Chapter 31
Chapter Thirty-One
SOREN
I sat on the sofa exactly where Cassian had left me, Asha swaddled in the oversized sweatshirt she’d claimed as her favorite blanket, and every few minutes she made a tiny sleepy noise and flexed her fingers against the fabric before settling again, completely unaware.
Yannick’s wolf was tucked between us, and I stroked its furry head, trying to settle my breathing and stop the rising swell of panic.
I checked the clock again. Over two hours now, and there was nothing to do but wait.
My gaze kept drifting to the open gun safe as Asha wriggled, searching for the bottle, before she sucked some more and then settled with a tiny sigh, and I smiled despite everything and brushed a fingertip across her cheek.
There was a dull vibration somewhere beyond the walls, faint enough that I nearly convinced myself I’d imagined it.
I held my breath and listened, muscles tight, and the silence came back, and I let the breath out slowly and told myself it could have been anything, a door closing, something falling, an old house settling under snow.
Then it came again, a heavy thud through the floor beneath my feet, followed seconds later by another one farther off, both muffled by concrete and steel and earth but carrying enough weight to lift the hairs on the back of my neck. Something was happening.
Careful not to wake Asha, I crossed to the monitor by the hidden door.
Every external feed had gone black, and Cassian had told me the system defaulted to blank screens if the cables were damaged or the power failed, which didn’t make the black screens any easier to see.
I stared at them too long before I made myself look away.
My eyes went to the folded map beside the radio instead, with the red line marking a narrow escape tunnel through the rock, emerging into a concealed shelter half a mile off, with warm clothes, a satellite phone, and a snowmobile waiting.
I glanced from the map to the sleeping weight in my arms and asked myself the only question that mattered.
If someone came through that door and it wasn’t Cassian, where would I go even if I went through the tunnel?
Not another safe house. Not another alpha.
Just miles of snow-covered forest, freezing air, and me carrying a baby.
It should have terrified me. Instead, it settled into something steadier, some old instinct that had kept me alive long before Cassian ever pulled me out of the snow. Whatever waited outside that tunnel was still better than my brother or Center 14.
Something scraped faintly beyond the tunnel door. The sound was swallowed by the stone, impossible to place. It could have been someone approaching from the hidden entrance, or someone coming from the house. I shifted Asha closer and waited.
The handle from the tunnel door turned, and I spun so fast Asha stirred, her tiny sigh making me tighten my hold on instinct.
Cold air spilled into the room as the door opened, and for one impossible heartbeat, relief hit me so hard my knees nearly gave way.
Cassian. Then the man stepped inside, and everything in me froze.
My brother was exactly as I remembered him, his dark coat immaculate despite the snow outside, his steel-grey hair smoothed in the same style as always, and cruel calculation in his eyes.
Emric closed the door behind him with slow, deliberate precision before finding me, then settling his gaze on Asha and keeping it there, and it made my skin crawl.
“There she is.” Emric’s mouth curved, the closest he ever came to warmth.
“So, you’re not dead then.” He studied me, cold and precise.
“Exposure, a blizzard, a body nobody needs to produce. Almost elegant.” His gaze flicked toward the window, toward the noise still carrying from beyond it.
“I never believed it for a second.” He lifted his watch to check it. “Time to leave.”
I took a step backward, then another, putting as much distance between us as the room allowed, every instinct screaming the same thing.
Keep him away from her. Somewhere outside, I could still hear shouting, the crack of something breaking, chaos that made no sense with him standing here so calm and so untouched by any of it, as if the storm outside existed purely for his convenience.
“How did you get in? Where’s—”
“Give her to me.”
He said it lightly, already bored with my questions, and the calm in his voice told me everything I needed to know.
Whatever was happening outside, he’d planned for it.
Maybe caused it. People could be dying out there and he was standing in my room asking for my daughter as casually as if she were something he’d left behind.
I stumbled back another step, closer to where I’d laid the gun. “You can’t have her.”
His gaze settled on Asha.
Not her face. Not the tiny hand curled against my shirt. He studied her with the cold assessment I remembered from home, weighing bloodlines and value and what could be produced from them.
“You can hand her to me, or I can take her from you.”
He came closer and the room tilted around me.
“You can’t—”
“I can. I will.” There was no anger in it. No impatience. No mercy in him I could appeal to. “You’re still useful, if I need you for more of them, but you don’t have to be.”
More of them.
My stomach turned.
“Your survival is a preference, Soren.” His eyes finally lifted to mine. “Not a requirement. The legacy is.”
Asha stirred, her fingers curling into my shirt, and something inside me went cold.
I placed her in the bassinet, keeping my body between him and Asha as I tucked the blanket around her. I wanted her hidden. I wanted him to forget she existed. I wanted walls, locked doors, and Cassian between her and this man forever.
“For God’s sake.”
The disgust in his voice made me turn.
He drew his pistol from inside his coat with the same unhurried precision he did everything else.
“Give me the brat.”
Some distant, sensible part of me knew I ought to be on the floor, begging, doing whatever it took to buy her one more second of freedom.
Instead, I was frozen in place, my fear grew exponentially, and I couldn’t breathe.
The bond flared to life in my chest, sudden and fierce, and for one disorienting second, it felt like Cassian was standing right behind me with his hand pressed flat to my back.
My brother is here.
Help me.
My arms stopped shaking. I grabbed the pistol and pointed it at him.
“You’re not taking my daughter,” I said, and the steadiness in my own voice startled me more than it seemed to startle him.
Something flickered behind Emric’s eyes, the first real crack in his composure since he’d walked through that door. “Put the weapon down, little brother.”
“No.” I kept the pistol level, both hands wrapped around the grip the way Cassian had shown me, and took a step left so that any bullet would go through me and not hit her. If I died, I had to trust that Cassian would go after her, protect her, love her if I couldn’t. But she was going to live.
“So dramatic.”
His gun swung upward toward my chest before I’d finished the sentence. The bond surged again, hot and violent. I threw myself sideways into the wall hard enough to knock the air from my lungs as the shot went wide, splintering the doorframe behind me.
Asha cried out, and the sound cut through me sharper than the gunshot had; it burned away whatever fear had been left in me.
I came off the wall shoulder-first and drove it into Emric’s ribs, and we went down together in a tangle of limbs, his pistol skittering somewhere into the dark and somewhere beyond the panic; my cat fought with me, snarling and clawing against the instinct to submit.
My gun was still trapped between us. Emric lunged for my wrist with his free hand, twisting it away from him. I fought, both of us wrestling for control as the muzzle swung wildly between us.
The gun exploded.
The sound was deafening in the small room, and for a heartbeat neither of us moved.
Then the pressure on my throat vanished as Emric tried to cover the wound in his throat.
Blood burst between his fingers in a bright, pulsing spray, spilling over his knuckles and down the front of his coat. His mouth opened, but whatever he tried to say dissolved into a wet choking sound.
He stared at me, confused, then his knees buckled, and he hit the floor so hard the sound echoed around the room. One final shudder ran through him, then he was still, and blood crept across the floorboards beneath his head.
This wasn’t real.
It can’t be real.
He’d get up. He always got up. Then he’d smile that cold smile, tell me I’d been stupid enough to believe I’d won, and he’d make me pay for it. He’d take Asha, hurt Cassian, and lock me away again.
His eyes stayed open, fixed on the ceiling, and my fingers had locked around the grip so tightly they hurt, but I couldn’t make them let go. I couldn’t breathe, but I couldn’t look away.
I’d spent my entire life believing Emric Kastor couldn’t be beaten or stopped. That he couldn’t die.
I killed him.
And behind me Asha was crying.
The gun slipped from my numb fingers and clattered onto the floor, and I crossed to her, gathering her up with hands that had gone unsteady again now the fight was over, and held her against my chest while she cried herself hoarse into my shoulder.
“I’ve got you,” I said, repeatedly, until I nearly believed it myself.
Emric lay where he’d fallen, the gun still lying between us.
I couldn’t stop shaking, and I slumped to the floor.
“Soren.”
Cassian was here? Was I imagining this? He was kneeling in front of me; his hands covered in blood that wasn’t all his. His gaze flicked once to Emric’s body before they came back to me, and I watched him understand exactly what had happened, and I reached for him.
“Don’t.” His voice came out wrecked, one hand lifting off the floor toward me and then stopping short. “Don’t touch me, I don’t want blood on you, on her—”