Requiem (Blackwater Pack #5)

Chapter 10

10

DIMITRI

“You smell like her,” Lex commented as we walked down the hall toward the training facility.

I glared at my oldest friend, but I couldn’t exactly tell him he was wrong. Especially since I hadn’t showered after spending the night in Lulu’s bed.

I’d tried to, but every time I approached the bathroom, my wolf had a fit until we compromised on brushed teeth and finger combed hair.

Lex was right; Lulu’s soft jasmine scent clung to me, and I could practically picture my wolf rolling around in it. Whether she realized it or not, she’d scent marked me last night, and I was in for an uphill battle to get my wolf to relinquish it. It was like this every time she marked me.

Not that she knew it.

Scent marking was a wolf thing. Lulu had no idea that when she rubbed her face against my wolf’s throat that it set off a cataclysmic cascade of wolf urges. To her, she was cuddling. To me, she was marking me as hers.

And my wolf and I liked it way too fucking much.

“Shut up,” I muttered as my boots clomped a little harder on the waxed floor.

Lex only grinned and clasped me on the shoulder. “I wish you happiness, brother. She’s good for you. You’re good for her. The only ones who can’t see it are you two.”

I pulled up short. “It’s not that simple.”

“Of course it is.” Alexei frowned, the tattoos crawling up his jaw twitching. “Love is simple. Love is just love.”

I ground my back teeth together. “Not for people like us.”

“You’ve said this since the cave,” he reminded me, “and yet you’ve done nothing to change the situation. Neither of you have.”

“What? Of course we have,” I snapped.

“Then you would have sent her away when her coven excommunicated her,” he reasoned.

I reared back. “She was a fucking kid.”

“And your parents had people willing to help her,” he added. “She would have been safe.”

I flinched at the memory. I’d overheard my parents discussing ways to protect Lulu. They felt indebted because she’d saved my life. But their original solution had been to send her away to a small pack in Australia where she would have been isolated from most others.

They’d called it shielded, but I knew the truth. Lulu would have been alone in a strange world with no one to have her back.

So, I’d done something I’d never done before—defied my parents. I fought with them constantly, daring them to send away the girl that had saved me. Threatening to chase after her if she left.

And one night I remembered a single, crucial fact that changed everything.

Lulu had bonded us together, and being separated by miles felt like my skin was too tight. It made the wolf, who had only been called forward when she bound us, become volatile.

Lulu and I were connected, and separating us meant we’d both hurt.

Maybe I’d hammed it up for my parents, but the outcome had been exactly what I’d wanted. Lulu stayed, and not just in Narodnaya, but down the hall from my bedroom.

I raked a hand through my hair, mentally noting it needed to be cut. “Lulu’s safe with me .”

Lex’s lips turned up at the edges. “Because you love her.”

A growl ripped from my throat, and I was this close to pummelling my best friend. “It’s not love, Lex. Okay? You’re right—love is easy. Loving someone is easy, it’s the lack of understanding and communication that suffocates it.”

His slight smile slipped. “You’re telling me you do not love her?”

I exhaled long and hard. “I’m telling you I don’t know what I feel for her because the word hasn’t been invented yet.”

His mouth parted in surprise. “Dima, I?—”

A loud siren blasting overhead shattered the moment between us. Lights flashed as a robotic female voice sounded the alert, “Warning, code silver. Security breach section ten. Warning, code silver. Team Alpha response required.”

I spun on my heel and took off at a sprint, Lex behind me.

Section ten was where Lulu’s lab was.

And a silver alert…

A silver alert meant something had gone horribly wrong. It was an alert that only the Alpha team—a select, elite few fighters—was skilled enough to handle.

Anxiety twisted in my gut as I bypassed the bank of elevators and slammed through the door to the stairs. Taking them three at a time, it took precious moments for us to reach the tenth floor from the fifth.

I yanked open the door and nearly slipped on a spray of glass shards across the hallway. Every door had been blown open, some were in splinters while others hung off what was left of the hinges.

“Fuck me,” Alexei murmured, right behind me.

My eyes swept down the hall to the fifth door.

Lulu’s door .

A hole had practically been blown out of the side where the door once stood. Smoke curled from the charred frame.

“Lulu!” I shouted, running to the spot where I knew she’d be this morning. My heart pounded in my chest, my wolf snarled and snapped, begging to be free to protect her.

The last thing anyone needed was my wolf going on a rampage, though, so I shoved him back into his cage while careening around the door.

It took a second for my eyes to adjust to what I was seeing, but when they did, my stomach dropped out and my heart gave a violent kick.

Jack, the kid Lulu swore was just a misguided teen who’d been dealt a shit hand, was fucking levitating . He was at least three feet off the floor, and his eyes had turned a milky white, the irises and pupils completely blotted out. But what was the freakiest was the scream that didn’t seem to end as wind whipped around with fury, fast enough that I had to hold onto the door frame to keep from being swept back.

My gaze ripped from Jack to Lulu, and I felt her fear. Tasted her terror in a way that had me battling my wolf for control like never before.

Lulu’s feet were planted on the ground, her arms stretched wide in front of her as she tried her best to repel whatever magic was being hurled at her by Jack. Her feet skidded on the floor, and her back hit the wall, pinning her into place with a grunt. When a trickle of blood dribbled from her nose, I stopped fighting.

As a man, I didn’t have a shot in hell at protecting my girl. But as a wolf? Yeah. That might work.

The shift was one of the fastest of my life, and I found myself thrown into the passenger seat by my feral counterpart. I tried leaping forward, intent on ripping out Jack’s throat, or at least his intestines, but I hit a solid wall of nothing.

My head rang where it had slammed against the immovable force.

Wind , I realized. Jack was channeling the wind and had created a barrier around himself and Lulu.

I tried again and again. Lex joined me, both of our wolves trying to break into the room.

I watched in horror as Lulu’s legs shook, threatening to buckle. Her gaze swung to me, panicked and unsure.

“I’ll kill them all,” Jack hissed. “Starting with them .” Those creepy as fuck eyes swung to me and Lex, and I saw nothing but pure hatred in them.

“No.” Lulu’s whisper could barely be heard over the roar of the wind, and I was vaguely aware of more men and women spilling into the hall.

I stared at Lulu because if I was going to die, her face was the last thing I wanted to see. In the span of a heartbeat, I saw the future we should have had, but never would.

With trembling fingers, Lulu reached for her neck and tore the necklace from her throat. All at once, she seemed to straighten, and then darkness seeped into her eyes. Her pupils seemed to swell until the soft silvery irises and the whites were completely gone.

The wind faltered for a beat, and Jack’s mouth dropped with what could only be surprise.

And then he smiled, almost sadly. “Told you.”

The building began to tremble, a deep rumbling that vibrated up from the base of the mountain itself. A moment later, the top of a pine tree came through the window like a spear, glancing off Jack’s forehead before he was buried under a canopy of green.

The wind collapsed, the shift so jarring that Alexei and I fell into Lulu’s office in a heap.

Lulu slowly lowered her hands and took a deep breath. Using the back of her hand, she swiped away the blood, then stared at it like she had no idea what it was or where it had come from.

I shifted back, approaching her slowly and not giving a shit that I was naked. It wasn’t the first time Lulu had seen me like this, and it likely wouldn’t be the last.

“Lu,” I murmured, touching her wrist.

She turned to me, those otherworldly eyes almost glowing as she grinned, her body swaying toward me as she lifted a hand to cradle my face. “Bonded.”

I frowned, not entirely sure what she meant, even as that word echoed in my soul. Unable to stop myself, I turned my face into her palm and dragged my nose along the delicate skin of her inner wrist.

Everything in my world aligned at that moment.

The exact same way it had ten years earlier, when I’d come to stand before a broken little girl who looked so shattered by her own existence.

Lulu blinked once.

Twice.

And then her eyes cleared only to widen as she looked around at the destruction. A tiny whimper fell from her lips, and it was all I could do not to crush her to me.

“What the hell happened?” Andres, my father’s second in command, filled the hallway. His voice cut through the murmurs and whispers of the shifters behind us. Only Lex remained as a wolf, staring up at me intently.

Lulu yanked free of me, covering her hands with her mouth. “Oh, god. What have I done?”

One of my father’s betas, a man named Ivan, pushed through the tree branches and revealed an unconscious Jack. “He’s alive,” he announced.

“Take him to the lower level,” Andres commanded.

The lower level was a subsection of the prison that had been built for dangerous supernatural creatures that posed a threat. It currently had one occupant, but it looked like his solitary was about to end.

Several other men moved to help extricate Jack from the tree while Andres moved closer, standing at my shoulder.

“Lucia,” he murmured, “what on earth happened?”

Her tiny hand flitted up to her mouth. “I don’t know. I just… It all happened so fast. One second Jack was asking about Claire?—”

“Claire?” Andres cut in with a frown.

“His sister. Not really his sister, but a member of his coven.” She paled. “The girl who was killed last night. When I said she was dead, it was like a switch was flipped. He lost it.”

“It’s not your fault,” I told her, lacing our fingers. I needed to touch her in some way, if only to reassure myself that she was here and whole.

Her dove gray eyes moved to me. “I had no idea how strong he was. No idea that his power could decimate the wards.”

“Sheena,” Andres called to one of the women helping clear the rubble.

The redhead appeared almost at once. “Sir?”

Andres inclined his head to where Jack was being carried by Ivan. “Go with them. Make sure the boy is sedated.”

“Yes, sir,” she agreed, hurrying from the room to follow Ivan and Jack.

Andres rubbed his forehead. “At least that will keep him unconscious while we make a plan. I have to notify Nikolai.”

I winced, hating to interrupt Dad’s reunion with Addie. They both needed this for so long. “We do need to make a plan,” I agreed, “but the threat had been neutralized for now. I’ll talk to my father today.”

Andres gave me a firm nod.

A hysterical laugh bubbled out of Lulu. “A plan? Are you serious?”

Andres stiffened.

“Lulu,” I murmured, feeling her arm tremble.

“There is no plan to make. Two spirit elementals have broken through the wards.” She pressed her other hand to her chest. “The wards I made to keep everyone safe. I guess the joke’s on me. I can’t keep anyone safe.”

Andres pressed his lips into a thin line. “The safety of this pack is not your responsibility, Lucia. It never has been.”

“It isn’t?” She looked heartbroken and lost. “Then what am I here for?”

“Lulu—”

She pulled free of me, clutching her hand to her stomach like I’d bruised her. It ripped my insides open to see the hurt in her expression, the vulnerability shimmering in her gaze.

Andres cleared his throat, looking uncomfortable as he glanced sideways at me. “It’s moments like this I’m glad I’m not the Alpha of this pack. I think this is a conversation he needs to be part of.”

“Fine,” Lulu whispered. She bent to grab something from the floor, and then she was fleeing from the room. My stomach cramped as pain lanced through my chest. The drive to follow her was strong.

Andres hand caught my shoulder. “Give her time, Dimitri. Sometimes the best thing we can offer is space.”

Was it? Somehow it felt like the last thing she needed was more time to let her brain trick her into any more self-doubt and blame.