Chapter 25 #2
Menace burst into the room, shotgun in one hand, Savannah hot on his heels. I don’t know what I looked like, but the way his face changed, I must have been a vision.
“Wrecker!” Menace shouted, crossing to me in two long strides. “What’s happening? Are you dying? You look like you’re dying.”
I gasped, managed to suck in half a lungful of air. “She’s alive,” I rasped. “She’s alive! I can feel her. She’s close. Fucking, fuck, I can feel her.”
Savannah pressed a hand to my chest, then a cold compress to my temple. “His fever broke,” she said, voice shaky. “But he’s not out of the woods. His pulse is all over the map. Nobody has recovered yet.”
“Wren,” I said, the word a desperate laugh. “I have no fucking idea how, but she’s coming back to me. My little bird is coming home.” I could barely get the words out. I was still barely hanging on to life by a thread.
Menace set down the shotgun and put a hand on my shoulder. He tried to hide it, but his hand was trembling. “Just keep breathing, Eli. Let her come to you.”
I tried. I swear I tried, but every time I blinked, the blue light came back, brighter than before.
I focused on it, drew it in, made it my only thought.
The pain faded, replaced by the sharp, cold joy of knowing she was alive.
I tried to scream her name once, twice, just to make sure the universe understood what it had given back to me.
Footsteps hammered down the hallway. A second later, the door banged open, and she was there, in the flesh. Parker. My mate. My everything.
She looked like hell—hair a mess, face streaked with dirt and blood, one arm bandaged to the elbow—but I swear I saw a blue halo around her head. Her eyes locked on mine, and she ran to the bed, crawling up to straddle my lap.
“Never leaving you again,” she whispered, crushing her lips to mine. I tasted salt, blood, tears, and something electric that made my tongue go numb.
I buried my face in her neck and sobbed. I couldn’t stop. I didn’t want to stop.
As soon as she saw Menace, she jumped off the bed and grabbed a suitcase.
Fumbling with the latches, she opened it.
“It’s the cure,” she said. “These are vials of the toxin and vials of the antidote. The sigils tell you which is which. You have to get it to Doc—now. It’s the only way to save the pack. ”
Menace took the suitcase from her and looked at the contents. “You sure you can trust this stuff?”
She held her arms out. “Look at me. I’m perfectly fine. He gave me the antidote before I put a bullet between his eyes. Doc needs it first. He’ll know the best method of distribution. The toxin was introduced into the water system. Test it to be sure it’s all been flushed.”
I’d never seen Menace speechless.
“On it,” he said as he ran out, yelling for Doc and Bronc, Savannah at his back.
Parker pressed her forehead to mine. “I thought I’d lost you,” she said. “I thought I’d never see you again.”
I tried to answer, but the words tangled up behind my teeth. Instead, I hugged her tight, breathing in the strange, beautiful scent of lavender and lemons.
She collapsed back onto the bed beside me, clutching my hand. Her fingers were ice cold, but the grip was strong as ever.
“I think the angel came through for me again,” she said, voice raw. “There was no way I was getting out of the room Silas had locked me in. I was literally chained to the bed. There were metal cuffs around my wrists I couldn’t break.”
I reached up, touched the spot behind her right ear. The blue mark was still glowing, faint but steady. I wanted to ask a thousand questions, but only one mattered.
“How did you get out of those cuffs?”
She got a faraway look in her eyes and told me what happened. “I asked for help. And this is gonna sound wackadoodle, but I felt a tingling from my angel mark. It ran down my arms, and those cuffs heated up, and just like that…they just opened.”
“Miraculous.”
She nodded, then kissed my knuckles. Then told me how she disarmed Silas and killed him and his bodyguards. My mate was a true badass.
She told me how she remembered her mother had told her ‘to listen’ and she swore she heard a voice guiding her out of the compound after she snatched up that suitcase and fled. She’d located one of their cars that had the keys in it, and here she was.
We held each other for a long time. I could feel the mate bond pulsing between us, stronger than before, a living thing. Every throb of her heart echoed in my chest.
I pulled her close and whispered, “I love you, little bird.”
She smiled, just for me. “I know.”
And in that moment, nothing else mattered.
The antidote worked, but not like magic.
It was slow, ugly, and left a trail sadly not fast enough to save everyone.
I wound up in a ward at the hospital. The worst of us were here.
She was beside me, exactly where I knew she’d be, slumped in a vinyl chair the color of old blood.
Her head hung forward so her chin nearly touched her chest. The ends of her hair were stained with dried tears, sweat, and mucus from her nose.
Her hands were clasped together, white-knuckled, one wrapped around the other as if she could will my heartbeat into not stopping.
I tried to move my hand. It responded; a surprise. I reached out, grazed her knuckles. She flinched, then looked up, the whites of her eyes shot with red but sharp, electric, alive.
“You’re back,” she croaked. Her voice was a box of nails.
“Looks that way.” I tried to smile. My lips split again. “What’s the verdict?”
She wiped her nose on her sleeve, uncaring. “Doc says you’ll live. Most of the pack, too. Some didn’t make it.”
I nodded. I could feel the emptiness through the pack. “Who?”
She looked away. “Old ones mostly. Sable, Mr. Alonzo, Gunner’s grandma.” Her face twisted. “It was my fault.”
I squeezed her hand as hard as I could, which was less than a handshake but more than a prayer.
“Wasn’t you, Wren. This was Silas and whatever demon he rode bareback.
You saved us. You brought the antidote.” I wanted to say more, but the effort tore the air from my lungs.
“If you hadn’t, we’d have all died. Greenbriar had been planning something for years. ”
She shook her head. “Stop. Just stop.” The words came out sharp, but her grip didn’t loosen. “I just feel responsible. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d have stayed gone.”
It took all my strength to push myself up.
The room spun, slow at first, then steadied.
“You want to hear my theory?” I coughed.
My own voice was strange to me, like listening to yourself on an old tape.
“I think you made the shit start mattering. Before you, I didn’t give a fuck about much of anything.
Now I want to kill everyone responsible for this, and then I want to come back here and figure out how to live.
With you.” I let that hang between us, ugly and real.
Her face trembled, and I watched the wall come down and the girl I remembered peek through, just for a second. “You always were a terrible liar, Eli Leonard.”
“Never lied to you, Wren. Not once.” I forced my fingers to curl around hers, and this time, she let herself believe it.
Doc came in every few hours to check vitals, hang new bags, mutter about “goddamn miracles” and “demonic gene-editing.” He’d gotten the first shot of the antidote himself, so his hands only shook a little.
He said the others were stable. Some needed more time.
A few, like Rocket, were being kept in isolation, so their tiny hearts didn’t explode from the shock.
On the third day, the room was quiet. Not dead quiet—just the absence of fear. The antidote had done its job. We’d lost six, maybe more. The pack would be okay. They tried to take us down, but we’d come back stronger.
Bronc was up, but weak, his voice gone to hell. He called a meeting, insisted on it. Doc argued, said it was too soon, but Bronc’s face was set and he would not be moved. So the survivors gathered, limped, dragged, or wheeled in. Even Rocket was there, carried by a nurse in a sling like a baby.
The war room looked like an ICU. Blankets on the chairs, IVs run into arms and legs, oxygen tanks for the worst of us. Bronc presided at the head, face gaunt but alive. Juliet beside him, pale and shaking but with the same iron in her spine as ever.
When I walked in, the room went still.
I pulled Parker with me, not caring who saw.
Bronc’s eyes narrowed, then softened. “Sit,” he said. “We need to talk.”
I did. The chair felt like a punishment, but I’d earned it.
He looked at Parker. “Tell us what happened after they took you.”
She took a steadying breath. “I woke up in a room at the Greenbriar compound in Clovis. Apparently, they relocated everything and everyone there. I was chained to a bed. Silas was in the room, and he told me about the toxin and that I had been given the antidote. He said that everyone here would be dead in a few days. He showed me the case that held the vials and that he’d gotten them from Maltraz.
He’d left me alone for a while, and I managed to slip the cuffs.
I waited for him to come back. Don’t know if he was watching me by camera or what, but he came in with his gun drawn.
I hit him, and the gun went under the bed.
I went under after it. He looked under the bed, and I took the opportunity to put a bullet in his head.
Silas is dead. I also managed to kill two of his bodyguards.
But I didn’t see Vex, Rook, or Dagger. Those are his main officers. They’re still out there.”
“Holy shit. Thank you Parker. Sounds like you cut off the head of the snake. That leaves the body, and we know that with Greenbriar there is always someone waiting to sew another head right back on it. Maltraz is a different matter altogether. I think, for him, he saw an opportunity. Greenbriar has to be the priority.”
No one argued.
“Doc says we’re through the worst,” Bronc said. “But if we don’t answer this, they'll be back. I need ideas.”
Gunner groaned, “They might have vampire help too.”
Arsenal, from his wheelchair: “I say Greenbriar first. Then we’ll deal with the other parasites later.”
“Agreed. We don’t wait,” I said. “We take the fight to them. But we do it smart. Not like last time. Not a head-on charge. We bait the trap, and when they come, we finish it. We wipe out everyone in leadership. And their pack?”
Bronc contemplated. “Damn it. They are likely innocent. Just because you’re born into a shitty pack doesn’t make you a shitty wolf. Or maybe it does. I don’t like the idea of a wholesale massacre. That’s not who we are.”
I spoke up. “Well, they’re in the West King’s territory now. Slade Stewart can pick up the pieces.”
Bronc’s grin was mean. “Shit, that’ll endear Iron Valor to another territory.
I doubt they’ve even registered their presence, much less pledged fealty to Stewart.
Maybe after we take down Greenbriar leadership, we can see if Rafe can make contact to let Stewart know that a pack in his territory tried to genocide the south’s strongest pack.
That should get Stewart off his ass to get the remnants handled. ”
Menace offered to send his healer and her team to help everyone heal faster so we’d be healed and ready to face Greenbriar when they strike.
Bronc agreed. He adjourned the meeting with a wave. The pack filed out, with a plan in place.