They Erased My Name. Now Every Alpha Kneels to Me Chapter 12

They Erased My Name. Now Every Alpha Kneels to Me Chapter 12 – I Can Hear Her Heartbeat

Nessa 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 Blackthorn account. No windows. No cell coverage. Backup generator running for nine days.

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

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

Locke’s twelve took the perimeter. Juno took the south vehicle gate. Enzo put a drone up at four hundred feet. My brothers sat in the second van with their hands flat on their knees and their mouths shut, because I’d told them exactly what would happen if they moved.

“Talk to me, Commander,” Locke 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 a 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 and steady and 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 on the north door, six roaming, Blackthorn’s in the back office. Two rifles. The rest handguns.”

Locke 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 résumé?”

“That’s my girl,” said Nyx.

Here’s the thing nobody in that building understood.

Cyrus Blackthorn had spent his whole life waiting for an Ashgrove girl he could put in a chair and use as a listening

device.

He had never once considered that an Ashgrove girl might come through his door as a Commander of the Ivory

Guard 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.

Juno’s team took the north door in under four seconds.

Locke moved like something out of a nightmare – I’ve never seen anything like it, and I grew up around men who kill

for a living.

I went straight up the center.

Two men came around a stack of pallets at me, and I heard them decide a full second before they moved. 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 down with his own momentum and the second with a knee he’ll be feeling at sixty.

And then there was a chair on a concrete floor, and my mother in it.

Isolde Ashgrove looked up.

I’ve thought a hundred times about what I’d do if I saw her again. In the lodge 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 uniform, and it took her a moment.

Then she said, “Wren?” – and it came out like a prayer from someone who’d stopped believing in God – and every single 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,” I said. “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 punched into the concrete where her head had

been.

Cyrus Blackthorn came out with a pistol in one hand, walking across his own floor like a man at a garden party while

his men were folded up around him.

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

“Cyrus Blackthorn. By warrant of the Crown, you’re under arrest for kidnapping, conspiracy, and a 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. Your mate sold you for pocket change. I’d

have made you a queen.”

He raised the pistol.

And I heard him decide.

I heard him decide before his hand moved that lovely, ugly little half-second- and I was already dropping as the shot went over me, and 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 Ashgrove,” I said. “Say her name.”

“You little-”

I leaned.

“Seraphine Ashgrove,” he gasped.

“She has a stone now,” I said. “I paid for it out of my own salary 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.