56. Sam
Chapter fifty-six
Sam
The whole front of Thomas and Wally’s house had collapsed inward.
It was the same house where I’d brought Annabella after the prison break.
Where Thomas had saved her life while I paced a trench in the hallway.
Where Wally had once spent an entire afternoon rearranging the living room furniture because he’d read that the sofa was facing the wrong direction for positive energy flow, and Thomas had come home from the clinic, stood in the doorway for a full thirty seconds, said, “Wally, the couch is in front of the fireplace,” and Wally had said, “Yes, because fire is a transformative element,” and Thomas had picked up the entire sofa with one hand and moved it back while Wally called him a philistine.
It was also where Thomas had stitched me up after a Council op went sideways three years ago.
Where Wally had left a plate of food outside my door when I’d been too deep in Council darkness to stay with Derek or come downstairs.
Now, timbers were scattered like broken bones.
The roof was in the living room. Fire had eaten the back rooms down to the framing.
What was left looked like something had taken the house I remembered and crushed it in a fist.
Jase was in the middle of the wreckage. Hands bleeding, knuckles raw, working rubble with a silent, relentless focus
“Jase!” Wally’s voice cracked.
Jase looked up. Saw Wally. His expression…Goddess, the relief and fear and determination all mixed together.
“They’re here,” he said. “I can hear them. Mom is talking to keep everyone calm.”
Wally made a wrecked sound and threw himself into the rubble.
Derek and I fell in beside each other. He grabbed one end of a beam, I grabbed the other.
We lifted. Moved it. Grabbed the next. Ryan next to us as Gid worked the edges, stabilizing the structure so nothing collapsed further.
Sofia coordinated from the perimeter, calling out when debris shifted, directing us away from weak points. Annabella hauled timber beside us.
“There.” Jase pointed.
We dug harder. Through the rubble—muffled, distant, but there—Jo’s voice, steady and warm.
“Keep going!” Wally shouted into the gap. “We’re here! We’re right here!”
The next five minutes blurred into raw effort.
Derek and I worked seamlessly together; lift, pass, brace, repeat.
Ryan cleared the heaviest sections with a ferocity that was barely controlled.
Gideon swore steadily and creatively the entire time, which at this point I recognized as his way of keeping himself functional.
Then Derek and I hauled away a crossbeam, and there was a door.
Jase wrenched it open.
Jo came out first, Ellie locked against one side. Jo’s left arm was broken, hanging at an angle that made my wolf wince.
Ellie saw Annabella and called her name as she was reaching, straining against Jo’s hold, arms outstretched.
Annabella was already there. She took Ellie from Jo’s arms and dropped to her knees, pulling her sister against her chest. One hand on the back of Ellie’s head. The other locked around her small body.
“You’re okay.” Her voice broke. Through the bond, everything she’d been holding back came flooding in: relief that could have drowned her, love so fierce it burned white, terror at how close she’d come to losing this. “You’re okay, monkey. I’ve got you.”
Jo swayed on her feet. Sofia was there in a second, steadying her, guiding her to sit.
Amara came next, one arm locked around Ben.
Her electric blue hair was gray with plaster dust, turning it the color of a dirty sky.
Her eyes landed on Jase, and in an instant, he was there, pulling her and Ben into a hug.
She sighed into him. “I’m so glad you’re okay. ”
Then she pulled back, her hands still on his arms. “Have you seen Cameron? He was supposed to meet me at the house before —”
Jase’s expression changed. Something shuttered behind his eyes. “Amara.” His voice dropped. “I found him. On the way here. He was on the street outside Mrs. Johan’s.”
Amara went still.
“He didn’t make it. I’m sorry.”
She looked confused, her brain rejecting the information, trying to rearrange the words into a different sentence.
Then understanding hit. Her mouth opened.
Closed. Her hands tightened on Jase’s arms hard enough that her knuckles went white.
She didn’t cry. She looked at the rubble around us, at the wreckage of the house, at the smoke still curling through the valley, at all the destruction Kane’s people had left behind, and her face shut down.
It just went blank, as if everything was too much for her to deal with and she was shutting it away to deal with later.
Ben pressed tighter against her side.
“I—” She swallowed once and shook her head.
Then Wally was there. “I’m so sorry,” he said, pulling Amara and Ben against him, one hand on the back of Ben’s head, the other hugging Amara to him. “You’re okay. You’re both okay. My babies are okay.”
Amara leaned into Wally and said, “We’re fine. We’re not hurt.”
Wally pressed his face against Amara’s dusty hair and held on.
Fred came out next. Blood streaming from a gash on his forehead, a piece of wood impaled in his side above the hip, his shirt soaked dark. But upright. Moving. And carrying Thomas.
Thomas. His head lolled, blood matting his salt-and-pepper hair from a wound that was still bleeding.
The man who’d stitched half this Pack back together.
Derek and Jase took Thomas’s weight from Fred, lowering the doctor carefully, and Wally dropped beside his mate and pressed his forehead against Thomas’s.
Ellie’s sobs were getting worse, not better. The huge, whole-body kind that came from a child who’d been holding herself together for hours and had finally found the one person she could fall apart with.
“Mama wouldn’t wake up.” The words came out in jagged pieces between sobs. “Mama wouldn’t wake up, and I tried, and she wouldn’t and I was so scared —”
“Where’s Mom?”
Annabella looked at Fred over Ellie’s head. He’d sat down hard against the rubble, hand pressed to the wood in his side.
“Uncle Fred.” Her voice went sharp and thin. “Where is my mother?”
“She’s still inside.”
I moved. Jase was half a step behind me.
The gap in the wreckage was tight. I ducked through, bracing beams as I went, Jase stabilizing behind me.
The air was dust-thick. The timber groaned above our heads; it could shift at any second.
The whole structure was balanced on wreckage, and wreckage didn’t hold.
Somewhere to my left, wood cracked, and a trickle of plaster dust cascaded down.
There.
In the far corner of the bathroom was Annabella’s mother, lying on the tile floor. She was breathing; I could see it. The small, slow rise and fall of her chest. But the rhythm was wrong. Too much space between breaths. Too shallow when they came.
I moved the debris carefully. Lifted her. She weighed almost nothing. Too light, the kind of lightness that spoke of months of illness stripping her down, and whatever Webster had done to her was still doing it, still draining, even now.
Jase cleared the path. I carried her out. Daylight—gray, smoke-filtered—and I saw what my wolf had already known. Her skin was the wrong color. The gray of a body that was shutting down. Her lips were tinged blue.
I laid her on the cleared ground with all the care I had.
“Mom.” Annabella touched her mother’s face, her hands shaking. “Mom, please.” Silver-green light bled from her fingertips, reaching, searching, her magic trying to find whatever Webster had done and unravel it.
Emma didn’t respond.
Around us, chaos. Sofia and Derek helping Thomas, Wally, Amara, and Ben away.
Jo Shifted, bones cracking and reforming as she screamed through her broken arm mending.
Uncle Fred’s agonized growl while Jase supported him through his Shift, the impalement slowly pushing out as his wolf form healed the damage.
But all I could see was my mate, begging her mother to wake up while her sister pressed against her side, crying.