Page 126 of Knot Heirs: Serenity's Reign

A queen who wouldn't bow. Who couldn't be bought? Who had found her Alphas not through submission, but through alliance.

And that was a force that even the Society, for all its centuries of power, had never encountered before.

24

SHUT THE WORLD DOWN FOR YOU

~DARIUS~

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Darius Castellano's Mont Blanc pen drummed an irregular rhythm against the polished walnut of his desk. His gray eyes shifted from the sleek phone beside him to the Patek Philippe on his wrist, where the minute hand crawled toward eleven. Three days remained in the hunt, and the absence of one particular Omega was wearing his patience thinner than the edge of a razor.

He snatched up his phone and dialed Serenity's number for the fourth time. The call connected, rang five times, then rolled to voicemail.

"Fuck," he muttered, hanging up before her recorded voice finished its professional greeting.

The Prime Alpha in him bristled at the silence. He'd grown accustomed to her scent filling his office by nine sharp, her golden eyes flicking over reports with that keen intelligence that had first caught his attention.

Darius jabbed the intercom button. "Where the hell is Ms. Vale today?"

His assistant's voice crackled through. "No word from her, sir. She hasn't checked in."

"And nobody thought to inform me of this?" The edge in his voice could have cut steel.

"We assumed you knew, Mr. Castellano. Given your... arrangement."

Darius's jaw tightened. His "arrangement" with Serenity Vale—heiress to billions in blood money and the most intriguing Omega he'd crossed paths with—was nobody's business but their own.

"Find her," he ordered, disconnecting before hearing a response.

He rose from his chair, his six-foot-four frame casting a long shadow across the floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked Manhattan. Three assistants scurried out of his path as he stalked across the office, tension rolling off him in waves that every Alpha, Beta, and Omega in the building could sense.

Where was she? Serenity wasn't the type to oversleep or miss work without notice. Not the woman who'd clawed her way into financial consulting before discovering her true heritage. Not Marcus Vale's daughter, who'd inherited her father's golden eyes and his empire of drugs, weapons, and blood money.

Something was wrong.

Darius pulled up the tracking app on his phone—a precaution he'd insisted on after the last attempt on her life. The screen flickered, showing only a spinning circle where her location should be.

"What the fuck?" He refreshed the app. Nothing.

His mind cataloged possibilities with cold precision. Kidnapping. Betrayal. Flight. Each scenario twisted his gut with a possessiveness that surprised even him. Serenity Vale wasn't just an asset or a conquest—she was becoming something more, something dangerous to a man in his position.

He tried calling her again, listening to the unanswered rings with growing irritation.

"Sir," his head of security appeared at the door, "we're getting some kind of interference with Ms. Vale's tracker. Could be a technical glitch, but?—"

"Glitches don't happen to my systems," Darius cut him off. "Get a team ready. I want her found."

The Prime Alpha paced the length of his office, a predator in a twelve-thousand-dollar suit. His phone was in his hand again before he'd made a conscious decision to call Lucian.

His finger hovered over the contact. Tomorrow was the anniversary of Amelia Blackthorn's death. Lucian would be unreachable—lost in the darkness that consumed him every year on this date.

"Fucking timing," Darius muttered, remembering how Lucian had dismissed himself early yesterday, retreating to his penthouse with a bottle of Macallan 1926 and strict orders not to be disturbed.

He'd gone to bed early himself, finding Serenity curled in what she called her "nest"—a ridiculous arrangement of pillows and blankets she'd created in one of the spare bedrooms. They'd discovered it last week, and he'd been equal parts amused and irritated by her territorial marking of his space.

They'd ended up tangled together despite his mockery of her nest-building Omega tendencies. The memory of her scent—vanilla and something uniquely her—lingered in his nostrils, making her absence now all the more unsettling.

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