For a second, they stared at each other—wolf and human, twins. I knew, beyond all rationale or reason, that she’d held him at this point before.
That she’d let him go.
I stopped breathing. She nudged his face with her nose. Licked his chin. And then, without warning, she lunged. Her teeth closed around his human neck. She bit down, until she hit bone, and then she jerked her head sideways.
His spine snapped.
His eyes lolled backward.
His head hung on by a thread.
I felt Sora begin to Shift before I heard it. In human form—naked, her body smeared with blood—she knelt next to him.
“Give me a knife.” Her voice was rough, her words short and sharp. I walked to her, knelt next to her, placed my knife in her hands.
She leaned forward, whispered something in his ear. Then, dark hair running free down her back, her lips ruby red with her brother’s blood, she drove the knife into his chest and cut out his heart.
His legs turned gray, then his torso, his arms, his face, until we were looking at a corpse. His eyes sank back in his skull; his body decomposed. The earth rumbled under our feet, and in an explosion of light—fireworks at midnight, the sun just after an eclipse—he was gone.
Sora collapsed backward on her knees, her body folding in on itself. The curve of her spine caught the last bit of twilight, and I could see heavy breaths wracking her body.
Fifteen, twenty seconds later, she rose. She walked calmly to her discarded clothes. She got dressed, and then she turned back to me.
“The message I gave you?” she said. “For Devon?”
I nodded.
She closed her eyes. “I’ll tell him myself.”
Belatedly, I remembered to let go of the little room, the panic, the fear—and the fight drained out of my body with it. I was so tired, exhausted—and I hadn’t even done anything.
“That’s the danger,” Jed said gruffly. “You stay there too long, you hold on too tight—it can kill you.”
Because what I really needed was to add more to the list of things that could kill me.
One by one, I surveyed our little group. We’d survived. All of us. But as I met Lake’s eyes, I realized something was wrong.
“Where’s Griffin?” I asked.
She didn’t respond, and I realized that he hadn’t come back. Wherever he went when he wasn’t here, wherever Wilson had sent him—he hadn’t come back.
“Bryn.” Sora—a clothed Sora—called my name from the Stone River side of the Montana-Wyoming border. I forced myself to tear my attention away from Lake, even as I felt her fighting a silent battle with herself—
Not to care.
Not to let it hurt this time.
Not to think about burying him again.
I staggered toward the border, turning my eyes and mind away from Lake, giving her what little privacy I could.
“Thank you,” I told Sora quietly, wondering if taking her twin’s heart had provoked in her some measure of what Lake was feeling now.
The bond between them had outlasted even death—and now he was gone. Really gone.
Sora inclined her head slightly, but didn’t otherwise acknowledge my thanks in any way. I waited for her to speak and wondered if there was something I was supposed to be saying.
Hallmark didn’t exactly make cards for occasions like this.
“You promised me,” Sora said finally, her voice dry and hoarse, “that when this was over, you would give Callum a chance to make things right.”
Apparently, the fact that she hadn’t died didn’t void that promise in her eyes, and that made me think—
“Make what right?”
There was another long silence.
“Make what right, Sora?”
She may not have been part of my pack, but I was an alpha, and that dominance was audible in every single syllable as it exited my mouth.
“Griff!” Lake’s voice broke into our standoff, and reluctantly, I tore my eyes from Sora’s in time to see Lake launch herself at newly reappeared Griffin. In a flurry of overly long limbs, her body collided with his, nearly bringing them both down. She wrapped her arms around his body and squeezed, hard enough to leave marks.
Anyone else’s hands would have passed through him, but not hers.
Never hers.
Griffin ran a hand through Lake’s hair and tweaked the end of her ponytail, a calming gesture and a familiar one. Then he pulled back. He untangled himself from Lake’s arms, extracted himself from her steely grip, and turned his attention to me—and by extension, to Sora.
“It’s Maddy,” he said.
The second I heard her name, my insides twisted—a portent of things to come.
“She’s in labor,” Griffin continued, sounding calmer than he looked. “I would have stayed with her, but I couldn’t. The baby—it made me—I felt it—I couldn’t be there.”
I nodded, like I understood, even though I didn’t. The only thing I was able to wrap my mind around was the fact that something was about to go down.
Something bigger than Maddy giving birth.
“Sora?” That was all I said—no elaboration, no pretense that what she was about to say might not rock me to my core. I waited for her to speak, feeling emptiness bubbling up inside of me instead of anger, exhaustion instead of fear.
I didn’t want to hate Devon’s mother again, didn’t want to look at her and see the bad things, instead of the good. She must not have wanted that, either, because she expelled a long breath and then started talking.
“What exactly did Callum tell you about Maddy?” she asked. “What did he tell you about the Senate?”
Callum had told me that Maddy might be rabid.
I’d discovered she wasn’t.
He’d told me that if Maddy wasn’t the killer, the Senate wouldn’t be able to enact the vote.
“He told me she was safe,” I said, realizing even as I said it that those words had never left his mouth.
He’d said that the Senate couldn’t enact the vote.
He’d said that they wouldn’t be able to cross into our land without permission.
He’d never said they wouldn’t come after her. He’d never said that she was safe.
“Maddy’s in No-Man’s-Land.” My thoughts went from my brain to my mouth with no filter. “And once you get there, No-Man’s-Land is fair game.”
The other alphas couldn’t cut through my territory to get to Maddy, but they might not have to. By definition, any slice of No-Man’s-Land fell between two territories—maybe more. Maddy’s cave was in the mountains, and the mountains
were accessible from Cedar Ridge territory, from Shadow Bluff, and from Vallée de Glace in the North.
It might not be easy, but it was doable, and Callum had never said Maddy was safe. He’d just listened to me say it.
He’d let me believe it.
“Two other alphas have access to that mountain,” I said. “If they realize she’s there …”
Maddy had been hiding out in No-Man’s-Land for months—but this time, there was a trail of bodies, including one in Winchester, that could lead the other alphas straight to her door.
Looking at Sora’s poker face and seeing Callum’s, I knew suddenly that the Shadow Bluff alpha wasn’t the problem, and neither were our neighbors to the north. Shay had called the Senate meeting. He was the one who’d been building alliances.
“He’s coming for her,” I said. “Shay got passage—from Shadow Bluff or the northern packs, from someone who has access to that mountain.”
And Callum knew.
This had nothing to do with the Shadows. Callum’s ability to sort through possible futures would have been operating full force. He’d seen this coming. He’d known Shay might come after Maddy, and he hadn’t said a word.
“Callum has his reasons,” Sora said, but I doubted that she knew them—I doubted he would have shared them with her any more than he would have shared them with me.
This was what Callum did, who he was. He played God. He played me. He let bad things happen.
You need to be human for this.
I’m sorry, he’d said. For something that might happen and might not.