Page 36 of Dance Omega Dance

Blake

Ihit the pavement like I could pound the doubt out of it with sheer force. My jaw locked, eyes forward. Where was she?

Her cotton candy scent still clung to the air, teasing me, taunting me forward. Where are you, Summer Rayne? Where are you?

Zach didn’t wait for us. Didn’t glance back. Just started moving, cutting a path through the street like he already knew where she’d be.

I didn’t try to catch up. I let him go.

“We need to split up, we’ll cover more ground,” I said without turning to Anders. Like it was settled. He ran off in the opposite direction.

My commanding nature was the part of me she never really saw. Or maybe she had, andthat’swhy she left. I swallowed, taking a deep breath and breathing in her beauty.

Maybe she doesn’t think we’ll follow. Maybe she thinks she’s nothing to us. Or maybe we’re nothing to her. My heart pounded, hands clammy. What if she’s hurt? Or worse, taken? A lifetime of abuse at the hands of a rogue Alpha pack. I gulped, not wanting to think of the pain ahead.

I veered in the opposite direction. Letting my feet think for me.

She was all that mattered now. She always had been, but we hadn’t acted like it until it was too late. Until she walked out, slamming the weight of us behind her like a door we couldn’t pry open.

We were supposed to protect her. And we’d failed.

My phone buzzed a few minutes later. Zach’s voice came through like static and frustration. “She’s not here. I don’t think—”

“Keep looking,” I said before he could continue. His voice was steady again, smooth and sure, but there was something under it now. A tremor. A crack. And when Zach cracked, the entire world knew about it.

“Call if you find her,” he said. “I’ll do the same.”

Click.

He left it hanging. No goodbye. No reassurance. Just silence. But that silence said enough.

I dipped into the metro, scanning the crowd. Faces. Coats. Voices echoing off tile. But not her. Of course not her. That would be too easy. But she’d been past here. I could still scent her sugary sweetness.

Still, the hollow that opened in my chest surprised me. So did the spike of panic I tried, and failed, to swallow.

My phone buzzed. “I’ve checked by the river,” Zach snapped over the line, his words cracking like glass. “Nothing.” A pause. A breath. I could hear his sneakers pounding the pavement. “This isn’t working.”

We weren’t working. He didn’t say it, but I felt it hanging in the space between us.

“Keep going,” I told him. He didn’t respond. I didn’t need him to.

I retraced my steps. Thought like her. Felt like her. Searched for the place she might run to. Not because it made sense, but because itfeltright.

It took too long. My breath was tight in my chest when I finally followed her scent to a coffee shop. The weather-worn sign overhead. The mismatched letters glowing in the window. Rough, imperfect, just like us.

I pulled out my phone and texted the others.

“She’s here.”

Then I looked through the glass.

She was there, tucked inside at a battered wooden table, Maddie sitting close. Her face lit up under the old bulbs, but it wasn’t only the light... it washer. She glowed.

The kind of glow that hit me square in the chest. That cracked something open in me.

Relief poured in. Too much, too fast.

I didn’t wait. I opened the door. Ready for Zach and Anders to catch up.

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