A hand catches my wrist. Stopping the bolt an inch from his face. I’m staring up into ice-blue eyes that I’d know anywhere, in any light, in any room in the world.
Darius.
He’s covered in blood. His shirt is torn, his knuckles shredded, and there’s a gash across his cheekbone bleeding freely down the side of his face. He’s breathing hard, and his eyes are wild and pale and barely human, the wolf right there at the surface, held back by nothing but will.
He looks at me. At the bolt in my fist. At the blood on my hands. Sophie cowering behind me.
“Blue,” he says, and his voice cracks on it.
I lower the bolt. My eyes blur, and I realize I’m crying, which is stupid, which is the worst possible time to cry, but I can’t stop it because he’s here. He came. He’s standing in front of me, covered in blood with his wolf barely leashed, and he came for me.
“You’re late,” I say. “I already saved myself.”
Darius does something I have never, in all the weeks I’ve known him, seen him do.
He smiles.
“Yeah,” he says, his voice rough. “You did.”
Behind him, the sounds of the fight are fading.
“I was going to tell you something,” I say. “Before I left. I was on my way to find you.”
His eyes hold mine.
“I forgive you,” I say. “For all of it. I forgive you, Darius.”
He closes his eyes and exhales.
Then opens them, nods. “We need to move. We need to get you both out before they regroup.”
“Sophie can’t run,” I say. “She can barely stand.”
Darius looks at Sophie. Then, slowly, carefully, the way you’d approach a bird with a broken wing, he crouches down to her eye level. He makes himself smaller. Less threatening. I’ve never seen him do that for anyone.
“I’m going to carry you,” he says to her. His voice is low and steady, and nothing like the alpha bark he usually uses. “Is that okay?”
Sophie looks at me, and I tell her it’s okay.
She looks back at Darius and gives the smallest nod I’ve ever seen.
He lifts her like she weighs nothing, one arm under her knees, the other supporting her back. She’s so thin she barely registers in his arms. Her head falls against his chest, and her eyes close, and she lets out a breath that sounds like it’s been trapped inside her for three years.
I grip the bolt in my fist and square my shoulders. “Let’s go.”
42
Mo
We push through the main door and into the open air. The compound is a wreck. Fences torn down, guard posts splintered, smoke rising from somewhere near the western edge. The ground is churned up with wolf tracks and boot prints and dark smears I don’t look at too closely.
The fighting has stopped. What’s left is the eerie quiet that comes after violence, when the world is still catching its breath.
“It ended fast,” Darius says. “The second the pack realized we’d come for their alpha, they either stepped aside or helped us take him down.”
Wolves are everywhere. Some shifted back to human, standing over bound prisoners. Some are still in wolf form, pacing the perimeter. I recognize a few from our pack. Archer is near the north gate in human form, bloodied but upright, directing others. Elias is across the yard, a nasty cut above hiseye, standing over a group of guards who are facedown in the dirt with their hands behind their heads. Silas is farther out, his huge wolf stalking the tree line, making sure nobody runs.
But there are others. Wolves I’ve never seen before. A pack of them, lean and battle-scarred and definitely not ours. They move with their own coordination, their own hierarchy. Some of them are tending to the pack females and betas who are emerging from cottages.