Chapter 13 WOLF AT THE DOOR #2
Morgan’s entire body went ramrod straight, her hands curling into fists at her sides. “I most certainly did not,” she snapped, her voice pitching defensively.
“Not you,” said Arianna, a touch of annoyance in her tone. “The other one.”
Morgan’s mouth popped open. “Carly?”
That was all it took.
Dominic charged, his body dissolving into shadow and momentum so fast it left a gust of wind in its wake.
The air snapped where he’d been standing, a violent displacement that rattled the windows and sent a ripple through the room.
I barely had time to register what happened before he reappeared halfway across the living room.
One moment Carly was standing behind Morgan, wide-eyed and frozen. The next, Dominic was there, his hand already fisted in the front of her sweater, hauling her forward like she weighed nothing at all.
Carly let out a blood-curdling scream, but Caleb and Gabriel were already there, stepping in to protect her.
Gabriel crashed into Dominic, shoving him back a step as his arm came up across Dominic’s sternum like an iron bar.
Without missing a beat, Caleb threw himself in front of his sister at the same time, putting himself squarely in Dominic’s line of fire.
His arms were spread wide and his palms were glowing with the last residual magic he probably had to spend, but desperation had made him reckless enough to try anyway.
My heart pounded as I looked up and met Dominic’s eyes. There was nothing human left in them. No warmth. No restraint. Just a bottomless, obliterating fury that hollowed me out on sight. His lips peeled back in a snarl, and the sound that tore out of him was more beast than man.
Carly reeled back with a choked gasp, her hands flying up defensively as she clambered behind Morgan.
“Stand down,” gritted Gabriel, his voice strained with the effort of holding his brother back. His boots scraped against the floor as Dominic pushed forward, testing the resistance.
“Get out of my way, brother.”
“This isn’t the way, Dominic. Back off and give her a chance to explain herself.”
“Explain herself?” Dominic’s glare turned murderous as his voice dropped to a lethal register, each word wrapped with barely contained violence.
“She invited death into this house. She let them inside. Gave them access to the one person—” He faltered, his wrath fracturing into something rawer before he quickly buried it and turned his rage back to Carly.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done? What you allowed to happen to her? Stupid, stupid girl.”
Caleb widened his stance, planting himself more firmly in front of his sister even as his hands trembled.
Dominic’s eyes cut to him like an executioner’s blade. “Move.”
“She’s my sister. You know I can’t do that.”
The smile that pulled at Dominic’s mouth was terrible. Painfully beautiful and cold as winter. “If you’re attempting to pull at my heart strings, be warned. I have not a single one.”
“She made a mistake,” pleaded Caleb, doing everything he could to save Carly from Dominic’s wrath.
“A mistake is forgetting to prime your supper before you bleed it out,” he said, baring his teeth. “Inviting the executioner’s hand into someone’s home is murder. The only question is whether it’s premeditated or merely convenient.”
“I didn’t mean for this to happen!” The words burst from Carly in a desperate rush.
“They told me it would help her. They said—they promised it would only affect the Horsemen. That it would protect everyone. Keep us safe from what was coming. They told me what would happen if the Horsemen didn’t succeed.
I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought—”
“You thought of nothing but yourself,” growled Dominic, his free hand curling and uncurling at his side like he was physically restraining it from reaching for her throat.
“You made a choice to put her fate in enemy hands. Do you truly think your fear somehow excuses you? That your good intentions give back what’s been stolen from her? ”
“I didn’t know—”
“Dominic, please,” urged Gabriel, his muscles coiled from the strain of holding him back, but Dominic paid him no mind at all.
His eyes were still locked on Carly. “Your ignorance is excusable. It does not diminish the pain she has endured or the death sentence you put on her life,” he bit out so low and cold that it was almost worse than if he had screamed it at her.
“I…I’m sorry.”
“SAY IT TO HER!” he boomed, his command cracking through the room like a whip. “She’s the one paying for what you did.”
Carly’s gaze found mine, and I watched her face crumple completely. Tears streamed down her cheeks as she took in the full extent of the corruption—the death sentence written across my skin in black veins and failing muscle.
My hands shook in my lap, fingers twitching with spasms I couldn’t control.
I wanted to look away from her, to close my eyes against the horror and guilt on Carly’s face.
To scream at her and ask her how she could do this to me.
But I couldn’t do anything. The poison had long since spread past my jawline and was creeping into my mouth now, thickening my tongue and turning even the smallest movement into a fight.
But I had to know. I had to understand. Drawing on nothing but fumes and the crushing shock and betrayal of what Carly had done, I somehow dug all the way inside myself and forced out one single word.
“Why?”
It came out as nothing more than a rasp but she’d heard me.
Carly shook her head, sobbing. “They approached me with the Horsemen. They said they were trying to contain the threat. That the spell was the only way to stop what was coming without hurting anyone. I believed them.” She looked at Caleb, desperate for him to understand.
“They promised our family would be protected. That this was the price for keeping everyone safe.”
Caleb looked gutted. His face had gone ashen, his eyes glassy as he stared at his sister like she’d become a stranger. “How could you bring a Talisman into this house? Without telling anyone? Without telling me?”
“I was trying to save us!”
“By sacrificing her to them?” asked Morgan, her tone biting. “That’s not saving us, Carly. That’s screwing all of us over.”
“I didn’t know they would force her into the ritual,” cried Carly, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. “They promised no one would be hurt. They promised—”
A terrifying growl thundered out of Dominic, making Carly flinch back as though it had struck her.
“Dominic! Enough!” yelled Gabriel, his arm trembling with the effort of holding Dominic back, but his voice remained even. “This won’t fix anything.”
“I beg to differ,” snarled Dominic, his eyes tapering at the corners. “I’ve come to find that consequences are an excellent deterrent to repeat offenses.”
“Alright, enough of this shit,” snapped Trace, glaring over at the whole lot of them. “We’re wasting time here. She needs to get the fuck out of here so the witches can do the spell. We’ll deal with this later when Jemma’s out of the woods.”
And by this, I assumed he meant Carly.
“We’re going.” Caleb nodded jerkily, guiding Carly behind him with one hand. “I’ll take her home. Okay?”
His eyes went to Dominic, waiting.
Dominic didn’t move an inch. Neither did Gabriel’s arm across his chest. The entire room held in the balance of whatever passed between them, nobody breathing, nobody reaching for anything that might tip the scale the wrong way.
Then Dominic’s gaze cut to me. Just for a second. Just long enough to see how desperately I needed this to be over. When he looked back at Caleb, he gave a single, barely perceptible nod and shifted his weight, clearing enough space between him and the doorway for them to pass.
Caleb didn’t wait for him to reconsider. He steered Carly forward, one arm still braced around her as he guided her past Dominic and Gabriel and out into the hallway. She stumbled alongside him, still crying, still whispering apologies into the space between sobs. But no one was listening anymore.
Not Trace, whose face had gone flat and distant. Not Morgan, who had turned her head toward the fire. Not Gabriel, who kept his arm locked against his brother’s chest until the sound of the front door clicking shut confirmed they were gone.
Only then did the tension in Dominic’s body ease fractionally.
Gabriel finally lowered his arm and stepped back, blowing out a long breath as though he’d been holding it the entire time.
He didn’t bother to relax though. Instead, he took three long strides and crossed the room to Anita, palm extended.
She dropped the talisman into his hand without a word and then watched as he pivoted toward the fireplace and tossed it into the flames.
Sickly green fire immediately flared up, devouring the object in mere seconds.
The air shimmered around it then pulse outward from the hearth like heat over pavement. The moment it passed over me, I swore I could feel something loosen inside me, something I hadn’t even known was there, lifting suddenly from my chest. Even the house itself exhaled right along with me.
And it wasn’t just me who felt it. Across the room, Dominic rolled his neck slowly, deliberately, as though shedding something that had been coiled too tight.
Tessa’s hand slipped from her stomach to her lap, her posture softening for the first time since she’d sat back down.
Even Gabriel seemed to stand a little straighter, the weight he’d been carrying in his shoulders easing by degrees.
Beside me, Trace sat up, his jaw unclenching degree by degree, and I felt the familiar thrum of his presence through our bond settle back into something less frayed.
“Much better,” said Anita as though she had felt the shift as well. “Now that that’s taken care of, we can move on to the anchoring spell.”
I let out a shaky breath, allowing myself a single, dangerous spark of hope. That this anchoring spell would slow the spread. Buy us time. Maybe even reverse what was eating through me.
But it wasn’t just my survival I was praying for.
It was Dominic’s too. For what he would become if I didn’t survive this.
Because what I'd seen in his eyes, what had risen so easily and so completely, wasn’t just anger. It was something far darker, something that had been there the whole time and had simply been waiting for a reason to slip the leash. And it terrified me in a way the rot never had.
And in that moment, through the poison and pain and fear, I knew.
This wasn’t just about saving me anymore.
It was about saving all of us.