Chapter 27
Varek
The smoke was thicker here. It hung heavy between the buildings, turning the sun into a dim smear of orange.
The streets were unrecognizable now, cracked pavement slick with blood and littered with broken glass and debris, the remains of barricades glowing like embers.
Bodies lay in the gutters, wolves and humans both.
I pushed through it all, my comm hissing in my ear. Rowan’s voice bled through the static: “Varek, report! Where are you?”
“I’m in the northern quarter,” I said, breath ragged. “She’s here. I can smell her.”
Mariah’s scent was faint but unmistakable. Every instinct in me screamed to shift, to tear through whatever stood between us, but the chemical dampeners still burned under my skin, making it impossible. I was stuck halfway between man and beast, trembling with rage.
“Commander Varek!” one of Soren’s scouts shouted, pointing down the avenue.
I followed his gaze, and my stomach turned to ice.
At the end of the boulevard, through the drifting ash, a group of Council soldiers stood in formation on a platform. Behind them, floodlights cut through the haze, bathing the buildings around them in stark, blinding white.
And there, at the center of it all, they had her.
My Mariah.
My mate.
She was on her knees, her wrists bound. Her clothes were torn, soaked with dirt and blood. One of the soldiers gripped her hair, forcing her head up toward the light. With the other hand, he held a blade to her throat. She didn’t flinch.
The man beside her stepped forward on the raised dais. He was tall, severe, every inch the personification of the Council’s arrogance. His uniform was a dark slate color, his polished boots gleaming. A silver insignia glinted at his throat.
Commander Darius Voss.
I knew his face. Everyone did. Quite literally a monster in a human suit.
He was the Council’s main architect, the man who had designed the breeding programs. The man who was responsible for the death of thousands of women—my Elena—and now he held Mariah’s life in his hands.
“Commander Varek!” he called, his voice echoing down the street. “I know you’re out there.”
His words carried on the smoke, smooth and clear. He was enjoying this.
“I have something that belongs to you.”
The soldier yanked Mariah’s head up and back by her hair. The knife pressed against her throat, catching the light in a perfect, gleaming line. A thin bead of red welled up where it touched her skin.
He was as good as dead.
“Come take her, Commander,” Voss said, smiling faintly. “Come and take your pet.”
Every muscle in my body went rigid, but I tempered my rage, at least for the moment.
“They have Mariah,” I growled, pressing the button on my comm and informing the others.
The comm in my ear buzzed with voices, Silas growling louder than any of the others. “We can flank them,” he said. “Circle through the old tram station.”
“No,” I said. I almost didn’t recognize the sound of my own voice, it was so laden with violent rage. “If they see us move, they’ll kill her before we’re close enough to stop it.”
“Then what’s the plan?” Rowan asked next, his voice tight.
“I’m going in.”
“Varek—” Soren started, my comm bursting with sound in my ear, but I cut her off.
“I’m going.”
I holstered my rifle, raising my hands slowly as I stepped into the open street. The soldiers saw me immediately. A ripple moved through their ranks, rifles rising in perfect unison.
“There he is!” one shouted.
I kept walking. The ground crunched under my boots. The wind shifted.
Voss spread his arms, mockingly pleasant. “Ah, the infamous Commander Varek. The wolf who turned on his masters. I wondered how long it would take before you came crawling back to me.”
He gestured lazily toward Mariah. “Here’s the choice, then. You and your foolish little rebellion surrender, or she dies.”
I stopped twenty feet from the platform. A small contingent of the soldiers shifted, forming a semicircle around my mate and aiming their guns at her.
“Let her go,” I said.
“Or what?” Voss asked, his smile widening. “You’ll snarl at me? You can’t even shift, can you? I can smell the suppressant all over you.”
He turned toward Mariah and crouched down, his hand gripping her chin, forcing her to look at him. “She’s quite something, though. A fearless little spitfire. I can see why you mated her.”
“Let her go,” I repeated, seeking to instill every ounce of my rage into my words.
Voss looked back at me. “On your knees, Commander. Hands behind your head.”
Mariah’s eyes met mine then. There was no fear there. Only a spark, faint but burning. I felt it like a knife in my chest.
I dropped to one knee, hands slowly rising behind my head. My heart pounded.
“Thaaaat’s it,” Voss crooned, straightening. “Be a good wolf, and maybe I’ll let her live long enough to watch you die.”
He nodded to the soldier holding her. The man lifted the knife, pressing it harder against her throat. All I could see was the line of red dripping down from the blade.
That was the moment everything stopped.
I didn’t hear the wind. I didn’t hear the shouts of my people behind me. All I heard was the rush of blood in my ears as the beat of an old and violent thing woke inside of me.
The suppressant burned in my veins, trying to hold me back. It didn’t matter. I was done waiting.
My vision narrowed down to a single point: Voss’s arrogant fucking smile.
Then I moved.
Faster than I should have been able to.
Faster than I’d ever moved in my life.
The soldiers barely had time to shout before I hit the first one. My fist connected with his throat and bone crunched. I grabbed his rifle as he fell and fired into the group of soldiers. Bullets tore through armor. Wolves howled in pain.
Voss shouted something, but it was lost in the chaos.
Mariah twisted as the soldier’s knife shifted against her skin. Quickly, she reared away from the blade and threw herself to the side, landing on the ground. She swept her leg out from under her in a wide circle and the guard went down with a shriek.
“Now!” I roared into the comm.
Silas’s and Rowan’s flanks hit the square at once, wolves and humans surging from the smoke, tearing into the Council’s line. Gunfire lit the night. Soren’s soldiers flooded in behind them, sweeping up stragglers with deadly accuracy.
The next moment, the guard leapt to his feet, grabbing Mariah and dragging her against him again, his arm a steel bar across her chest, his blade against her throat again. She fought, twisting, but he was stronger.
Mariah.
I slammed my shoulder into her captor’s back with all the force I had left. The impact drove him forward. His grip faltered just enough that the blade slipped sideways across Mariah’s neck—barely a whisper of contact, but enough to widen that thin red line.
Her gasp punched through me like shrapnel.
The soldier whirled, snarling. I caught his wrist mid-swing and shoved my forearm up beneath his arm, wedging it against his armpit.
The joint popped as I wrenched his arm outward, the sound of bone giving way followed by a wet, ugly tear.
Blood slicked my fingers as I twisted harder, sincerely wanting to rip his fucking arm off.
The knife clattered to the ground, its edge flashing as it spun out of reach.
He screamed, dropping to his knees, his hand bent at a wrong, impossible angle. I grabbed him by the collar and drove my elbow into the side of his head. The scream cut off.
There wasn’t time to breathe.
A rocket launcher hissed from the far end of the square. The round exploded, went wide, and hit a building a little bit away from us, showering us in debris. Rowan’s voice crackled in my comm just before the blast.
I saw Mariah’s eyes flash from green to gold. Her body shivered as she shifted. Her limbs morphed, skin erupted into fur, her scream twisting into a howl that echoed through the burning square.
She hit the nearest guard in full form, black fur with silver streaks catching the light as her teeth closed over his throat.
Blood sprayed across her muzzle. Another lunged at her from behind, and she spun, hurling the dying guard in her jaws into the second man, bringing him down.
She leapt on his chest and dug deeply through the man’s soft belly with her claws.
Two down. She moved like a storm: fierce, fast, and utterly unstoppable.
The fight closed around us in a circle of noise and flame.
I moved through it in time increments measured by my heartbeats, one target at a time.
My knife sank into the side of a soldier’s neck; I ripped it free and turned to fire at the one behind him.
A bullet grazed my ribs, the pain hot. I ignored it.
I caught another soldier’s arm as he swung a baton and drove my knife up under his ribs, feeling my blade hit his vital organs. He crumpled, and I stepped over him, onto the next.
When the smoke cleared enough for me to see, most of the Council’s line was down. Bodies smoldered in the debris, the air thick with blood and smoke. Rowan and Silas were at the perimeter, calling the remaining troops to pull back and regroup.
Then I saw Voss.
He’d slipped away in the confusion, moving toward the alleys beyond the square. He staggered, one hand holding something against his chest, his face pale with blood loss.
“Voss!” I roared.
He froze, looked back once, then turned around and ran.
Mariah snarled with barely contained rage. I met her gaze. No words were needed.
We went after him together.
The smoke swallowed him, but I could still hear his boots pounding down the street with cadence of a man running not from fear but toward something.
We tore after him through the ruins. The buildings loomed like broken teeth on either side of us. Fires licked the walls, turning everything gold and red. Ahead, Voss stumbled once, then straightened, ducking into a ruined courtyard.