Chapter 39 Archer
Archer
The cabin door slams open, and Lily stands there, chest heaving, face drained of colour.
I’m on my feet in an instant. Elias drops his book, and Silas goes rigid on the couch. Darius, who’s been standing at the kitchen counter staring at nothing for days, goes to her immediately.
“Blue is gone,” Lily gasps. “I overheard Pam talking to Maren. She said Blue left with some alpha from the pack she ran away from. Over an hour ago.”
The information lands, and my wolf surges forward, clawing at my insides, demanding I punch through the nearest wall and run south until I find her.
But I’ve spent ten years being the one who holds it together when everything goes to shit, and that muscle kicks in even when the rest of me is screaming.
Elias is already off the couch and heading for the door. “Which direction? How long ago exactly? Who was—”
“Stop. We need to know what happened before we go charging into the woods blind.”
“Fuck that. She’s been gone for an hour—”
“And if we run after her with no information, we’re useless to her. Sit down, Elias.”
He doesn’t sit. His eyes are wild, pupils blown wide with fear. His scent has gone dark, turned bitter and sharp.
Silas hasn’t moved from the couch, but his hands are gripping the armrest hard enough that I hear the wood splintering beneath his fingers. His jaw is locked tight, eyes black, and I can see the shift rippling under his skin. He’s holding it back by a thread.
And Darius, standing beside Lily, his face blank—not angry, not panicked. Blank. Like someone reached inside him and turned everything off. His scent is flat and dead. I’ve never seen him like this. Not even the night of the coup.
“Lily,” I growl. “Where is Pam?”
“Her cottage.”
“Stay here, Elias. I mean it. If you go near Pam right now, someone’s going to do something we can’t undo. Let me and Darius handle it.”
Elias opens his mouth to argue, and I cut him off with a look that I hope communicates exactly how much I am not fucking around right now. He shuts his mouth.
Blue is gone. Every second I spend here is a second she’s getting farther away, and I hate this. I hate being the one who has to be smart when everything in me wants to be fast.
Pam opens her cottage door before I knock. She’s been expecting this. Her arms are crossed over her chest. Her chin is up.
She doesn’t smell like guilt. She smells like satisfaction.
“You know why we’re here,” I say.
“I assume it’s about Blue.” Her voice is steady. Not remorseful. She looks me in the eye and doesn’t flinch, and I realize with a sick lurch that this isn’t a female who made a stupid mistake.
“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.”
Pam doesn’t answer, and Darius makes another sound beside me. Low and guttural, barely human.
“What did he tell you, Pam? What did he say to get Blue to leave?”
“First of all, he said her name isn’t even Blue.
Can you believe that? She’s been lying to you all since the beginning.
Her real name is Moira, and she abandoned her pack, just ran off without a word.
He said he just wanted to talk to her, reconnect, and find out why she left.
He said he had important information for her. ”
“What information?”
Pam hesitates. “That her sister is alive.”
Sophie. The one Blue told us about in the kitchen.