CHAPTER 35
JONATHAN
My pulse hammered against my ribs. The forest air felt too sharp in my lungs, like every breath carried needles. Behind me, the reception cabin glowed warm and small, May’s silhouette moving near the doorway…watching me, waiting.
“He has her,” I told May. “I’m going after her.”
Blanche.
My mind kept trying to put her somewhere safe. Somewhere logical. On a couch, wrapped in a blanket, furious at me and ignoring my calls. Anywhere but in the hands of Erik Skoll—a man she worked for, a man she couldn’t seem to escape. A tug-of-war she’d never agreed to play.
You bring your conscience, he’d said. Blanche for the land, plus the money. He’d reiterated that the financial offer still stood even after his veiled threat.
As if this was about morals. As if this was a chess match and not a hunt.
I should have told him no. Should have roared it into the phone until my voice cracked. Should have threatened him with the kind of violence men like him understood.
But I’d heard his tone. It had been calm and certain. He wasn’t making an offer. He was giving me the illusion of choice.
I turned, stepping back toward the cabin for my truck keys, and that was when I heard it.
A sound like dry bones snapping. A faint crackle at first, easy to mistake for a branch shifting in the night wind. Then another. And another. Until it thickened, multiplied, and became a hungry chorus.
I stopped. The smell hit me a second later. Smoke.
Sharp and biting, already beginning to coat the back of my throat. The scent of burning pine sap and varnish. Something long built, something never meant to burn.
My stomach dropped.
I pivoted toward the cabins and saw it.
Flames licked up the side of one of the outer units—cabin eleven, the one next to mine—but it wasn’t alone.
Bright orange tongues crawled over the roof, quickly consuming the structure like it was paper.
The window had already blown out, glass shattered inward, more flames pulsed inside the cabin like a living thing.
It was burning too quickly, at an accelerated pace.
For a split second, my mind refused it. Not tonight. Not after that call.
The heat surged as the wind shifted, and reality slammed into me hard enough to make my knees go weak.
“No,” I breathed.
My eyes stayed on the blaze. It wasn’t spreading naturally, like an accident. It was too precise in the way it moved. The fire started high, possibly fed by something thrown or poured. Whoever had caused it had wanted it to catch fast and intended it to be seen right away.
This was a message. And both it, and its sender, were clear to me. Which meant Blanche wasn’t in Graymore. She was here. In the woods.
May stepped out onto the porch, one hand still holding her tea mug like she’d carried it out without thinking. She locked onto the burning cabin and went still like a stone.
Then her head tilted, turning sharply away from the fire. Toward the dark.
“Jon,” she said slowly, her voice dropping. “Wait.”
Her pupils shifted beneath half-lowered lids, unfocused, as if something else had caught her attention. Her eyes jumped left to right in short, precise sweeps, tracking something.
“What do you see?” I asked.
She went still. “East,” she said, then paused. “Old utility road. Someone’s on the hill.”
My blood went cold.
“Go!” she barked, sharper than I’d heard her in weeks. “I’ll call the fire department.”
I turned and ran, boots sinking into dry grass, heading east, cutting across the field toward the darker edge of the Hollow where the land rose sharply. The ground sloped upward fast. Trees thickened. Shadows closed in.
The old utility road appeared as I crested the incline. It was a narrow, half-forgotten scar in the earth, choked with weeds and coated in fallen pine needles. It hadn’t been used in years. Too rough. But it cut cleanly toward the eastern ridge.
And then the smell hit me again. Stronger. Worse. Plastic and fertilizer and treated soil. My pace faltered.
The greenhouses.
I broke through the trees and saw them. My heart lurched. Two of them were already burning.
Their curved frames glowing from within like enormous lanterns stuffed with fire. Plastic sheeting sagged and curled as it burned, dripping molten streaks onto the ground below.
“No—no—” I roared, running desperately.
The heat slammed into me.
The gladelace butterflies!
I needed to reach them. Needed to free them.
Inside the nearest structure, shapes fluttered wildly—all of them trapped, wings battered against warped plastic as they hurled themselves again and again at seams that wouldn’t let them escape.
I heard their screams.
High, sharp sounds—not audible to human ears, but desperate.
I snapped.
My vision sharpened. My hands burned. Claws slid free, skin splitting. My jaw locked as my canines pressed down, fangs appearing. My ears angled instinctively. Not a full shift. Just the tools for the job.
I tore at the enclosure with my bare hands.
Plastic split as my claws ripped through reinforced seams meant to withstand storms—not Lycans. Smoke poured over me. Heat scorched my face like a roaring sauna. I ripped again and again, widening the breach until it was just barely enough.
“Get out,” I choked, slapping uselessly at the frame as if my hands could undo what was already lost.
A rush of movement came. Some of them burst free, spiraling into the night in a chaotic storm of scorched color.
Then the tarp collapsed inward as the fire surged.
My sleeve caught flame. I slapped it out without registering the pain, my focus snapping upward as the roof buckled. A section gave way with a violent hiss.
I staggered back, coughing, eyes burning, heat rolling over me in suffocating waves. No more screams came from the butterflies.
Faint smoke curled from my skin as I straightened, claws retracting slowly. Faint smoke curled from my skin as the shift bled away, heat still thrumming under my bones, leaving only fury and ash behind.
This was deliberate. Cruel.
I turned and lifted my gaze.
Up, high on the eastern rise, by the old utility road, were silhouettes half-lit by a burning sky. One in particular.
Our gazes locked.
Fang. He knew where Erik—where Blanche—was.
He smiled, just enough to show he was pleased. Amused. That this had been a game to him.
He wasn’t even trying to hide. He stood like he belonged here, like the Hollow was already his territory.
Their territory. His posture was calm, controlled, his hands loose at his sides as if he’d simply wandered out to admire the view.
Cabins eight, nine, ten, and eleven were now burning behind me, smoke clawing at the night sky.
Behind Fang…two, maybe three others, broader than most men, stood with the quiet stillness of predators. Spaced far enough apart to feel intentional. Standing in formation. A pack.
They hadn’t tracked me. They’d let me come to them.
My hands curled into fists so tight my nails cut into my palms.
The message was clear. They could burn my cabins. They could destroy my father’s land…destroy what I’d built. What I was trying to rebuild.
In the blaze, I saw the ghosts of all the hours I’d spent repairing these places, sanding boards, sealing windows, rebuilding what time had rotted away. I saw my father’s hands doing the same long before me, stubborn, relentless, believing this place was worth the work.
Erik could burn every structure on this land down to ash, and it still would be the Hollow. The land wasn’t wood and nails. The legacy wasn’t a booking calendar. The legacy was blood and bone and duty.
The land was alive. And Blanchette—Blanchette was alive.
For now.
That was all that mattered.
I stared at Fang through the heated simmer, through the firelight, and something in me went very quiet.
It was a decision.
He wanted to corner me and force me to choose between saving what I’d built and saving the girl he’d stolen. To make me scramble like prey. But the moment he’d lit those fires…he’d made something else clear. There was no going back.
No deal. No rules. Erik had my leverage. My weakness. He thought that meant he had me.
He didn’t.
I dragged in one more breath of smoke and let it burn a path down into my lungs.
Then I looked back at the tree line, toward Fang, and I let him see it on my face, clear as a snarl.
I wasn’t the man who’d walked away from Blanchette at the fountain. I wasn’t the man who’d spent years running from what this land demanded of me. I’d made my choice. And if Erik wanted a Black Wolf…he was about to learn what it meant to call one out of the woods.
The greenhouse behind me collapsed inward with a violent roar, sparks bursting up into the night like a swarm of angry stars.
Fang didn’t flinch. Neither did I. Firelight flickered across the sharp angles of his face before he lifted his head toward the horizon.
“He’s waiting for you on the mountain,” he called. Then, he turned and vanished into the trees, followed by his henchman.
Blanchette’s face rose in my mind. The way I’d left her standing at the fountain.
The way she had looked when I’d walked away and abandoned her.
I should’ve stayed, dammit! Should’ve said…
something. Should have made a different choice.
If I had, Erik would’ve never gotten to her in the first place.
Instead, she was out here somewhere in the dark, trapped by my decision.
It struck me then how strange it was. I was further from Blanchette than ever, yet never felt closer to her than right now. Every step I was about to take was for her…for us.
If Fang was bait, then Erik was the hook. And standing here, hesitating, meant losing her.
I wouldn’t walk away this time.