Rejected at Seventeen, Crowned by the Lycan King Chapter 12

Rejected at Seventeen, Crowned by the Lycan King Chapter 12 -I Can Hear Her Heartbeat

Talia found it in fifty-one minutes.

A decommissioned cold-storage facility eleven miles off the coast road, owned through four shell companies that all

eventually kissed a Sablewood account. No windows. No cell coverage. Backup generator running for nine straight

days.

Nine days. He’d been ready for over a week.

We staged in a treeline at 9:40 p.m.

Dorian’s twelve took the perimeter. Fiona took the south vehicle gate. Enzo put a drone up at four hundred feet, and

my brothers sat in the second van with their hands flat on their knees and their mouths shut, because I’d told them

what would happen if they moved.

“Talk to me, Commander,” Dorian said, crouched beside me.

“Give me a second.”

I closed my eyes.

I’ve spent a year learning to do this and I still don’t have words for it. It’s like turning a dial through static. First the

wind. Then the generator. Then a bird settling in the gutter. Then footsteps – count them, place them, hold them.

“Slower,” Nyx murmured. “Go under the machines.”

I went under the machines.

Eleven heartbeats inside.

Nine on the main floor, spread wide, three near the north door, patrolling.

One in a small room at the back. Seated. Slow, steady, arrogant.

And one-one-sitting very still in the middle of everything, going far too fast.

I know my mother’s heart. I fell asleep on her chest for the first four years of my life.

“She’s alive,” I said, and my voice did something embarrassing. “Center of the building. Eleven hostiles. Three north

door, six roaming, Sablewood in the back office. Two rifles, the rest handguns.”

Dorian stared at me. “How could you possibly-”

“Because I can hear the difference between a rifle sling and a belt holster,” I said. “Are we doing this, or are we

discussing my resume?”

“That’s my girl,” said Nyx.

Here’s what nobody inside that building understood.

Cyrus Sablewood had spent a hundred and eighteen years waiting for a Hale girl he could put in a chair and use as a listening device.

He had never once considered that a Hale girl might come through his door as a Ravenguard Commander with

twenty-five trained operatives, a drone, and the King’s warrant in her pocket.

He was waiting for a hostage.

He got an officer.

We went in at 9:58, through the south vehicle door, because at 9:58 the generator load cycles and the whole building

coughs and I could hear it coming eleven seconds before it happened.

Fiona’s team took the north door in under four.

Dorian moved like something out of a nightmare. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I grew up around wolves who kill

for a living.

I went straight up the center.

Two men came around a stack of pallets and I heard them decide to do it a full second before they did.

That’s the whole trick, in the end. That’s the entire gift. Not power. Time. Everyone else is living in the present. I get to

live half a second in front of it.

I put the first one down with his own momentum and the second with a knee he’ll be feeling at sixty.

And then there was a chair in the middle of a concrete floor, and my mother in it.

Elowen Hale looked up.

I’ve thought about what I’d do if I ever saw her again. In the boathouse I had entire speeches. Cold ones. Perfect

ones. I used to say them out loud to the ceiling.

She looked up, and she saw a Ravenguard uniform, and it took her a moment.

Then she said, “Wren?” – like a prayer from someone who’d stopped believing in God – and every one of those speeches evaporated out of my head forever.

“Hi, Mom,” I said, and cut the zip ties. “Sorry I’m late. I was busy.”

She made a sound like she was dying.

“Don’t. Not here. Get up. Behind me. Now.”

I got her four steps toward the south door before the back office opened.

“MOVE!” I shoved her sideways behind a pallet stack as the first shot went into the concrete where her head had been.

Cyrus Sablewood walked out across his own floor like a man at a garden party, pistol in hand, while his wolves were

folded up around him.

“There she is,” he said. “The little Hale.”

“Cyrus Sablewood. By warrant of the Crown, you’re under arrest for kidnapping, conspiracy, and one hundred and eighteen years of stupidity.”

He laughed. He actually laughed.

“You have no idea what you are,” he said. “Your family made you a servant. I’d have made you a queen.”

He raised the pistol.

And I heard him decide.

Half a second

that lovely, ugly little half-second – and I was already dropping as the shot went over me. I came up

under his arm and broke his wrist across my forearm.

He screamed.

I put him on the floor, knelt on his spine, leaned down to his ear, and made sure my mother heard every word.

“Seraphine Hale,” I said. “Say her name.”

“You little-”

I leaned.

“Seraphine Hale,” he gasped.

“She has a stone now,” I said. “I paid for it myself last week, before I knew she was mine.”

Then the Royal Guard came through the south door, and it was over, and my mother was on her knees on a filthy concrete floor with both hands pressed over her mouth, sobbing my name into her palms.