Chapter 47
Noa
Sound returns in uneven, jagged pieces, as if the world itself is reluctant to move on from this loss.
Magic still cracks in the air. Boots and paws pound through the bloodstained and torn-up earth.
None of it matters right now. My focus won’t pull away from the weight beneath my hands, from the wrongness of how Rhosyn’s body lies before me.
With her neck loose, her head has turned and the weight of it has settled into my palm. My thumb presses to her throat without thinking, lingers there, then shifts an inch to the left, searching for something I already know I won’t find.
I keep trying, hoping persistence alone can convince her heart to start again, and only stop when Siggy collapses forward.
Whatever pieces she was holding together through sheer will shatter all at once, her grief tearing out of her in uncontrolled sobs that shake her whole body.
She folds over Rhosyn, pressing her forehead to her shoulder, and her good arm tries to draw her closer.
She clings tight to something that’s already gone.
The distraught sound my Nightingale makes hurts in a way I don’t yet know how to carry.
I know I should be moving to her side, helping her through this. But I can’t make myself move from this spot.
Stepping away, removing my hands from her still body, it’s admitting it’s real.
At the outer edges of my mind, where everything is moving too fast and too slow at once, acceptance and denial collide. From there, memories reach for me. Memories of Rhosyn I’ll now be forced to look back on with a new, heartbreaking clarity.
Some of them sneak through. Rhosyn in my bedroom back in Ashvale, threatening to maim Rennick on my behalf before blow-drying my hair when I didn’t have the will or care to do it myself.
Rhosyn grinning wide and laughing as she proved just how professional her bow-tying skills are.
Rhosyn walking side by side with me down the chilly road, telling me how much she would hate to leave this place. That it’s home and—
I shove it down, force it back before it can take over.
Grief is stubborn. It doesn’t disappear just because I reject it now.
It will be right there waiting for when I’m ready.
Right now, I need it contained, because even if she isn’t breathing, the enemy still is, and they’re still battling against the shield Amara’s coven and the Fallamhain wolves have made around us.
Fingers curling, I slowly lift my hands away from her and as I do, I force determination into the hollow places grief has carved out.
I sniff, swallow hard, and wipe my tears on my shoulder.
With a steadying breath, the best one I can muster right now, I brace myself and prepare to call on my wolf—on purpose this time—before I step back into the fight.
A blaring sound slicing through the madness of everything stops me before I can start.
A car horn.
Flashing headlights follow close behind. They glare off the snow, slicing through the sickly green haze already blanketing everything. The brightness makes my eyes burn, forcing me to squint as I search for the source.
Between the bodies and magic still tearing into each other, my gaze locks on a familiar figure.
It never occurred to me that she’d involve herself tonight, and now I see that was a mistake.
It’s no secret she wants revenge on me—her father said as much himself.
I just wouldn’t have guessed she’d come for it personally.
I thought their grand plan would be for Cathal to collect me himself and deliver me to her on a silver platter, wrapped up and waiting for whatever version of revenge she decided fit my so-called crimes against her.
Talis McNamara steps out dressed for the part, black from head to toe, a beanie pulled low over her copper hair.
She rounds the SUV, her eyes snagging on mine for a split second.
The smile she flashes me is wicked and ugly with satisfaction, before she turns and starts shouting orders, waving people into motion.
It takes my sluggish head a moment to understand what’s happening, but then it clicks.
She’s not here to collect on the debt she thinks I owe her.
That smirk isn’t just proof of her satisfaction.
It’s proof that seeing me like this—on my knees in the mud, my friend’s body laid out in front of me, and cut off from my mate—is enough to sate her bloodlust. For now, anyway.
She isn’t here to join her pack or their allies in the fight rioting around us.
No, Talis isn’t interested in getting blood on her hands or her clothes. She’s here to make sure the ones who did can walk away alive.
A getaway driver.
She’s ushering people toward her SUV and the other waiting vehicles—all Escalades stolen from our pack—but something about it feels off.
The timing is too deliberate, the response too immediate.
This isn’t her call, she doesn’t have the authority for that.
She’s just the messenger. The one they sent in to extract what’s left now that the tide has turned and the victory they thought was a guarantee has slipped through their fingers.
Movement near the vehicle catches my eye, my stomach tightening. Evara—the last of the triplets—breaks for the car, sprinting toward her exit while she still has one without hesitation.
They thought they could come here, spill this much blood, tear this territory apart from the inside, and win.
And now that they know they can’t, they’re running.
No.
It doesn’t get to end like this.
They don’t get to escape what they’ve done.
Not tonight and not after all the years of cruelty it’s taken to build their legacy—clubs designed to hide cages behind velvet curtains and loud music.
Auction blocks where omegas are forced to stand naked and muzzled while strangers decide their worth.
Planes loaded and flown across the country to ensure those places remain well stocked.
My eyes stay on Talis through the disarray, through the waning battle as the enemy begins to scurry like rats. I stare at the beta female who tried to lay claim to my life. My home. My mate. My title.
And let the pain rise. All of it. All the jagged pieces I’ve never allowed myself to think about at one time out of fear I’ll stop breathing beneath the weight of it all.
I think about being chased away from the only home I’ve ever known.
My wolf caged for almost eight years. Having my memories altered and stolen.
My magic buried so deep I forgot how to listen for it.
My mother lying to me for years, not out of cruelty but out of desperation, the betrayal of it still stinging anyway.
Merritt Fallamhain’s threat. My mother sacrificing her life to save mine.
Reuniting with the mate I hadn’t remembered I was missing, only to have him reject me.
The ache of the broken bond. The attack on my home. Lowri dying.
Rhosyn dying.
I let all of it in, and I let it take me all at once.
It starts as pressure in my skull and a familiar buzz in my ears that’s swallowed whole when I keep feeding the rising beast in me more pain.
More of my history. The buzz swells to a roar and drowns everything else out.
My bones begin to hum, the vibration spreading from my chest until my fingertips go numb and my lips tingle.
My vision is tunneling. The forest, the road, the ward—Rhosyn—it all falls away.
All that’s left is Talis McNamara in the glare of the headlights and scurry of wolves and witches around her.
I keep going.
I don’t stop when my body threatens to fold over itself or when my breath shakes, or when my very being feels too small to contain what it’s building. I crest something I didn’t know I could reach. Power drones through me.
Power I wasn’t born with but entrusted with.
Mine to wield all the same.
Then something cracks. Not bone. Not flesh.
Something inside me that splinters like glass.
My eyes flutter shut and in that same exhale, threads snap into existence all around me.
They appear in my mind’s eye in shades that don’t exist outside of this place. Strings of color stretching out in every direction, connecting to different people, some weave between them in patterns I don’t understand but don’t need to.
The two other times I’ve fallen into this power’s grips, I’ve been in the back seat, letting instinct I didn’t recognize guide my hand toward something I would have been too afraid to touch on my own.
It doesn’t happen that way this time. This time there’s only a calm, clarity over what I must do. I don’t need a force greater than myself to push me forward, to imagine my hand reaching toward the threads that are nothing more than different points of fear connected to different presences.
I trust in this magic. This gift left to me by Mom.
My consciousness lifts out of my body. I’m no longer wearing my skin or kneeling in the cold, wet mud beside Rhosyn.
In my mind’s eye I’m floating beyond that, looking down on the blood-slick road and the people scattered across it, divided between those who keep fighting and those who are already fleeing.
It’s the ones scrambling for the SUVs that catch my eye first, desperate to escape the chaos they set in motion.
But it’s not really the people that I’m concentrating on, it’s the threads attached to them.
Too many to count are foul and steeped in the malice rooted deep in their souls. A mirror image of each other.
I imagine my fingers wrapping around the threads and pulling.
Over and over again. I escalate to pulling two at once.
Not out of haste or carelessness, but because I’m certain.
The enemy’s threads are unmistakable. Even without their telltale oily appearance or the way they radiate hate, I would be able to separate them from the innocent.