Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Anne
The waiting is killing me.
I keep telling myself that no news is good news, that Darius said he would send word the moment the operatives were secured, that the silence until then doesn’t mean anything has gone wrong.
But repeating all this to myself over and over doesn’t stop my hands from finding each other in my lap, twisting together every few minutes before I realize what I’m doing and make myself stop.
Violet is in the armchair across from me, legs tucked beneath her, a book open on her lap. She turns a page, and I watch her eyes not move.
“You’re not reading that,” I say.
“I know.” She doesn’t look up. Then, after a moment: “And you’re not drinking your tea.”
I look down at the mug in my hands. It went cold some time ago. I set it on the side table.
Far below the sitting room windows, the manicured grounds of the Alpha’s mansion stretch in all directions, looking peaceful in the afternoon light.
Guards move at their posts, unhurried, doing the same rotation they’ve run all morning.
From here, you would have no idea. Nothing about the day here looks like what it is there.
That thought unsettles me more than I expected it to.
I think about Kain, which I’ve been doing since eight o’clock this morning when the car came to pick me up like Violet promised.
“Stay safe,” he said to me yesterday. And then he was gone, and I haven’t seen him since.
I press my thumb against the gold band around my finger, feeling the worn metal as I try to breathe.
He is not going to die. I’ve said this to myself so many times in the last twenty-four hours that it has become something between a prayer and a fact that I’m simply refusing to negotiate.
He is coming back.
“I should be out there.” Violet says this to the window, not to me. Her voice is even, but I know her well enough by now to hear the strain underneath.
“You know why you’re not.”
“I know why I’m not.” She closes the book forcefully. “But that doesn’t mean I like it. I’m a hybrid. I could be helpful.”
“Darius needs to know you’re safe,” I say. “He wouldn’t be able to focus during the battle if he had to worry about you.”
She’s quiet for a moment, jaw tight. She knows I’m right. “Ethan is out there. Kain is out there. And I’m sitting in this room turning the pages of a book I’m not reading. Doing nothing.”
“I’m here, as well, if you haven’t noticed,” I point out dryly. “Besides, being here is doing something. It’s helping. Darius knows nobody can get to you in this fortress of his.”
She peers out the window. “He has tripled security. I don’t think I can even go get a glass of water without running into a guard.”
When I don’t say anything, she glances at me, and her expression softens.
“You’re very calm,” she murmurs. “Considering the circumstances.”
“I’m not calm at all,” I confess. “I just don’t have anywhere to put my anxiety, so I’m keeping it bottled up.”
That pulls a small laugh from each of us. It doesn’t last long.
“I’ve never been afraid like this before, Violet,” I say, thinking about the waiting, the not knowing, the feeling that everything I’ve spent ten years grieving has come back, close enough to touch, yet may still be taken away.
“I mean, I’ve been afraid. After he disappeared, I was afraid for a long time.
But it was different then. That was the fear that comes… after. This is—”
“The fear that comes before,” Violet finishes for me quietly.
“Yes.”
Both our heads turn when we hear it.
A single thump. Like something heavy was dropped just outside the sitting room door, soft enough that it could have been a book falling from a shelf in the corridor. Maybe a guard shifting position, leaning back against the wall.
We look at each other.
“Probably one of the guards,” she says, already uncurling from the armchair.
“Violet—”
“I’ll go check.” She is already moving toward the door.
She opens it and steps into the corridor. I hear her footsteps, unhurried, moving toward the main hallway.
I sit straight up on the settee and wait.
Twenty seconds.
Thirty.
Forty.
I don’t like how long this is taking. Slowly, I get up to go look for her.
The corridor is empty.
No Violet. No sound of her footsteps returning. The guard who should be posted at the far end of the hall is absent, his post empty and wrong in a way that makes stomach clench.
“Violet?”
Nothing.
I move toward the main hallway junction. My wolf is up and pressing on me hard now, a low warning vibration that runs through my entire chest. I turn the corner—
And stop.
Violet is at the top of the main staircase, completely still, looking down. The front entrance door at the bottom of the stairs is open. It should not be open.
I smell the blood before I see it. I gasp audibly when I look down and see the bloodbath.
The soldiers Darius tasked with protecting his mate are dead.
So many that I can’t even count them through my horror.
Some of the guards look like they were trying to transform into their wolves but were killed mid-shift.
Some are still wearing their human skin.
How did this happen?
Before I can process what I’m seeing, six men rush in, wearing black gear and face masks. They move in perfect unison, leaping over the bodies and heading for the stairs.
I freeze in terror. How are they here? And if they’re here, who are Kain and Darius fighting?
Violet spins toward me, her eyes blazing as she shouts, “Anne! Run!”
One of the men rounds the top of the stairs behind her.
She turns and drives her elbow into his jaw with a force that sends him into the wall hard enough to crack the plaster.
He slides down, groaning, but there are two more right behind him, and below us, the footsteps on the stairs are approaching fast.
I try to move, but there is nowhere to run. There are too many of them, and there is no corridor long enough to put any real space between us and them. No door thick enough to hide behind.
My wolf surges to the surface so hard, my vision goes white at the edges.
Violet catches my eye. Half a second is all it takes for me to understand.
“Now!” she orders.
I shift.
I haven’t done this in a while. There was a time when shifting felt like home, when running on four legs was the easiest thing in the world.
But when I lost Kain, the grief was worse when I shifted, my wolf howling for a mate everyone said was dead.
So, I stopped. It wasn’t a conscious decision.
More of a slow withdrawal. Months between shifts. Then longer.
The transformation tears through me in a wave—bones cracking and reshaping, the floor dropping away and expanding as I come down on four legs, my clothes shredding and falling in scraps around me.
The world opens up: sound and scent and detail flooding in with an immediacy that nothing in human form can match.
I have not been in this form for years, but my wolf does not care. She lands, and she is ready.
Violet shifts, too.
I have never seen her do so before. I understand now why the Covenant wants her so badly, why Darius moves through the world with fury whenever anyone mentions a threat to her.
She is stunning in this form, her coat a deep silver-gray that catches the light from the hall, her eyes burning amber and gold.
She is larger than me and frankly terrifying—pure power radiates off her in waves that I can feel as I stand next to her.
Violet is the most dangerous thing in this building, and she does not wait.
She launches herself at the nearest man before he can even raise his weapon, and the sound of the impact echoes off the walls.
She goes through the other enemies at the top of the stairs like a storm: no charted path, just deadly force leaving destruction in her wake.
She takes the first one and drives him into the wall so hard, the plaster caves in.
The second tries to flank her, but she spins with pure hybrid speed, her jaws closing on his vest and throwing him backward over the railing to the floor below. He doesn’t get up.
I have no training for this. No techniques from drilled patterns or muscle memory beyond what my wolf herself knows. But she knows enough. Even an average wolf can attempt to fight.
I take the ones coming at us from the corridor now.
A blade swings at my flank—silver tipped in wolfsbane, I can smell it—and I throw myself sideways.
The knife catches air instead of flesh, and my jaws find the man’s wrist before he can recover.
The satisfying crunch travels up through my jaw as he drops the weapon and screams.
We push the rest back toward the staircase. For a moment, I think we may actually hold our position.
Then, a silver chain wraps around my back leg.
The burn is immediate and total—not like ordinary pain but fire that skips the skin and goes straight to the bone. I snarl and spin, trying to wrench free, but the man at the other end is braced against a doorway, and the silver is biting deeper with every second I pull against it.
Another operative comes at me from the side while I’m fighting the chain. His boot connects with my ribs hard enough to knock the wind out of me. He follows it with a second blow to the side of my head, and the corridor tilts sideways for a moment.
I get my legs back under me through sheer stubbornness and rip the chain free with my jaws. The metal takes skin with it, leaving a burning stripe across my ankle. I snap the chain at the man’s face, and he falls backward.
Violet has cleared the top of the stairs. Four more men down.
But out of the blue, a dart embeds itself in the side of her neck. My eyes scan the area, looking for the culprit, and I find two men on the stairs, one with a small gun in his hand.
Violet doesn’t seem to feel any ill effects at first. She takes a step, stops, and shakes her head as if she has water in her ears.