A Wolf’s Revenge

Chapter 9

I was sitting on the hood of my car outside my apartment building when my phone rang. Quarter past eight. Full dark.

The guilt had been eating at me for months.

My phone rang again. I looked at the screen.

Jeff.

Jeff Alli had been my closest friend since we were nine years old, had broken each other’s faces over a girl in the school yard, and decided afterward that anyone willing to take a punch like that was worth keeping. He was my right hand. The only person besides Kerra who had this number.

“There’s a big problem, Z.” His voice was low and wrong. Jeff did not sound like that.

I was already moving toward the car. “What is it?”

“Your father ordered the hit on the Conti’s. Tonight. They’re moving now.” A pause. “Kerra’s inside.”

The world went very still.

“I’m already trailing them,” he said quickly. “I’ll do what I can, but you need to get here. Now.”

I was in the car before he finished the sentence, the Glock from the glove compartment in my hand, the engine already running. I didn’t think about the ring in my pocket, the tickets, or Stockholm. I thought about one thing only.

I drove.

I parked three blocks from the Conti villa and went the rest of the way on foot, keeping to the shadow-lines of the buildings.

I smelled it before I heard it.

Wolfsbane — that flat, green-bitter wrongness on the air, faint this far out and unmistakable. My wolf recoiled from it before my mind had finished naming it. My father had a signature, and this was it. He did not bring his pack to a wall and trust them to win. He poisoned the ground first.

Then the sound came up over the rooftops — gunfire, voices, the particular quality of chaos that meant a coordinated attack already underway.

The Conti estate was full; they’d been hosting a family evening, which meant more bodies, more confusion, more cover.

My father had chosen the night well. He chose everything well.

The northwest corner of the wall had a single patrol guard, his attention pulled inward by the noise growing inside. I came over the wall in under ten seconds, put him down quietly, and dropped into the grounds.

The aconite hit me full the moment my feet touched Conti soil.

It was in the smoke already curling off the perimeter fires, in the spray someone had laid down across the lawns — my wolf pulled toward the change on instinct and slammed into a wall of sickness, the air turning to something my body read as poison.

I forced it back down. I had been dosed before, in training; my father believed a son of his should know what his own weapons felt like from the wrong end.

I could function through it. Barely. On two legs.

Which meant the Conti pack could not.

I understood the shape of the night then, crouched in the dark at the edge of their grounds.

The Conti men were fighting as men — guns, knives, the clumsy desperation of wolves who had reached for the shift and found it locked.

A Conti patrol could hold a wall against three times its number when it could turn, and that was the whole reason my father had failed to break them for three years.

So he had not come to beat their pack. He had come to make sure there was no pack to beat.

He had taken the one advantage they had and burned it out of the air before his first man came over the wall.

I kept my head down and moved for the main house.

The door guard came at me. I put him down, went through the door, and started calling her name.

She was in the dining room. Jeff was with her, crouched beside her, a hand on her shoulder, and when she saw me come through the door, she was across the room in three steps, her arms around my neck, her whole body shaking.

I held her. Under the smoke, the aconite, and the cordite, her scent reached me — the one my wolf had recognized in a school corridor a lifetime ago and had never once let me forget, no matter how many years I spent telling myself it was something I had chosen, instead of something that had chosen me.

It cut through the poison. It always had.

I pressed my mouth to the top of her head and held her as tightly as I could with the noise of the attack still coming through the walls.

“Zimife.” She pulled back to look at my face. Her eyes were red, her cheeks tracked with tears, but she was steady underneath it — that bedrock quality she had, the thing that had been there from the first time I met her. “What’s happening? Who is doing this?”

I couldn’t answer that. Not here. Not now.

“I’ll explain everything. But we need to leave right now.”

“I’m not leaving without my family.” Her jaw set. “My grandfather is somewhere in this building. My cousins are upstairs. I won’t—“

“Kerra.” I put both hands on her face. “The baby. You can’t turn. Even if I could get the rest of it out of the air, you can’t turn.” The words came out lower than I meant them to. “You have to let me carry the part of this you can’t carry yourself.”

Something moved in her expression — not surrender, she was not a woman who surrendered, but a recalibration.

Her hand went briefly to the curve of her belly, the old instinct of a she-wolf who knew exactly what she could and could not do for the life inside her.

She looked at me for a long moment and I watched her make the decision, watched the cost of it move across her face.

“Get the children out first,” she said. “Upstairs, the east wing. There are four of them, and the youngest can’t hold a shift yet. Get them out, then come back for me.”

“I’m not leaving you—“

“Zimife.” Her voice was absolutely steady. “Four children. Go.”

I looked at Jeff. He was already moving for the stairs.

“I’ll cover the ground floor,” he said. “Go.”

I was halfway up the first flight when my father’s voice came from behind me.

I turned.

Aleksander Zorander was standing in the entrance hall with two of his men flanking him, his suit jacket still immaculate, his face wearing the expression I had grown up fearing most — not anger, but disappointment’s colder cousin.

Assessment. The look of a man revising his estimate of something downward.

He was breathing the same poisoned air I was and standing in it untroubled, which told me he’d dosed himself ahead of time, the way you’d inoculate before walking into a sickroom. He had thought of everything. He always thought of everything.

Jeff was on the floor. Not dead — breathing, one hand pressed to his ribs — but down.

My father’s men had my arms before I registered they’d moved. In clean air, I’d have thrown them across the room. In this air, I was barely stronger than the men holding me, and they knew it.

“She’s pregnant,” I said. My voice came out raw. “She is carrying your grandchild, Father. Whatever else you decide tonight, let her go.”

The surprise registered on his face for exactly two seconds. Then it was gone.

He straightened his jacket. He looked at me the way he had looked at me my entire life — as a function, an instrument, something that had either performed correctly or failed to — and he said, “No child of Conti blood will ever carry the Zorander name. As for the girl—“ He turned toward the door. “She’ll die tonight with the rest of them. The aconite will see to it she dies as a woman, not a wolf. That’s more mercy than her grandfather ever showed me.”

“Father—“

“Report for work tomorrow morning.” He was already walking. “We won’t speak of this again.”

One of his men hit me from behind. I went down hard, my head cracking against the marble, and lay there in the spreading dark of my own blood — the wound trying to close and the aconite holding it open — listening to my father’s footsteps move toward the door and out of the building.

Somewhere above me, the ceiling began to burn.

Jeff’s face swam into focus above me.

“Let me help you up.”

I swung at him. He caught my arm.

“I know,” he said. “I know, Z. I’m sorry.”

“You told him.” My voice didn’t sound like mine. “You told him about Kerra.”

Jeff’s face was wrecked with something that might have been genuine. “You were going to throw everything away. The pack. The family. Everything we built. Over a Conti.” He let go of my arm. “I covered for you for months. But you stopped being you. And someone had to make the call.”

“She is carrying my child.”

He flinched. Just barely. “I didn’t know that.”

“Now you do.”

The fire was moving down the staircase. I could hear it — the deep crack of timber giving way — and under it, fainter, the thing that turned my stomach worse than the smoke: the aconite cooking off in the heat, doubling, the whole house filling with a poison that meant not one wolf in it could save itself the way our kind was built to.

I got up on my own.

The stairs were still passable but barely.

I went up through thickening smoke, one hand on the wall, bent low where the air was thinnest. The east wing corridor was already lost — a solid wall of fire from the junction to the end, the heat hitting me ten feet before I reached it like a physical barrier.

My wolf strained against the cage of the poison, wanting to give me the speed, the resilience, the body that might have made it through.

It had nothing to give. None of us did. That was the design.

I stood at the junction and understood, with the clarity that comes in the absence of any other option, that there was no way through.

I turned back.

Kerra was where I’d left her, in the dining room, on the floor now, her back against the wall, her hands moving slow and deliberate over her belly the way she did when she was frightened and trying not to show it.

When I came back through the door without the children, her face told me she already knew.

“I couldn’t get through,” I said. “The corridor. I’m sorry.”

She closed her eyes for one second. Then she opened them. “Okay,” she said. “Okay. Help me up.”

I soaked the curtains from the dining room in the kitchen sink, working fast, the smoke already thickening in the lower rooms. I wrapped them around her, lifted her, and went for the nearest exit.

The windows on the ground floor were jammed — locked from outside, which meant my father had sealed the house before his men went in.

I put my shoulder into three of them and got nowhere.

My shoulder was a man’s shoulder tonight, not a wolf’s.

The smoke was getting into my lungs and staying there, each breath shallower than the last.

We were running out of time.

I carried her to the far end of the corridor where the fire hadn’t yet reached, set her down against the wall, and crouched in front of her.

“Zimife.” Her voice was barely there now, scraped thin by the smoke. She was coughing between words, her face pale beneath the soot, but her eyes were on mine and they were clear. “Stop looking at the windows.”

“I’m going to get you out.”

“Listen to me.” She reached up and put her hand against my face. Her fingers were cold. “You came back for me. You came into a burning building you couldn’t turn inside of, and you came back for me.”

“I should have kept you out of it entirely. I should never have—“

“Zimife.” Her thumb moved against my jaw. “I know what you are,” she said quietly. “I think I’ve known for a while. The way you’d go still when my grandfather’s name came up. The way your scent changed.” A pause that cost her air she didn’t have. “It doesn’t change what you are to me.”

The words went through me worse than the fire.

The fire found the far end of the corridor. Ten feet. Eight.

I pressed my forehead to hers. Her hand was still on my face.

“I had a ring,” I said. It was a stupid thing to say. It was the only thing I had.

She made a sound that was almost a laugh. “I know you did. I could smell it on you for weeks. Onyx and your nerves.” Her eyes were going unfocused. “I would have said yes. I want you to know that.”

The fire reached us.

I pulled her against me, wrapped the drapes tighter, put my body between her and the wall of heat, and held on. I could feel her breathing — shallow, ragged, slowing — and I kept talking to her, her name, over and over, because as long as I was saying it, she was still there.

And then, in the last of it, my wolf stopped letting me lie.

It had recognized her in a school corridor four months ago, and I had spent every day since calling it something else — strategy, weakness, want.

It chose that moment, the worst and only moment, to give me the truth with no room left to refuse it: mate.

The word arrived whole and undeniable, the way it should have arrived the first time I caught her scent, and it arrived exactly as the thing it named went out.

The bond severed. I felt it go — a thread I had refused to acknowledge existed, burning through and snapping, leaving a wound where my wolf had been. Something in me went quiet that night and did not come back for a very long time.

Then, there were hands on me. Strong ones, dragging me backward, and a voice I half-recognized, yelling something I couldn’t process.

I fought it.

I was still fighting it when the darkness came.