66. Sam #2
“Last report had her heading northwest. No confirmation of position.”
Northwest. Toward the temple. The spiritual anchor of the territory. The place where the ward lines converged and the magic in the earth ran deepest. Smart. Logical. With Esme done and Carlito gone, she was falling back to the strongest position available.
“Hold the line. Hold the fucking line.” Ryan’s voice this time.
More attackers came over the bodies at the bridge’s edge. I went through them. Block. Break. Throw. One in the river, one unconscious, one on his knees, regretting his life choices. Talia finished the fourth with a brutal strike to his throat that had him gurgling on the ground.
“You’re compromised,” she said.
“I’m fine.”
“You are performing adequately. That is not the same as fine, and we both know it.”
Then Annabella reached for me.
Not the distant hum I’d been feeling all morning. This was different. This was her reaching, deliberately, the way she did when she wanted me to feel something specific. I reached back without thinking, and the bond opened wide between us.
She let me in. All the way. No filters, no walls, no careful management of what she let me feel. Just—her. The whole unguarded truth of Annabella McGrath, laid open across the bond like she was pressing it into my hands for safekeeping.
Images and sensations came. The smell of pine outside the Shaw House kitchen at dawn, cold air and wood smoke, and the particular quality of morning light through the trees that I’d grown up seeing and never once thought was beautiful until she’d stood in it.
Ellie’s laugh, high and wild and fearless, the sound of a kid who didn’t know yet how cruel the world could be, and Annabella’s fierce determination to keep it that way.
The sensation of my forehead resting against hers.
The world going quiet. Just us. Just the bond humming between us and her breath on my lips.
She was giving me the things she loved. Every one of them. Pressing them into the bond like someone tucking letters into a coat pocket before a journey they might not come back from.
No.
I knew what this was.
I knew what this was and I couldn’t stop it. I threw everything I had back at her—don’t, I’m coming, hold on, please—but she was already pulling away, and the bond that had been wide open was narrowing.
She closed the door.
Not all at once. She took the mate bond that ran between us and narrowed it. Squeezed it down until what had been a river of shared feeling became a stream.
Then a trickle.
Then a thread.
And on the other side of that thread: almost nothing. The barest whisper of alive and nothing else.
My legs stopped working.
I went down to one knee on the blood-slick bridge, and for a horrifying second, I was back in a Council briefing room, listening to a clinical voice explain how mate bonds degrade when one partner dies.
The bond thins first. The connection attenuates.
The surviving mate reports a narrowing sensation, followed by—
No.
She wasn’t dying. She’d done this on purpose. She’d shown me everything she loved and then she’d walled me off. Which meant she was about to do something she didn’t want me to feel, and that was worse—that was so much worse—because the goodbye made it real. She thought she might not come back.
Annabella, don’t you dare—
My vision went strange. The battle sounds warped, distant, like hearing them through water. I was on one knee on a bridge with my mate’s grief still ringing in my bones and a thread where a bond should be, and I couldn’t—
I saw Talia move from the corner of my eye, throwing herself across the two feet of space between us. The silver round that should have punched through my chest hit hers instead.
The impact spun her. I heard it, that dense, wet sound a silver bullet makes when it enters a body. She went sideways, hit the wall of the bridge, and didn’t get up.
I was beside her instantly. One hand behind her head, the other pressed to the entry wound, left side of the chest, center mass.
Silver was already spreading. Gray lines tracking through her skin so dark that they looked like cracks in ebony wood; the toxin eating through tissue faster than her wolf could close it. Blood, too much blood, too fast, pooling beneath her on the ancient stone.
“Talia! Talia.” I pressed harder on the wound. Useless. We both knew it was useless. “Mason—! I need—”
“Stop.” Her hand came up and gripped my forearm. “There is not time for that.”
“There’s—”
“There is not.” Her amber eyes locked on mine, assessing, even now.
“Listen to me. The Council is broken.” Each word cost her something.
I could hear it in the spaces between them, the wet catch in her breathing that said the round had hit a lung.
“Victor Kane’s corruption runs deeper than I reported.
When this is over—” A cough. Blood on her lips.
“When this is over, it will need rebuilding. From the foundations.”
“Talia—”
“New voices. Ones that understand what I never did.” The wolf-head pin on her lapel caught the gray light. Crooked. Bloodied. The symbol of an institution she’d served her entire adult life. “I was not wrong. But perhaps I was not as right as I believed.”
Her grip on my forearm loosened. Not all at once; by degrees, the way Talia did everything.
Measured. Deliberate. Like she was choosing when to let go rather than letting it be chosen for her.
Her breathing shallowed, each inhale shorter than the last, each exhale carrying less back.
She didn’t fight it. Talia Johnson had never wasted effort on battles she’d already calculated the outcome of.
Her eyes stayed open. They stayed sharp. The amber didn’t dim. It just stopped, the way a clock stops, between one tick and the next.
I closed her eyes, because she’d have wanted it done properly, and for a moment my hand stayed on her face. The wolf-head pin sat crooked on her lapel. I straightened it. Don’t know why. Just did.
I scanned the ridge. Couldn’t see the position of the sniper who’d shot Talia, but I could feel the implications stacking up like dominoes. Someone had just watched his silver round pass through a supposedly impenetrable barrier.
The wards are down, and they know it.
Shit!
“All positions, take cover! Wards are down—they know!” I was already moving, grabbing the nearest wolf by the back of her vest and hauling her toward the earthworks. “Off the bridge! NOW!”