Chapter 21 #2
I climb into bed. The cool silk of my nightgown slides against my skin. He is already here, propped on his elbow with a folder open against his bent knee. When he sees me, he sets the folder on the side table without finishing the page.
“Tired?” he asks.
“Mm.”
He turns out the lamp.
His lips land on my forehead. The kiss is warm. Brief. He settles onto his side and folds an arm under his head. His breathing finds its rhythm within minutes.
The bond hums on between us as I stare at the ceiling.
Lucas has gone to sleep with his knuckles resting against the back of my hand on the sheet, the way he has every night this week, and at some point, this minor, thoughtful gesture has stopped being sweet and started being insulting.
A mean thought drifts up from the part of me that does not have manners. Maybe the curse won’t be what kills me. Maybe this pent-up desire will do me in first. Or maybe I’ll save it the trouble and kill myself.
I huff a quiet laugh into the dark.
He doesn’t stir.
I lie there, listening to him breathe. I count to ten the way one of my old yoga teachers used to make us do, then to twenty, and somewhere past forty, I lose track and start over. The mark on my collarbone vibrates against the silk. The bond tugs steadily and softly on its tether and goes nowhere.
At some point, I drift off.
It’s a howl that wakes me.
Long, raw, the kind of sound that opens your eyes before your brain catches up to why. A second one rises under it, shorter, closer to the estate. And then, a third one breaks off mid-note.
Lucas is already out of the bed. I push up onto my elbow and look at him. The room is dark, the curtains a pale rectangle behind him.
“Stay here,” he tosses over his shoulder as he pulls on his shirt, pants, and shoes.
“What is that?”
“I don’t know yet.”
He’s out the door before I can say another word. The latch clicks behind him. I sit there in the dark with my heart in my throat for two seconds, three, and then I’m on my feet, pulling my robe off the chaise and knotting the belt around me as I move.
The corridor is cold. Voices down in the entrance hall, quick and low. Boots on stone. Someone running.
I take the stairs barefoot.
By the time I reach the front doors, Lucas is already through them, Monroe a pace behind.
I follow them into the courtyard, and the cold hits me through my thin robe and nightgown.
Floodlights have come on across the front of the estate, throwing everything into a harsh whiteness that makes even the grass look unnatural.
There’s a wolf on the gravel.
He is enormous, dark-furred, on his side, his ribs heaving.
There’s blood on the stones around him. A lot of it.
Two of the perimeter guards crouch beside him, and as I get closer, I watch as he shifts back.
It’s a slow, painful unfolding, and the wolf finally becomes a man with a torn-open chest and a face I remember seeing on the briefing screen in Lucas’s office last week.
Task force. Bauer’s section.
Lucas drops to a knee beside him.
“Stay with me,” he murmurs, his hand at the back of the man’s neck. “Look at me. What happened?”
The shifter’s mouth drips blood from the corner of it. His eyes find Lucas and hold his gaze.
“Ambushed.” It comes out weakly. “Alpha…There’s an army. So many of them.” His hand twitches against the gravel. “We didn’t see them till they were on us. Bauer is—”
“Where?” Lucas presses, his voice low and steady. “Where were you?”
The man’s lips part, but no words come. His chest rises once more, slowly, and then never does again.
A hand finds my elbow. Monroe, his face pale. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t need to.
Lucas closes the man’s eyes with his thumbs. When he stands, the line of him has changed. There’s a stillness in his shoulders I have only seen in him once before, the day the rogues attacked our convoy. He turns to Monroe.
“Get me Liam and Reese. Now. And every team lead I have on this estate. My office in five.”
“Yes, Alpha.”
Lucas’s eyes find mine across the gravel, and for a few seconds, he is just looking at me, taking me in—the robe and the bare feet and the way I have followed him out into the cold without thinking. Whatever he was about to tell me to do, he doesn’t.
He holds out his hand.
I cross to him. My palm slides into his, and we go inside together.
In his office, he doesn’t sit down. He goes straight to the communications panel on the far wall and starts working the keys before I have even closed the door behind us.
“What can I do?” I ask. I want to help.
“Nothing right now.” He doesn’t look up. His thumb is running across the frequency dial. “Stay near me.”
I sit on the edge of the leather couch by the window and watch as he starts opening channels.
“Bauer. Bauer, this is Steele. Respond.” A pause. “Bauer, respond.”
Static.
“Wren. Section two. This is Steele, respond.”
A burst of crackling, then a voice, breathless. “Alpha. Wren here. We’re at the eastern checkpoint. We just got the alert.”
“Status.”
“All twelve of us accounted for. Nothing unusual in our sector tonight.”
“Hold position. Don’t move until I tell you.”
“Yes, Alpha.”
He cycles to the next frequency. “Halsey. Section three. Respond.”
A different voice, calmer, older. “Alpha. We are on the southern ridge. Twelve of us. Quiet here.”
“Hold.”
“Yes, Alpha.”
He goes back to the first frequency. “Bauer. Bauer, respond.”
Nothing.
The door opens. Liam first, half dressed, his hair still flat from the pillow. Reese a step behind him, already in a shirt and trousers, his jaw stubbly. They both glance at me on the couch, and neither of them comments.
“Alpha.”
“One of Bauer’s men just died on the gravel out front.” Lucas’s voice is clipped. “They were ambushed in the western buffer. He said there were too many of them to count. I have not been able to contact Bauer or anyone else in his section. Sections two and three are holding.”
Liam’s brow furrows. “How many on Bauer’s team?”
“Fifteen. I want a squadron on the ground in Bauer’s region by first light,” Lucas says. “Twenty wolves. Combat ready. Send our best trackers.”
“Done.” Reese is already moving toward the door. “I’ll wake the second platoon.”
“Quietly,” Lucas adds. “Don’t sound the alarm.”
“Yes, Alpha.”
Liam is studying the map on the wall, his mouth thin. “If the man wasn’t exaggerating, twenty won’t be enough.”
“He wasn’t exaggerating. He used his last breath on those words. But I’m not sending more men in blind. I want eyes and a body count, not a second slaughter. We engage only if they do. Make that clear.”
“Understood.”
Liam follows Reese out the door, and the office becomes quiet. The quiet has a weight to it I do not like.
I get up off the couch and walk over to Lucas.
He is still at the comms panel, his palm flat against the wall above it, his head hanging between his shoulders. The line of his spine is pulled tight. This is a man holding a heavy burden and refusing to set it down.
“Hey.”
He turns his head toward me. The tiredness in his face hits me hard. I lift my hand and rest it against his jaw. He closes his eyes and leans into my palm for the length of a single heartbeat.
“What’s happening, Lucas? Talk to me.”
“That task force was looking for the witches,” he murmurs. “Bauer’s section was working the western buffer towns. Twenty-three settlements. They’ve been out there a week.”
A weight settles low in my stomach. Fifteen soldiers unaccounted for.
“Who do you think it was?” I ask quietly. “An army of that size doesn’t come out of nowhere.”
His eyes hold mine, and he exhales through his nose.
“I don’t know. But the way he said it. ‘So many of them.’ That’s not a rogue band.
” His fingers rub his temple. “Although, when our convoy was attacked, those rogues fought like nothing my men had seen. Strength they shouldn’t have had.
Stamina that didn’t match anything natural.
I have a feeling there’s a connection here.
Maybe a larger group of them somewhere. Maybe the ones who hit the convoy were a piece of something bigger that we missed. ”
“Enhanced, somehow?” I offer carefully.
“Maybe. Whatever that means.”
I do not have an answer for him. Not one I am ready to put in his head at four in the morning. I place my hand on his chest instead, over his heart, and let it stay there.
“Come sit down for a minute,” I murmur.
“I can’t.”
“One minute, Lucas.”
He lets me draw him to the couch.
By the time the first light of day is creeping along the far ridge, I have made him a coffee in the small kitchen attached to the office and pressed it into his hands.
He drinks half of it—without tasting it, I’m sure.
Outside the window, the courtyard has filled with men: twenty of them, stripped down, their kits in piles by the gravel driveway.
Lucas sets his cup down. “Go to bed, Sienna.”
I shake my head. “I’m staying right here with you.”
He looks at me sadly. “It’s going to be a long day.”
“Then it’ll be a long day.”
He swallows hard, but he doesn’t argue.
We walk outside together. On the front steps, the cold makes my breath catch again.
Lucas notices and pulls me under his arm without a word, his palm warm on my hip through the silk.
The men on the gravel are already shifting, fur rolling up over skin, the change rippling through the squadron in waves.
Twenty wolves, dark and lean, line up in formation in front of us. Reese, still in human form, lifts a hand to Lucas.
Lucas nods once.
The wolves turn as a unit and move. Fast, low, a dark current pouring down the drive, through the open gates, and into the trees beyond. Within thirty seconds, they are gone. The gates swing shut.
We stand there for a long time.
I tip my face up. Lucas is watching the tree line, his jaw set. I lean against his side and rest my cheek against his shoulder.
He exhales heavily, and his arm encircles me. He pulls me against him, and his head drops to the top of mine, his cheek pressed against my hair. I bring my arms around him and hold him there.
The sun edges over the eastern wall.