Chapter 48
Noa
“Noa!”
He calls for me before he even appears through the trees, my name torn from his chest and flung into the night with frantic urgency.
It reaches straight for me, snapping my attention off the road and pivoting it toward the tree line before I have time to think.
My new sharpened senses settle on him immediately, tracking him through the dark even now that the green light has faded and the night has closed in around us.
I smell him before I see him.
Leather. Vetiver. Mint.
And blood. Too much of it. Enough that my wolf bristles, a low, possessive warning curling through my chest as she registers it on him. On my mate.
Rennick breaks through the trees at a sprint, already in his human form, bare aside from the dark layer of spilled blood and mud he wears.
His gray gaze finds me immediately, panic and relief tightly tangled as one, and then he’s on me, crossing the space between us in seconds, his arms locking around me with enough to crush the air from my lungs. I don’t care.
He gathers me into him and holds on as if letting go isn’t an option, as if keeping me pressed to his chest is the only thing standing between me and the dark that tried to take me from him.
I let myself go, surrendering to it, fingers clutching at his neck, his back, anywhere I can anchor myself to the solid proof of him. That he’s here. That we’re both still here.
His strong body trembles, not from cold, but from everything he’s been forcing down since that first scream tore through the territory.
“Noa,” he breathes into my hair, the sound crumbling apart as he says it. “Fuck, baby…when that ward went up and I couldn’t reach you—”
I want us to have a moment. Just one. To breathe each other in. To let our bodies reassure each other that we’re safe, that we made it back to each other. And we will.
But there’s something he needs to know first, something I desperately need to tell him so he’s prepared for what’s headed our way.
“Ren,” I try, my voice catching as I speak against his throat. I try again, louder. “Ren, I need—”
He doesn’t hear me.
His panic barrels right over me, spilling out unchecked as his hands begin to move over me, searching, verifying the best he can through my borrowed coat.
He’s cataloging injuries I don’t have, his hands moving with a frantic precision that tells me he won’t believe I’m whole until he confirms it himself.
He pulls back, easing my head away from his neck, his gaze flicking over my face and throat as I press my palm to his chest, feeling his heart race beneath it.
His attention catches on the blood that stains my skin there, the blood that isn’t mine.
His breathing comes too fast, too shallow, his eyes going in and out of his wolf's.
“Are you hurt?” he demands. “What happened? How did they get you? Why did they bring you out here?”
My head shakes. “I’m not hurt.” It’s the truth. I made it through with a few cuts and bruises and a vicious, pounding headache, but otherwise I’m fine. So why are tears gathering as the words leave my mouth? “I need you to listen to me—”
“And did you—did you shift?” he cuts in, his voice dropping, turning rough with disbelief twinged with awe.
“Because I felt something through the bond. Something I couldn’t explain.
Like another presence joining it. And then out there—” He swallows, his eyes flicking toward the woods, unfocused now as his mind is dragged back into the memory of what he saw.
What he saw me do. “Noa…that was you, wasn’t it?
They just started dropping, one by one. Cathal.
His pack. The witches fighting with them.
The way they were screaming.” His gaze snaps back to mine.
“That was you and your magic, wasn’t it? ”
I shove down the clawing emotion rising in me and answer quickly, because it’s the only way to get him to slow down long enough for me to get to what really matters.
“I’m bruised,” I say first, because I can feel how desperately he needs that reassurance, how badly he needs it to be true.
“But I’m not hurt. They chased us through the woods and caught us,” I continue.
“Siggy was compelled. They brought us here to wait for the ward to fall so they could load all the omegas onto the plane they had coming in.” A plane I very much doubt will be landing now, not when there’s no one left on their side here to answer communications.
“And yes. I shifted. They were hurting Juno and Siggy, and something snapped. She just…broke free and it was—it felt like getting the last stolen piece of myself back.”
Relief softens his expression, the kind meant for me rather than himself, as if something he’s wanted for me has finally come true. His thumb brushes beneath my eye, warm and steady.
“She’s free,” he says softly, wonder twining through each syllable. Pride, too. His gaze holds mine as he adds tenderly, “I can’t wait to meet her, baby.”
The words settle warm in my chest. He leans in then, unhurried, and brushes a soft kiss to my lips. It’s light and fleeting, hardly a kiss at all, yet the simple contact soothes the raw ache inside me that I haven’t had time to give proper attention to.
When he kisses me again, there’s more weight to it. His hand slides to the back of my neck, a touch I know by heart, and the world pulls inward until there’s only the contact between us and the quiet sense that this moment belongs to us.
Too bad it can’t last.
When he pulls back, his brow is furrowed again. “You used the power your mom left you. The weaver magic—the fear.”
He understands better than anyone how consuming this magic can be.
How once you’re caught in it, you can’t guide what you’re shown.
You can only endure it. Losing control with him like that wasn’t my finest moment but with how the bodies screamed and shattered beneath it today, I feel even worse for ever subjecting him to that.
“Yes,” I whisper. There’s no triumph in it, no satisfaction. There’s only exhaustion and acceptance for the roll I played tonight.
He pulls me into him again, forehead pressing to mine, breath shuddering out of him. “You’re incredible, but I wish I could have spared you from—”
“Rennick,” I interrupt, louder now, my voice breaking as tears I managed to delay a moment ago spill over again. “I need you to listen to me.”
Something lands. I don’t know if it’s the words or the sound of them, but he lifts his head, drawing back enough to meet my eyes.
The sight of my tears spilling freely and the way my chest starts to quiver, those sobs I’ve been holding back pressing hard against my ribs, only reignites his barely calmed panic.
He shifts his weight and adjusts his hold on me, lifting a hand.
His thumbs brush at my cheeks, chasing each tear as it falls, like he believes that if he can erase the evidence quickly enough, the pain might follow.
He asks it quietly, the words barely carrying, his gaze moving over my face as if the answer might be written there. “What’s happening? You said you weren’t hurt…”
I shake my head slowly, deliberately, and the words scrape on the way out, bitter and wrong. “No. I’m not the one who’s hurt.” I swallow something I know will be a choked sound and I search over his shoulder around the dark road. “Where’s Canaan?” But that question tastes worse.
“Canaan?” he repeats, sounding genuinely thrown, like my question has come out of nowhere and doesn’t belong here.
“Why are you asking…?” He trails off, then exhales, deciding to give me what I need anyway.
“He was fighting with us at first. After he took out Mercer, a couple of the young enforcers on his team—the ones that revealed themselves as traitors tonight too—decided they didn’t want to die like him.
They ran. Canaan didn’t let that stand and he chased them north.
If I had to guess, he met up with Rook and they should be on their way back now. ” His brow creases. “Why?”
I don’t have time to process that Mercer is another name added to the ever-growing list of liars and spies within our ranks. Not when we’re running out of time to find Canaan, to bring him here so he doesn’t have to walk into this alone.
I don’t know why I’m so insistent on this, only that the need sits heavy and persistent in my chest. Walking with him here won’t make what waits any easier.
It won’t soften it or change it. There’s no reason for Rennick to warn him, either.
I know that in the quiet, certain way sad truths settle.
Canaan already knows. He would have felt the bond between them tear, the tether snapping clean through him the moment her heart stopped.
The howl that followed her death echoes in my memory, distant and mournful, leaving the air hollow in its wake. At the time, I couldn’t tell if it was real, my thoughts too scattered to know the difference. But now some deeper, instinctual part of me knows that it was.
It was Canaan.
A sound like that doesn’t come from doubt or confusion. It comes from loss.
And I think Canaan deserves to have Rennick with him when he finally has to face it.
“You need to go find him.” I start wiggling in his arms, silently urging him to put me down. When his arms don’t loosen like I want them to, I start shoving at his chest and shoulder. “You need to go, Ren. Before he gets here and sees—”
The sound that tears through everything is the most horrific thing I have ever heard in my life.
It isn’t a scream. It’s pain, ripped out of a chest with such violence that the night itself flinches from it. The road goes silent all at once, the sound has stripped the air of everything else. No voices. No movement. Just the echo of it hanging between breaths.
Everyone standing in the bloody wreckage turns as one.
Canaan stumbles out from the tree line. He’s human, bloodied and unsteady, emerging from the shadows the same way Rennick did, only slower. Like he already knows he’s lost and doesn’t have to rush. His eyes sweep the road once, unfocused, searching….
And then they lock.
The spear is still there, driven clean through her chest, the ice sharp and intact, refusing to melt in the bitter cold.
We’re all helpless to do anything but be spectators to the moment Canaan Roarke’s world stops.
I see when it happens, when the space his dead bond left behind tells his body what to do.
The mate connection is gone, but the way it shaped him isn’t, and his feet carry him forward the same way they always did.
Toward her. He doesn’t run. He can’t. He moves slowly down the road, through the blood, mud, and snow.
He drops to his knees beside Rhosyn, close enough that his movement jostles Siggy, who’s still sitting vigil at her side.
That seems to be what finally breaks Siggy free from whatever frozen place she’s been trapped in.
Her head lifts. She turns toward him, eyes blown wide and shining.
Hands shaking as she pulls back at last, giving Canaan space. Giving him his mate.
I look away only long enough to watch Siggy stagger into her mother’s waiting arms. Yrsa catches her without a word, holding her off to the side while Siggy, who’s still babying her broken arm, folds into her.
In my peripheral vision, I catch the shape of a large dark wolf stepping out of the trees near them, but I’m already turning away and don’t look back to see who it is.
Rennick has been holding me tight and unmoving, his face stoic as he works through what’s unfolding in front of us.
Then his grip shifts. One arm slides beneath my knees, the other across my back, and he cradles me against his chest. I don’t think there’s anything strong enough to make him let me go in a moment like this.
Canaan reaches for Rhosyn with a tenderness that’s unbearable to witness. His hands hesitate first, hovering like he’s afraid to touch her, like he knows she’s too still, too quiet, and can’t reconcile that with the way his body remembers her.
When he finally pulls her into his arms, he does it slowly, carefully, adjusting his grip again and again as if he can find a way to hold her that won’t make this worse.
He can’t make it whose.
Holding death doesn’t hurt the dead. It only hurts the living.
His broad shoulders shake as his head dips to her, his forehead resting against her temple.
His lips are moving and he’s saying something that I can’t hear, but hope to Goddess that somehow Rhosyn hears them wherever she might be.
Canaan is pressing a kiss to her wild curls when he can’t keep it at bay any longer.
Another guttural sound escapes him that I know will be imprinted in my memory for the rest of my life.
It tears free from his chest in a way that’s broken to the point of being utterly unrecognizable.
It carries across the road, and I know with a sick certainty that I’m watching a man fracture beyond repair.
You don’t lose your mate like this and walk away unchanged.
It reshapes who you at your core, steals something from you that you can’t ever get back.
I can’t bring myself to keep watching his descent.
My face turns into the crook of Rennick’s throat and I close my eyes, shutting out the sight of it even as the sounds of his pain continue at my back.
Canaan’s grief spilling out across everything.
Every unfiltered and raw noise that slips from him weaves itself with Rhosyn’s final words echoing in my head until I can’t separate them anymore.
I stay where I am and let myself come undone as quietly as I can, tears falling without sound, because in my mate’s arms, I know I’m safe to break.