Chapter 27
ROWAN
Cade gets me back to my room, and as soon as the lock clicks shut behind me, I sag against the wood like someone’s just cut the strings holding me up.
My palms press flat against the door. It’s cool under my skin, the kind of cold that makes the heat in my veins feel louder.
I let my head fall back with a soft thud and taste the adrenaline at the back of my throat.
Ho. Ly. Shit.
My lips buzz, my chest is too tight, and somewhere behind my ribs, my wolf is purring so loud I can hear her rasping against my bones, begging to be let free. I don’t know if I should laugh, cry, or run until the thrumming in my limbs bleeds out.
The kiss at the creek keeps replaying in my mind on a loop. The heat of Cade’s mouth. The way his hands held me like he was afraid I’d disappear. The quiet sounds he made—half growl, half groan—ones I felt more than I heard. That wasn’t just a kiss. It was so much more. An earthquake.
Ours, Wolf sighs happily, stretching inside me like a cat basking in the sun.
“Dangerous,” I mutter back. Because that’s what this is. Cade Westin is dangerous to every defense I’ve built around my heart, and now? Those defenses are cracked wide open.
I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to ignore the way my pulse refuses to settle. Because if this is what happens when he kisses me, what the hell happens if I let myself fall the rest of the way?
And it wasn’t just the kiss that rocked me.
My chest still hums with the strange, wild energy I’d pulled from the creek. The memory hums under my ribs, a pleasant electric ache, like sunlight that stays inside you even after you go indoors.
Wolf keeps purring in the back of my head, satisfied and smug. She liked that. She likes him.
I close my eyes and try to hold on to the aftertaste of the earth—the way the ground felt like it accepted my overflow and then let me go.
It’s the first time in the last few days that the word “control” didn’t feel like a threat.
For a few breathless minutes, I truly believed I could do this.
I can be both the storm and the person who closes the window afterward.
An out-of-place sound cuts my reverie—different than a floorboard settling, lighter than Liz breathing. Something like fabric sliding.
My eyes snap open. The skin over my arms prickles, not the wolf’s warning this time but something thinner, a human instinct.
There’s someone else here.
I tell myself it’s nothing. NightShade is full of strange things. Maybe Liz is reorganizing my closet because she can’t sleep. Maybe I’m still buzzing from the creek and hearing things.
Then, the closet door moves.
Not a groan or a creak caused by an old, magical house—a deliberate, small slide.
The air from my lungs leaves me all at once. The world narrows to the gap at that closet door and the blood in my ears. My wolf hums from within, eager and suddenly hungry for blood; she wants to throw herself at this threat like it’s for sport.
Do not move, she says, low and clipped.
I don’t know if she’s warning me or ordering me. All I know is I don’t want to find out what’s hiding behind that door.
I turn to exit my room and call for Cade, but before I can touch the handle, a light flashes around me and the next thing I know… I’m on my ass.
A cloaked figure stands over me. Hood shadowing a face I can’t make out, though every nerve in me insists it doesn’t matter. He—an assumption I make based on the flat chest—doesn’t make a sound, not when his boots kiss the floorboards, or when his hand flicks upward.
Something glints, arcing into the air.
I suck in a breath and kick out with my feet, calling on my wolf strength, but her presence is dim. Where the hell are you?
Light… Spell… Can’t shift. Sealed room. Her words are clipped, but I get enough to know what she’s saying.
I’m on my own here.
Worse, no one outside these walls will hear me if I call for help.
The intruder lunges. Instinct and the last few days of practice take over.
I roll to the side, dodging his first swipe, pivoting like Cade drilled into me.
Getting back up, my elbow snaps up into his ribs—solid, like hitting stone.
He doesn’t even grunt. His fist connects with my shoulder, spinning me into the wall so hard I see white as I stumble.
I push myself back to a standing position, chest burning, and slam my knee toward his gut once he comes close again.
But he catches my leg midair, twisting. Pain shreds up my side as I crash to the floor, breaking a chair in the process. My wolf snarls, but her presence is still dulled as I stagger back up, teeth bared.
He’s stronger and faster. Every hit he lands sends me rattling, but I refuse to stay down. Fury keeps me upright. I won’t go out like this. Not today.
I move to attack again, this time aiming lower. If I have to fight dirty, then so be it, but before I can kick him square in the balls, he reaches for my loose hair, yanking my head back like I’m nothing more than an annoyance.
Red floods my vision.
My hand scrambles over the ground, trying to find the strength to get back up and break his hold on me, but instead, I find splintered wood. A broken chair leg. I wrap my fingers tight around it, ignoring the sting of tiny cuts into my palm, and shove myself upward.
One of my hands clamps over his shoulder, and a white-hot pain lances through my palm like I’ve pressed it to a coal. It sears—brief and electric—but I don’t let go. My rage is all-consuming, and this guy is going to be stopped.
He releases my hair, wavering on his feet before I’ve even hit him, but I don’t pause. I arc my arm back and strike.
The wood pierces through his stomach, blood gushing onto the rug next to my bed, and he leans into me.
The heat beneath my palm intensifies and moves through me like it did at the creek, but it’s not as overwhelming. Still, the sensations are the same, just shorter-lasting. My heart pounds and power licks along my skin, yet I’m doing nothing more than standing here, watching him bleed.
At least until even that changes.
His breath leaves him in a harsh grunt, eyes widening beneath the hood. I try to step away, intent on going to the door and calling for help, because even though this guy was likely trying to kidnap me, I don’t really want to be a murderer.
Before I make it to the first step, his knees fold. He collapses like a rag, the cloak swallowing him into a heap on my rug.
What the hell?
I stare at him, panting, every nerve on fire. The wood juts from his side, blood dark and blending against his cloak. Too much blood.
“No,” I whisper, dropping beside him. My hands hover uselessly above the wound, trembling. “No, no, I didn’t—I didn’t mean—”
He doesn’t move. No chest rise. No shifting breath. The hush in the room presses in, heavy and absolute.
I thought I’d only slowed him—stopped him long enough to get help. The stillness says otherwise.
He’s dead.
Yet, he shouldn’t be.
Cade repeated several facts to me during our training sessions until they felt like law. One of which being that supernaturals don’t die like humans, not unless their hearts are ripped out or something catastrophic happens. Heads snapped off, bodies torn apart—things that leave obvious marks.
There’s nothing here like that.
It’s going to be okay, Wolf says, her presence back to normal somehow.
How do you figure? I screech in my head because there’s no way I’m shouting and drawing attention. If she’s back, the room might not be sealed any longer.
Just go get Cade, she urges. He’ll fix this.
I shake my head so hard my vision blurs, my gaze snapping back to the body sprawled at my feet. My stomach twists. No. No way. We’re burying this guy in the woods. Nobody here is going to know I killed someone.
I can’t handle the thought of one of them looking at me with any sort of doubt in their eyes. I don’t want to be the doom and gloom. I want to just be Rowan, the newly formed shifter, who isn’t going to destroy the world.
If Liz, Cade, or even Iris start to think I’m capable of… No, I just can’t allow that possibility to happen. Too much has already happened. I won’t add this to the list.
You’re being ridiculous, Wolf chides, but even she sounds less sure than she means to.
Am I, though? I glare at the corpse, my heart pounding like it’s trying to break out of my chest. Cade and the others already know the prophecy.
They already think I’m some walking curse waiting to happen.
If I tell them, if they see what I’ve done, I’ll be handing them proof of what hasn’t really been said out loud.
I see where you’re coming from, but you’re not giving them enough credit, Wolf offers, but it feels like a weak argument.
I don’t care. They won’t know I’m a murderer. Not if I can help it. My inner voice is barely a whisper.
I know how this looks, I know how irrational it is, but the panic pumping through my veins isn’t just fear—it’s ice and fire, terror and shame all tangled together, burning up the oxygen until I can’t breathe.
I’ve spent this past year alone. I’ve only just begun to believe I could have a real family again.
Can I risk losing that over one night—over an accident I can’t even explain? Is hoping they’ll believe me enough? Will they even see the difference between self-defense and the prophecy coming true?
I can’t answer that last one with a definitive yes, which tells me all I need to know.
Whatever just happened—this power, this surge, this thing—it wasn’t normal. It wasn’t even what happened at the creek. It was darker. It felt like something inside me uncoiling, like a shadow stretching to fill a room.
And until I can understand it, until I can be sure I won’t become exactly what they all fear, I can’t tell them. I can’t risk it.
Not when I’ve fought so hard to belong these last few days. Not when I’ve finally found people who want to keep me safe.
Not when one mistake could take it all away.