(Kieran POV)
The scent hit me before I'd fully opened her chamber door—absence sharp as broken glass, her rose-and-rain essence fading like perfume left too long in sunlight. My wolf knew instantly, even before my human mind processed the visual evidence of drawers left partially open, bed linens smoothed with the particular precision that came from someone erasing traces of their presence.
She was gone.
The traveling case was missing from where I'd seen it sitting in her wardrobe, though every gift I'd given her remained exactly where she'd left them. The crimson gown hung like an accusation, silk that had marked her as mine now seeming to mock the presumption that claiming could make someone stay when duty called them elsewhere.
But this wasn't about duty, was it? This was about the
