55. Sam
Chapter fifty-five
Sam
Three Rivers smelled like a crematorium.
Wolfsbane and char layered over everything—the pine smoke, the melted plastic, the wet-ash stink of buildings that had burned themselves out.
My wolf had gone quiet. Not calm. Quiet the way a predator goes quiet when the territory it’s supposed to defend has been torn apart, and there’s nothing left to fight. Just wreckage and smoke and the absence of every sound that used to mean home.
Because this was home.
Annabella and I moved deeper into the streets.
Just the two of us. I knew every building on this street.
Alder’s Hardware, where the old man had taught me and Derek to re-string fishing reels when we were nine, after Derek had knocked over a paint display, and we’d spent the afternoon cleaning it up.
The Millhouse Bakery, where Rashid Took made cinnamon bread on Saturdays, and Mason used to buy an entire loaf and eat it in the car.
Alder’s front window was blown in. The bakery was gutted, ovens visible through the collapsed wall.
I assessed the damage tactically because the alternative was feeling it, and feeling it would make me useless.
So I filed each building under structural compromise, casualty risk, search priority and kept moving, and I did not think about the time Wally had dragged me into the bakery to help him choose between the lavender shortbread and the rosemary-lemon cookies and I’d told him to get both and he’d said, “Sam Shaw, you are the only man in your family with any sense.”
I did not think about that.
“Gerty Reyes!” someone shouted to our right.
Nothing.
“Raymond!”
Nothing from Raymond either.
Annabella worked the right side of each structure.
I took the left. We’d fallen into the pattern without discussing it.
She’d pause at doorways, head tilted, her wolf sorting through layers of noise for the sounds that mattered.
I’d check for structural integrity, entry points, any pocket where a body could be sheltered.
Through the bond, I knew she had locked down her emotions.
I knew the feeling.
“Emmett! Dear Goddess, answer me—Emmett!” A voice shattered somewhere to our left, near a collapsed storefront.
A child’s cry answered. Thin. Scared. Alive.
We moved. Found them fast. A woman on her knees beside a gap in the rubble, reaching down into a space too small for an adult body, and a boy of about six peering up from underneath a fallen shelf that had formed a pocket just big enough to save his life.
I dropped and assessed. Heavy beam, but the load point was off-center. Manageable.
“When I lift, you pull him out. Fast.”
The woman nodded. Her hands were raw. She’d been digging with her fingernails.
I braced. Lifted. The beam shifted—eight inches, enough—and the woman lunged forward and hauled the boy free. He came out crying and clinging and covered in dust and breathing, and she pulled him against her chest and made an unintelligible sound that hit me right in my gut.
Annabella directed them toward Zeke’s triage point. Steady, specific, her command voice carrying through the smoke. The woman stumbled away.
We kept moving. Two more found. Two more alive. That was what mattered.
The smoke thickened. My wolf tracked every scent: blood, char, wolfsbane, the fading signatures of Pack members I’d known my entire life.
Then someone broke through the smoke at a run. Sofia. Red curls tangled with ash. One sleeve torn off at the shoulder. Soot streaked down her cheek.
Her eyes locked on me.
“Have you seen Derek?” The words came out brittle and rushed. “I know he’s alive, I can feel him through our bond. But I’ve been looking since the attack hit, and I can’t find him —”
“He’s alive.” The twin bond confirmed it; Derek’s presence, battered, furious, but there. Close and getting closer. “I feel him too. He’s near. Where did you see him last?”
“He wasn’t here. He went with Ryan to Bridgetown to look over the defenses.” She shook her head, curls swinging. “I called him the second it started. He said to stay alive, that he was coming for me.” Her voice splintered on coming for me, but she held it together. Miller stubbornness.
She reached Annabella. The hug was fierce and brief, two women confirming the other was still vertical. No comfort in it. Just proof of life.
Then Sofia pulled back.
“Thomas and Wally’s house. The front collapsed. Fire got the back rooms.” A breath that cost her. “Jase has been digging since it happened.”
Through the bond, Annabella went cold. Not numb—cold. Everything she was feeling flash-froze in an instant, sealed under ice so she could stay upright.
“Ellie?” Her voice didn’t sound like her. “My mom?”
Sofia shook her head. “They were all there. Mom, Dad, Thomas, Amara, and Ben. We don’t know yet if they made it out. But if anyone can find them, it’s Jase. He won’t stop.”
I felt the exact moment Annabella’s body decided to move, muscles coiling, weight transferring forward, every cell turning toward that house like a compass finding north. Through the bond: Ellie, Ellie, Ellie, Ellie—Not a thought, just a name, repeating with the rhythm of her pulse.
Before she could take a step, a sound tore through the smoke.
I knew it before I understood it. But my wolf knew. The way wolves know thunder. Something old and massive and deep, a resonance that didn’t hit your ears, it hit your ribs, your spine, the hollow places between your bones. It carried a vibration that made my teeth ache,
“What —?” Annabella started.
“True Wolf form.” I was already moving. “That’s Ryan.”
The roar had come from the Alpha compound. I ran. Annabella was half a stride behind, Sofia matching pace. We crashed through debris—overturned vehicles, splintered wood, glass crunching under every stride.
Then the twin bond flared.
Not the steady hum I’d been tracking. A spike—hot, sharp, close. Derek. He was near, and running hard, and every emotion he had was stripped bare and broadcasting through our connection at full volume. The desperate, single-minded drive of a wolf searching for his mate.
His scent punched through the smoke a second later. Pine. Moss. Blood.
Sofia caught it too. She made a sound beside me—torn between grief and relief—and pushed harder.
Then he was there.
Derek.
Bursting through the haze at a dead run. Alive. Filthy. Blood on his hands, his shirt, streaked down his neck. His gray eyes scanned the street and found what they were looking for.
“Sofia!” her name ripped out of him.
Sofia broke from us and sprinted. They collided hard enough that I felt the impact through the bond, Derek’s arms wrapping around her, lifting her off the ground, his face buried against her neck. Breathing her in with a raw, animal desperation.
Through the twin bond, I felt what he felt. The mate bond singing. His wolf settling. The terror of I couldn’t find her giving way to the equally staggering relief of she’s here.
“You’re alive,” he gasped against her skin. “Fuck, you’re alive.”
“I’m okay, I’m okay.” Sofia’s hands locked into his shirt. “Derek —”
He pulled back just enough to check her over. Eyes, face, shoulders, ribs—frantic hands checking her body.
“Are you hurt? Did they—?”
“I’m fine. But Thomas and Wally’s—”
“Later.” Derek’s jaw worked. He looked over Sofia’s shoulder. Found me.
We locked eyes.
Derek jerked his chin at me.
I nodded back.
“Ryan found the safe room under the Alpha House,” he said, arm still locked around Sofia. “Mai and the twins are trapped inside. The door’s jammed from the collapse.” He scanned behind us. “Where’s your team?”
“Spread across town,” Annabella said. “Gideon’s clearing buildings, Mina’s on the signal jamming, Zeke’s running triage, Esme and Jem are guiding rescue. It’s us.”
Derek grabbed Sofia’s hand. Ran.
We sprinted behind them and rounded the collapsed eastern wall of what used to be the Alpha House.
And I stopped. Ryan was eight feet at the shoulder.
Maybe more. His frame was something between wolf and man, built on a scale that shouldn’t have existed outside of the old stories; muscles bunched and straining under dark fur streaked with dust and blood, claws extended and caked with debris.
He’d carved a path through the rubble, ripping through concrete and steel and rebar to reach a reinforced steel door set into the foundation.
The door was intact. The frame was warped to hell. Buckled from the collapse above, the metal twisted at an angle that jammed the door solid.
“Mai, Wally and the twins are inside.” Ryan’s voice came out distorted, too deep, too wide for a human throat.
Victoria. Oakley.
I was at the frame before I’d finished the thought. Hands on the warped metal, fingers tracing the buckle pattern, my brain already calculating angles. Derek appeared beside me. Shoulder to shoulder.
“Hinges are warped,” I said. “We pull straight, it digs deeper. We need to lever the frame out first.”
“Need something to wedge.” Gideon’s voice, arriving at a run, breathing hard. Drawn by Ryan’s roar, probably, along with anyone still standing. His eyes swept the scene—True Wolf form, jammed door, Shaw brothers converging—and he skipped shock entirely. Just got to work. “Give me a bar.”
Ryan’s claws closed around a bent piece of rebar and ripped it free like pulling a weed. Handed it over.
We positioned ourselves. Ryan and Gideon on one side. Me and Derek on the other, Annabella beside me, Sofia beside Derek. I felt their pulses through the metal. All of them fast but steady.
The twin bond between me and Derek was wide open. No walls, no static right now, just the raw, unfiltered connection we’d been born with. Derek’s strength and fury and love for the woman beside him, pouring through.
But it wasn’t just Derek. Through him—faint at first, then stronger—I caught something that wasn’t his. Sofia’s fierce, stubborn refusal to let this door stay shut. It was bleeding through Derek’s side of the twin bond, his mate bond carrying her into the circuit like a tributary feeding a river.
And on my left, Annabella’s magic stirred.
Silver-green warmth flooding through our mate bond, not a spell—just her.
Her power, her will, her fury at a world that kept trying to crush the people she loved.
It poured into me and I didn’t fight it.
I let it merge with the twin bond, let it flow through me into Derek, felt Derek’s breath catch as it reached him and Sofia.
For one second—one extraordinary second—I felt all of them.
Derek’s steady, immovable strength. Sofia’s ferocity, compact and blazing.
Annabella’s fire, hot and bright and vast. And my own, threaded through theirs, holding the center.
Not four people pulling.
One.
We pulled.
The frame didn’t stand a chance.
Metal shrieked, bolts sheared clean off, the warped steel that had withstood Ryan’s True Wolf strength buckled outward like it was made of tin.
The force that went through my arms and back and legs wasn’t just muscle—it was amplified, compounded, four people’s strength and will and love fed through our bonds and multiplied into something none of us could have generated alone.
Derek made a sound beside me; half shock, half recognition. Through the bond I felt him feel it too. The same stunned awareness. What the fuck is this?
The bonds settled. The circuit dimmed. My arms were shaking, my breath coming hard, but underneath the physical cost, something hummed. Something new. Like a frequency we’d just discovered, still resonating in the space between all four of us.
Annabella stared at her hands. Then at me. Through the bond: wonder, sharp and startled.
Derek looked at me. I looked at him.
“What the hell was that?” Gid asked.
Neither me nor Derek answered. Because I didn’t have words for it yet. Only the feeling: my twin and our mates, completely linked and amplified.
But whatever it was, whatever we’d just tapped into…it could wait.
Because the door was open. And behind it, in the dark, someone was moving.
Mai appeared first. Dust-covered, hair matted, clothes torn.
Oakley was pressed against her neck. His eyes swept the ruins with an intensity that had no business existing in a child who couldn’t hold a conversation yet.
Wally came behind her, Victoria in his arms, her Spider-Man shirt gray with dust. Her dark eyes tracked everything; focused, measuring, taking stock of the world with that same unsettling awareness as her brother.
Behind them came more children.
“Me and Wally got as many kids into the safe room as we could when the first bombs hit,” Mai said.
Ryan was still in True Wolf form when he strode forward and lifted Victoria from Wally.
She didn’t flinch, didn’t cry, didn’t recoil from the massive, clawed hands or the fur or the glowing eyes or the fact that her father was eight feet tall and built like something out of a nightmare.
She just grabbed for him and settled against his chest like this was the most natural thing in the world.
“Dada?”
“I’m okay, troublemaker.” He almost held it together on troublemaker. Almost. “We’re all okay.”
Mai stepped into him, Oakley still pressed against her neck.
Ryan’s massive arm came around them both—careful, so careful with those claws—and for a moment the four of them just stood there.
Victoria’s small hand fisted in his fur.
Oakley’s face buried against Mai’s neck, one arm stretched out to grip Ryan’s arm.
Mai, with her eyes closed, her forehead against Ryan’s chest, breathing him in.
Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. Even Gideon, who had a comment for everything, kept his mouth shut.
Something that had been knotted tight behind my ribs since Kane’s phone call loosened. Just a fraction.
They’re alive. The twins are alive. Mai’s alive. My brothers are alive.
But we weren’t done.
Mai turned her head and her eyes found Annabella. “Ellie?”
“Jase is at Thomas and Wally’s house. Still digging. I need to go.”
Mai’s hands tightened on Ryan’s arm. Brief. Released.
“We’ll come,” she said.
Wally turned to Annabella, and every trace of color left his face. “What do you mean, digging?”