Chapter 30
Chapter Thirty
Kain
I open my eyes to a white ceiling and fluorescent lights.
I’m not in pain anymore.
I can still feel where the wound was—a deep ache centered in my chest that will take days to fade fully—but the acute sting is gone.
The blade is gone. I can breathe without that wet, dragging resistance.
I lie still for several seconds just to confirm this, taking one slow breath, then another, and I feel my lungs fill properly both times.
I am alive.
It comes back in pieces. Rushing to the Alpha’s mansion. Rick’s men going down around us. Rick himself, his voice, and the sting of the blade in my chest just as my jaws came down on his head.
Ten years of my life ended out there on the grass. The Covenant’s hold on me, the compound, the threat that kept me obedient across missions I don’t want to count—gone. All of it, gone.
Rick is dead.
I let that sit for a moment. I have thought about this—the end of him, the end of all of it—in the abstract for years, in the way you think about something you can’t afford to believe in too much in case it never comes.
But it has come, and I don’t know what to do with it. It doesn’t feel like triumph. It feels like setting down a weight I carried for too long.
It’s over. I exhale in relief.
Gradually, I notice a presence at the edge of my awareness that was never there before.
Quiet and warm. I recognize it the way you recognize a voice you’ve known your whole life, even when it’s speaking from another room.
It is not me, and it is not my wolf, but it is linked to us in a way that is new and permanent and right.
Anne.
The bond. I marked her out there on the grounds, and I felt the whole world shift on its axis.
Then, everything went dark, but the bond stayed.
I can feel now that it stayed even through the surgery, even through whatever sedation they gave me, a thread that never broke.
Anne is at the other end of it, and I can feel that she is close.
That she is awake. That in the last few seconds, something in her has changed, an alertness sharpening, as though—
The curtain at the foot of my bed is pulled back, and I see Anne standing there.
She is dressed in clean clothes that aren’t hers—a shirt too large for her shoulders, jeans rolled up at the ankle. Her hair is down, and there is a cut along her jaw that is healing and will be gone by tomorrow.
“I felt you wake up,” she says.
“I know.” I did know. I felt the moment she felt me. “Come here.”
She steps forward and sits on the edge of the bed. I reach for her hand, and she gives it to me without hesitating.
For a while, we stay like that. Her hand in mine. The bond humming steadily between us, warm and full, mirroring our emotions and senses back to each other. I can recognize her relief, and underneath that, a quieter and more permanent sentiment.
“How do you feel?” she asks.
“Like I was stabbed through the heart.”
“You were stabbed through the heart.”
I turn my head to look at her properly. “Anne.”
“Kain.”
“I love you.” The words come out simply. Just the fact of it, stated plainly. “I have loved you since we were teenagers, and I have not stopped for a single day in the years since, including when I was doing things I’m not proud of. I need you to know that.”
Her throat moves as she swallows, and her fingers tighten around mine. “I know,” she says quietly. “I love you, too.”
She leans down and kisses me softly. I bring my free hand up to her face and hold her there for a moment, feeling the bond sing between us at the contact, pleased with itself, finally settled.
When she pulls back, her eyes are bright. “You have terrible timing,” she tells me. “For everything. For coming back, for the truth, for all of it.”
“I know.”
“We are going to have a very long conversation when you’re recovered.”
“I know that, too.”
She smiles.
From the other side of the curtain next to me, Darius’s unmistakable voice says, with the deliberate patience of a man who has been repeating himself, “One more bite.”
“I’ve had six bites.”
“The healer said you need to keep your strength up.”
“The healer said I need to rest. She said nothing about you standing over me with a spoon.”
“Open.”
“Darius, I swear to the Moon Goddess—”
Anne and I smile at each other. She reaches over and pulls back the curtain.
Darius is seated beside Violet’s bed with a bowl and a spoon, leaning forward. Violet’s arms are crossed, and she looks annoyed.
Darius straightens when he sees us. The spoon lowers slowly.
“You’re awake,” he says to me.
“Yeah.” I glance at the bowl. “How long has this been going on?”
“He started the minute I woke up,” Violet says. “Which was an hour ago.”
“You had those disgusting chemicals in your system,” Darius says, staring at her again. “You need—”
“I have eaten more soup than any person should consume in a single sitting.”
“One more—”
“Darius.”
He closes his mouth. Sets the spoon down. Regroups with the dignity of an alpha who has not technically lost this exchange but is choosing to table it. He looks at me and Anne, and his expression carries a genuine warmth that he doesn’t bother to conceal.
“How are you both?”
“Kain will need a few days,” Anne says. “I’m fine.”
“You are not fine,” I say. I can feel her exhaustion and her pain. She is not a trained fighter; the battle took a toll on her.
“I can stand, and nothing vital is missing. That means I’m fine.”
Violet is now leaning toward us in her bed and squinting at Anne’s neck, where my mating mark sits, still raised and new. Her gaze shifts to me. Then back to Anne.
“Anne,” she says softly, “is that—”
“Yes,” Anne says, smiling softly at me.
Violet’s face conveys several complicated emotions before ending up in a big smile. She reaches across and grabs Anne’s free hand. “I’m so glad.”
Darius looks first at the mark, then at me.
His expression is harder to read than Violet’s; after all, he is a man who takes his responsibilities seriously, and I spent weeks in his pack under false pretenses.
But what finally settles on his face is not reproach.
It looks like acceptance. Like a door opening.
“Congratulations,” he says.
And I can tell he means it.
He pulls his chair closer, and his alpha manner reasserts itself. “This has taken a toll on us all.”
“What is the situation?” I ask.
Darius exhales slowly. “Twenty operatives hit headquarters. Close to a hundred came to the mansion.” A pause. “Some were taken prisoner, but most are dead. Rick’s body is in the morgue.”
A heaviness settles in my chest at that. I already knew he’d been killed. I was there. Hell, I decapitated the man. But hearing it stated plainly, in Darius’s voice, in a room where I am alive and Anne is beside me, makes it unmistakably real.
“And the captured ones?”
Darius’s jaw tightens. “Some offed themselves before we could stop them. Poison capsules hidden in their teeth.”
I grimace. That could have been me after a few more years of conditioning.
“We were able to remove the capsules from the operatives who were unconscious when we got to them, before they came around. They are in custody now.” Darius continues. “We’ll interrogate them.”
I nod. “Good.”
“We’ll be monitoring the Covenant. If they try again—”
“They won’t,” I say confidently. “Not against Moonvale. Not after this. They lost over a hundred operatives and at least two handlers in a single operation. What they may gain by coming after Violet again doesn’t justify it, not against a pack that now knows exactly how they work.
They’ll cut their losses and give up for now. Or find a softer target.”
“You’re sure.”
“I spent ten years watching Rick run the numbers on operations exactly like this one. I’m sure.”
Darius holds my gaze for a moment, weighing my words. Then, he nods. “We’ll keep the captured operatives until we’re satisfied we’ve extracted everything useful,” he says. “After that, once you’ve recovered, I’d like your input on everything we’ve gathered about the Covenant’s structure.”
“You’ll have it.”
Another pause. Shorter this time. “You’re welcome in this pack, Kain. That’s official.”
I ponder what it costs a man like Darius to say something like that, given everything—and what it means that he’s saying it anyway. “Thank you,” I reply.
Violet convinces Darius to go get himself some coffee, with the promise that she will eat some more soup later. She watches him go with fondness in her gaze.
“He likes you,” she says to me when he’s gone. “He’s not good at showing it when there’s still a threat assessment happening, but he likes you.”
“I’ll take it.”
“You should.” She lies back on her pillow, some of the brightness going out of her now that the immediate company has thinned. “I’m going to try to get some sleep before he comes back.”
As she closes her eyes, the entire medical center goes quiet. Somewhere down the corridor, there are footsteps, voices, the ordinary sounds of a building doing its work. Outside the window, the sky is fully dark, and the pack grounds below are lit with the amber warmth of evening lights.
Anne is still on the edge of my bed.
“Lie down with me,” I tell her, moving over as much as I can to make room for her.
“I’m fine.”
“You fought today. You got hurt. Lie down.”
She looks at me, then at the bed. It’s narrow, but not impossibly so. She lets out a resigned sigh, takes off her shoes, and carefully stretches out beside me, on her side with her back to my chest. I put my arm around her.
She sighs. “We have a lot to talk about.”
“I know.”
“Good.” A pause. “Don’t move. You’ll pull something.”
I don’t move.
Through the bond, I can feel when she stops fighting sleep. The tension leaves her slowly—shoulders first, then the rest of her—until she is breathing steadily and the presence of her in my chest is soft and even. Finally, deeply at rest.
I stay awake a little longer. Not from pain, not from vigilance, but because I want to.
Because I spent ten years in rooms I couldn’t leave, and this is one I am free to leave whenever I want.
Because the woman beside me is here because she chooses to be.
Because the man who held me captive is dead, and that part of my life is over.
I close my eyes, and sleep comes to me peacefully.