Chapter 30
Chapter Thirty
Sienna
The howl rolls up the slope and finds me where I’m crouched behind the lip of the outcropping. Long, then short.
Lucas.
My chest pulls tight on the sound. Down in the bowl below us, the perimeter fight has gone from skirmish to roar, claws on metal, men shouting in three directions, the deep growl of wolves who have forgotten they were ever men.
Time to go.
Lydia is already on her feet beside me. Her injured shoulder stays strapped to her body under her dark jacket, the lines of her face set in an expression I’ve never seen on her before.
Adrenaline. I tell myself that’s what it is.
“North door is open,” she breathes. “Stay close. Single file behind me through the corridor. Once we’re past the stairwell, I’ll lead.”
Violet’s hand brushes my elbow. “Together,” she murmurs.
I nod once. The ten Silvercrest soldiers line up at our backs in their black fatigues, in a tight column, eyes already on the cleared ground between us and the wire.
Their leader, a shifter named Kessler, gives Lydia a small chin-lift.
She raises one finger. We move, all of us in human form so we can communicate.
The slope drops away under our boots. We descend low and fast, threading between the pines. The north entrance yawns open from the inside, a black slit in pale concrete. We pour through it one after the other, Kessler last, his hand pulling the steel door shut behind him with a heavy click.
The concrete walls of the cold corridor swallow the sound of the battle whole.
The light is bad, yellow strips humming overhead, and the floor is a stained gray that has held a lot of things I don’t want to think about.
Somewhere underneath the smell of damp and old metal, something else lifts the hair on the back of my neck before my brain has caught up to it.
Lydia takes point.
She moves with the tight, sure stride of a woman who already seems to know where the turns are. My pulse stutters once at the back of my throat, and I push the thought down. Lydia briefed the layout this morning from the squadron’s sketches. Of course she knows. This is what she does.
We hit a stairwell. Lydia proceeds down the steps without slowing. We follow.
Underground level. The bad lighting gets worse, pools of it interrupted by long stretches of darkness.
We pass a cell block. My wolf is awake at the back of my chest now, ears up, hackles lifting.
The mark at my collarbone is humming against the strap of my vest. Between my ribs, the bond with Lucas is open: hot, alert, his fury a steady current under my own pulse from the north side of this building, where the fight rages on.
He’s alive. Still in it. Still pushing.
Good. Good.
“Quiet,” Lydia murmurs ahead of us.
I notice it just as she says it. There is no one down here.
The front of the compound has emptied into the perimeter fight.
That part of the briefing was clean; that part fits.
But this stretch of corridor, so deep into the building, two levels under what should be a guarded holding facility, should not be silent.
It should at least have a watch. A man at a junction. A radio crackling in a guard room.
There is nothing.
Violet’s hand finds the small of my back through my vest. “Sienna,” she whispers, low.
“I know.”
“Something’s wrong.”
“I know.”
There’s a corner ahead of us. Lydia’s good hand lifts, and we all come to a stop. She crouches at the edge of the wall, angles her head, one finger at her lips, then waves at us to follow her.
I take a step. My wolf throws herself sideways inside me hard enough that I rock on my heels.
It’s a warning. My foot stops mid-stride, my weight pulling back, and I open my mouth to say “wait,” but it’s too late. Lydia is moving.
The corridor ahead of her opens into a wider junction. We round the corner into the mouth of it, and the air hits me before I notice anything else. It’s wrong. Heavy. The lights flicker overhead. Then, I see them.
Operatives line the walls, twelve of them at least, eyes already gold, claws already half out from the tips of their fingers. The bay of each of them goes up at the same moment.
“Back!” Kessler bellows.
The corridor explodes.
The first wave hits us from three sides at once, men faster than any wolf I have ever seen move.
The column of soldiers behind me goes down in a sound I will hear in my nightmares for the rest of my life—claws ripping through fatigues, throats torn open before our men even have a chance to extend their own claws.
Violet’s hand grabs the back of my vest and yanks me sideways into an alcove.
We hit the concrete shoulders first, hard.
Magic crackles at her fingertips. Blue, fierce, untrained.
The fight is violent. I can hear the howls as Violet pins me against the wall. Sounds of flesh tearing, the smell of blood thick in the air. Our soldiers are no match for these shifters. They never were.
The corridor suddenly goes quiet. Violet and I force ourselves to look.
Kessler is on his back, two feet from us, eyes open. They’re all dead. All of Lucas’s soldiers are gone. The corridor we walked through is painted the red-black color of blood.
Eight Covenant operatives walk out of the smoke emanating from the far end of the junction. Hands at their sides. Claws still long.
And in the middle of them, striding through them like a woman crossing her own front hallway, is Lydia.
Untouched. Not a hair out of place.
The breath goes out of me in a hard exhale. “No. No, it can’t be.”
“Lydia.” Violet’s voice is shaking—with anger, not fear. “Lydia, what the fuck?”
Lydia tilts her head at us.
The smile that curves her mouth is one I have never seen her wear. Not at the breakfast table, not in the corridors, not at the welcome dinner. It is tight, clean, almost amused, and it goes through my chest like a stone through a thin sheet of ice.
No. No, it can’t be.
Lydia is one of them!
The bond pulses against my ribs so hard, I sway.
Lucas.
His fury rolls back at me through the link, hot enough that the mark at my collarbone burns where the necklace hits it.
Suddenly, Violet moves.
She launches off the wall, straight at Lydia. All the magic she has never learned how to use breaks out of her at once, her hands lit up blue, her teeth bared, the ends of her hair lifting at her shoulders.
“You backstabbing bitch!” she screams. “Where’s my mother?”
Three operatives are on her before she gets close.
She fights them. Of course she does—her mother is somewhere in this building, and one of her best friends is up against a wall behind her.
Two of the shifters head in my direction. I kick the one who gets to me first, but he grabs my leg and twists. A punch from the other guy knocks me against the wall. I try to summon my wolf, but the curse mark begins to burn so violently that I can’t breathe. I claw at my own throat.
“Sienna!” Violet looks at me over her shoulder, and I gesture with my hand that I’m choking.
“Go!” I manage to yell to her.
She turns back around, facing the enemy.
The magic at her hands flares, rattling the strip lights overhead.
Glass cracks somewhere in the corridor. One of the operatives goes flying backward into the concrete wall hard enough that an audible crack comes from his body upon impact.
Another grabs Violet by the throat, and she sinks her teeth into his forearm until he howls.
It takes three of them to bring her down.
“Darius is going to gut you,” Violet snarls on the floor as a knee drives into her back. “My mother is going to gut you. If they don’t get to you first, I will.”
Lydia laughs. The sound of it runs down the corridor like cold water.
“Your mother…” she repeats, savoring it. “Your mother was the smart one, Violet. She recognized me when we met at Silvercrest. Twenty years on, she still remembered my face.”
Violet’s struggle stops. Her head jerks up off the concrete floor. “What are you talking about?”
Lydia crouches in front of her. She is patient about it. She tucks a strand of Violet’s hair behind her ear.
“When your filthy little hybrid community was being slaughtered,” she murmurs, “my mentor brought me to watch. I was nine. We have been around longer than you know, sweet girl. Your downfall. Your exile. We’ve been part of it all, for generations.”
The color goes out of Violet’s face.
“Lillian was clever,” Lydia continues. “She would have figured out who I was eventually. And I did have to find a way to get you here. Two birds, one stone.”
Violet lunges, her teeth bared. The operatives slam her back down and clamp a collar on her.
“Take her,” Lydia tells the operative.
They pull Violet to her feet. She thrashes. Her boot finds a man’s shin, and his expletive rebounds off the walls. They haul her down the side corridor.
“I will gut you, Lydia, do you hear me?” I hear my friend yell before her voice fades in the distance.
The corridor is very quiet again, and Lydia turns her attention to me.
I have not moved from the wall. My curse mark is so painful that I’m still struggling to breathe. It’s like fire spreading through my entire body. Warm blood slides down my neck.
Lydia studies me.
This is the woman Lucas trusted above any other, the one he considered his childhood friend, the one he nearly made his luna. The fury that climbs up my throat is so cold, I can’t feel my own teeth.
“You wanted me to go into the forest that night,” I say tightly. “You knew I wouldn’t want to go with you.”
She smiles. “You’re so easy to manipulate, Sienna.
Yes, it was me. It wasn’t that hard to change the patrols.
You had to die so that the alliance between the two packs would be destroyed.
The Covenant couldn’t afford Silvercrest and Moonvale teaming up.
Not if we wanted to succeed in our mission.
” She shakes her head slowly. “But you’re like a cockroach that just won’t die. ”