“Tell us everything. Now,” Darius says.
Pam crosses her arms and leans against the doorframe. “It was Stuart.”
Stuart?
My brain cycles through every face, every name, every file I’ve kept locked in the back of my mind for ten years. Stuart. Dark hair. Son of—
“Stuart Moss?” I ask.
Pam’s eyebrow twitches, which is confirmation enough.
Moss.
Mark Moss’s son.
Mark Moss, who stood beside our fathers at pack gatherings and smiled and shook hands and plotted murder behind closed doors. Mark Moss, who helped orchestrate the coup, who helped slaughter our families.
Mark Moss, whom Darius put on his knees in the mud and held a blade to his throat, choosing mercy over justice. Exile instead of execution. A mistake we all agreed to because killing every last one of them would have turned us into the very thing we were fighting.
And now they have Blue.
Beside me, Darius makes a sound, and his scent detonates. The flat, dead nothingness evaporates, replaced by something so violent, so purely lethal, that it turns his wood smoke black and suffocating. Pam stumbles backward into her cottage, and my own wolf drops low inside me in instinctive response.
“Darius.” I put my hand on his chest. He’s vibrating. The shift is right there, seconds away, and if he turns now, there’s no bringing him back. “Darius, look at me.”
He doesn’t look at me. He’s looking through Pam, through the wall behind her, through everything, and his eyes are ice-blue murder.
“I’m the one who let them live. I’m the one who exiled them. This is on me,” he says. “I’m going to kill them. Every single one of them. I’m going to find their pack, and I’m going to burn it to the ground, and I’m going to start with Mark Moss and end with his son, and I’m going to make sure it takes a very, very long time.”
“Yes,” I say. “You are. But we need to be smart.”
His eyes snap to mine. The wolf is right there behind them, barely leashed.
“If Stuart was bold enough to walk back onto our doorstep and take our omega, he’s not operating from a position of weakness. He came prepared. He wanted this.”
Darius’s jaw works. I can see him fighting it, the animal warring with the leader.
“How did Stuart know she was here?” I ask Pam. “How did he know Blue was with us?”
Pam’s eyes flick between Darius and me. She’s calculating, deciding what to give us and what to hold back, and I don’t have the patience for it.
“Pam,” I say, slamming my fist against her doorframe. “Now.”
She swallows. “The village. The errand run. I saw him there.”
The errand run. The market. Blue going white, unable to breathe, and Lily walking her back to the truck.
“We were all kids when it happened,” Pam continues, and her voice gets a defensive edge. “The coup, the exile, all of it. I was eight years old. Stuart was maybe ten. He wasn’t one of the ones who did anything wrong. He was just a kid whose father got exiled.”
“His father helped murder our parents, Pam.”
“He was a child. Same as us.” She lifts her chin. “He was nice. He was always nice to me, even back then. Charming and kind, and when I saw him at the village, I just… we talked. That’s all. And we’ve been in touch since.”
“In touch.” Darius looks at her, and she has the decency to back away a few steps.
“Texts. Phone calls. Nothing sinister. He wanted to know how the pack was doing. He asked about Elias.” Something flickers across her face. “And then he asked about the omega. He’d heard rumours.”
“And you confirmed it.”