

“It’s...complicated.” She grimaces. “And not here. If you wanna see your girl again, get your ass in gear and follow me!”

I look over my shoulder at the tall, sterile white gates of the ISA. Then back at this wild woman riding one of our mounts and yelling at me to follow. Two paths diverged.

Is this what Orri was talking about when he said I had to consider all of the variables?

“She’s not in there,” Vi points out, gesturing at the center. “I saw her just recently, she gave me this letter. You can read it if you like, do that smell thing you alphas do. But we need to talk, and it can’t be here.”

With one last glance at the ISA complex, I square my shoulders and sink into battle mode. Nodding, I turn Enebris around and we rush off into the unknown.

Minutes later, we’re inside Vi and Djorn’s cottage and I’m poring over the handwritten letter. With every word, every sentence, my heart sinks further.

She cared. All this time, she cared.

So why did she have to leave?

“Do you believe me now?” Vi says after I read the note for the tenth time. I don’t know what I’m expecting—for Sarah to pop out of the page or something?—but this is the last connection I have to her. The letter doesn’t say why or where she’s going, just that she had to leave and it wasn’t her choice.

That she loved me.

“Where is she?” I croak, putting the letter down on the table and looking up at Vi. “Why would she do this? Why didn’t she say something?”

A shadow passes over her face. “We all have secrets. Some of them are so big they eat us alive.”

“But do you know what happened to her? Is she—” My throat closes up at the terrible thought. “Alive?”

“Oh, she’s alive all right,” Vi sighs. “They’ll make sure of that.” Then, under her breath, “Bastards.”

“What are you talking about?” Part of me doesn’t want to know, but I have to find her and discover the truth. I have to know what she’s been hiding all this time.

“Tell me, Ulfar,” she says at last, folding her arms. “Have you ever heard of the Syndicate?”

* * *

I haven’t losta lot of battles in my life, but one stands out among the rest. Soren, Rathgar, Orri and I were on a patrol mission through the outer reaches, looking for an illegal smuggling operation run by an organization called the Syndicate. We thought it would be an easy smash-and-grab operation. It wasn’t.

We lost too many good men that day. Realized just how extensive their network reached, how much influence and firepower they brought to bear on their enemies. Even now sometimes I wake up panting from a nightmare reliving that awful day.

And now, Sarah has been taken by them. By the only enemy that’s ever bested me. By the very thugs that still haunt my sleep at night.

I thought it couldn’t get any worse when Vi told me the Syndicate was involved, but then she dropped an even bigger bomb on my heart:

They wanted the child.

---