The clearing opened around them like a mouth expecting to bite.
Timothy stepped first onto the packed earth, his boots making no sound.
Max followed close behind, his shoulders tense, his head swiveling left and right with the mechanical precision of a man who had walked into too many traps to trust silence.
Lucian came third, his hand resting on the knife at his belt, though they both knew silver would do little against whatever had lived here long before wolves learned to walk on two legs.
Ellis brought up the rear, his quiet finally seeming like a weapon rather than a choice.
They fanned out across the clearing.
The hollow table stood at its center, black stone drinking the gray morning light, its grooves and channels empty and dry. No blood. No chains. Nobody.
Nothing.
"This isn't right," Max muttered. He crouched near the base of the table, running his fingers over the dirt.
"There should be... something. Ash. Scorch marks. The ground should be angry."
Lucian circled the stone slab slowly, his sharp eyes scanning every inch.
"There's nothing. No signs of struggle. No silver residue. No"—he hesitated, nostrils flaring—"no scent."
Timothy stood motionless at the table's edge, his hand resting flat against the cold stone. His face had gone pale.
Not with fear, but with something worse: confusion. Timothy Black did not get confused. He planned. He prepared. He knew things before they happened, or at least he pretended to.
But here, now, standing before an empty altar in a clearing that smelled of nothing but old rain and older earth, he had nothing.
"He was here," Timothy said finally. His voice was quiet, almost wondering.
"The vision. The bond. He was here."
"Then where is he?" Max stood, brushing dirt from his knees. His scarred eyebrow was knitted low over his eyes, his jaw tight.
"Did they move him? Did they finish and—"
"No." Lucian cut him off sharply.
"No. Look." He pointed at the ground around the table. The dirt was undisturbed, smooth as a frozen lake.
"No drag marks. No footprints except ours. If they brought someone here to hurt them, there would be traces. Blood doesn't just vanish."
Ellis spoke for the first time since they'd entered the clearing.
"Maybe they never brought him here at all."
Everyone turned.
The quiet wolf was standing at the edge of the tree line, his head tilted, his dark eyes fixed on something in the distance.
"Maybe the table was never the destination. Maybe it was just... a sign. A warning."
Timothy's jaw worked silently.
He looked back at the stone slab, at its empty channels and patient silence, and something in his expression cracked.
Just a little. Just enough.
"Then where do we go?" Max asked, his voice rising with frustration.
"We followed the bond. We followed him. We're here, and Lucas isn't, so where the hell do we go now?"
No one answered.
The wind picked up, moving through the clearing for the first time since they'd arrived.
It carried no scent of wolf, no scent of blood, no scent of Lucas.
It carried nothing at all.
Lucian turned in a slow circle, scanning the treeline, the sky, and the stone. His hand had drifted away from his knife.
His posture had shifted from alert to something more like defeat.
"We need to tell Sebastian," he said quietly.
Max's head snapped toward him.
"Tell him what? That we found nothing? That his bond led us to an empty field and a rock that doesn't like vampires?"
"Yes." Lucian's voice was steady, though his eyes were not. "We tell him the truth. And then we figure out what the truth means."
Timothy pulled his hand from the table.
The stone had left no mark on his palm, but he rubbed it against his thigh anyway, as if trying to wipe something away.
"Lucian's right," he said.
"We go back. We regroup. And we think."
Max opened his mouth to argue, then closed it. There was nothing to argue with. No enemy to fight. No trail to follow.
Just a clearing, a stone, and the horrible, sinking feeling that they had already arrived too late, not to save Lucas but to even find him.
They walked back the way they came. The forest swallowed them whole.
Sebastian saw their faces before they reached him.
That was the worst part.
The distance was still too great for words, too great for details, but close enough to read the slump of Max's shoulders, the way Lucian wouldn't meet his eyes, and the careful blankness Timothy wore like armor.
Ellis had fallen back to the rear again, his silence heavier now, as if carrying something none of them wanted to name.
Sebastian pushed himself off the oak tree.
His legs held. Barely.
"Where is he?" The question came out flat.
Not demanding. Not hopeful. Just... flat. The way things sound when you already know the answer but haven't yet learned how to stop asking.
Max stopped a few feet away.
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked at Lucian.
Lucian looked at Timothy. Timothy looked at Sebastian.
"There's no easy way to say this," the alpha began, and Sebastian's stomach dropped because those words were never followed by anything good.
Those words were the ones people used before telling you someone had died. Before telling you someone wasn't coming back.
"Then don't say it's easy," Sebastian cut in.
His voice cracked on the last word. "Just say it."
Timothy's jaw tightened.
"The Hollow Table was empty. No Lucas. No signs of struggle. No blood. Nothing to indicate anyone had been there at all, let alone—" He stopped. Swallowed.
"Let alone a sacrifice."
The words landed like stones dropped into deep water. Sebastian felt them sink.
Felt them settle somewhere dark and cold at the bottom of his chest.
"That's not possible." His voice was barely a whisper. "The bond. I felt him. He was there. He was hurting. I saw—"
"We know what you saw," Lucian said gently. Too gently.
The kind of gentleness that hurt worse than shouting.
"But whatever happened at that table, it didn't leave any traces behind. Not for us. Not for the land itself."
Sebastian shook his head. A small movement. Denial before it hardened into something else.
"You missed something." He took a step toward Timothy. Then another.
"You had to have missed something. Footprints. A trail. Anything."
Max held up his hands, palms out. Placating.
"We searched every inch of that clearing, man. Timothy knows that place. He's been there before. He said—"
"I don't care what he said."
Sebastian's fangs descended. He felt them scrape against his lower lip, felt the familiar burn behind his eyes.
"Lucas is out there. He's alive. And you're telling me you found nothing? That's not possible. That's not—"
"Sebastian."
Timothy's voice cut through the rising tide like a blade.
Not loud. Not angry. Just absolute.
The kind of voice that had ended arguments and started wars and called lost wolves home from the edge of madness.
Sebastian stopped.
"Come here," Timothy said.
And Sebastian, against every instinct screaming inside him, went.
Timothy waited until Sebastian stood directly before him.
Close enough to see the gray threaded through the alpha's dark hair. Close enough to smell the old grief clinging to his coat like smoke.
"I have searched for a lot of things in my life," Timothy said quietly.
"Wolves. Answers. Forgiveness. Most of them, I found eventually. Some of them, I didn't. The ones I didn't find?" He paused. "They weren't lost. They were hidden."
Sebastian's breath caught.
"That table doesn't lie," Timothy continued.
"But it doesn't tell the whole truth, either. It shows what it wants to show. Keeps what it wants to keep."
"You think it's hiding him?"
Timothy didn't answer immediately.
He looked past Sebastian, toward the trees, toward the east, toward the clearing they had left behind.
"I think," he said slowly, "that we've been asking the wrong question."
Lucian stepped closer. "What's the right question?"
Timothy's eyes found Sebastian's again. Dark. Steady. Unreadable.
"Not where Lucas is," he said.
"Who took him? And why did the Hollow Table want us to think he was there at all?"
The silence that followed was absolute. Even the forest seemed to hold its breath.
Sebastian's hands curled into fists at his sides.
Lucas's boots felt heavy on his feet. The bond hummed low and watchful in his chest, not screaming anymore, not warning. Just... waiting.
Waiting for him to catch up.
"Then we find out," Sebastian said.
His voice was steadier now. Sharper. The voice of someone who had stopped drowning and started swimming. "We find out who took him. And we find out why."
Timothy nodded once. A small movement. But it felt like a promise.
"Good," the alpha said. "Because I have a theory, and you're not going to like it."
Sebastian's blood ran cold.
He didn't ask what the theory was.
He wasn't sure he wanted to know.
But the bond was still humming. Still waiting. Still pulling him toward something he couldn't yet see.
And Sebastian had spent his whole life running toward things that scared him.
He wasn't about to stop now.