1 Finn #3
My alpha’s eyes had gone flat, the gold in them hardening like cold metal, but I didn’t stop.
“He wants to talk about sacrifice. He tells me he put his heart in a folder, that he denied himself a mate to build this crew. But a wolf doesn’t just choose to deny the bond.
The moon goddess doesn’t work that way. So where is she, Reed?
What row did you leave her in? Or did you just decide your royal bloodline was too sacred to parade through the dirt? ”
“Calloway,” Reed said. It wasn’t a shout. It was a low, vibration in his chest, the sound of a massive engine straining against its mounts. “Keep your mouth shut.”
“Tell me where she is!” I snarled, the wolf in me pushing against my ribs, desperate and furious.
“You’re demanding I drag Sloane out of the walls.
You’re demanding I trigger her Heat, risk her cover, and let the Order butcher her just to buy you a legal override.
If the quorum is so damn important, tell me why your own line is empty! ”
“Because she’s dead!” Reed roared.
The sound tore out of him, raw and echoing off the steel of the truck, cutting through the low murmur of the camp.
The wind seemed to die in the pines. Across the turnaround, two wolves from another pack turned their heads, then quickly looked away, sensing the sudden, dangerous peak in the alpha’s temper.
Reed stood panting, his broad chest rising and falling. He pressed his thumb so hard into his opposite palm that the skin turned white, then purple. When he looked up, the gold in his eyes was gone, replaced by a dark, hollow ruin.
“I found her,” Reed whispered, his voice cracking on the words.
“Before I knew what the Order was. Before we had a crew, or a ledger, or a plan. She was a dormant, Finn. I was a boy. I didn’t know what the scent meant.
I didn’t know that my proximity, my alpha blood, would act like a match on dry tinder. ”
He took a ragged, shuddering breath, his jaw clenching.
“I set off her Heat,” Reed said. “Right there on the ridge. She went into a fever. And then she was taken. It must have been the Order. Though I didn’t know it then. I set off her Heat, Finn. But we never finished the bond. Never even had a chance to start.”
He looked at me, and the sheer, devastating weight of his loss hit me like a punch in the gut.
“A wolf has one mate, Finn. In this life and the next. You know a suppressed dormant who goes into Heat without her mate to anchor her dies. Her organs cook themselves from the inside out. She’s dead.
My line is already broken. The Founding Alpha line ends with me.
I am the shield but I have nothing left to protect. ”
The words sat in the hot air, heavy and tragic. I stood frozen, my anger dying in my throat, replaced by an aching horror.
Reed wasn’t solitary because he was stoic. He wasn’t the lonely Superintendent because he preferred the silence. He was a ghost walking a fireline, building a revolution to save other men’s mates because he had watched his own burn to ash before he even knew how to hold her.
“Reed,” I muttered, the anger dropping away. “I... I didn’t know.”
“Now you do,” Reed said, his voice flat, the stoic mask sliding back over his face. He checked his glove, tightening it with a sharp snap. “So tell me again why you’re walking away from the only chance we have to make sure it never happens to anyone else.”
I looked at him, my chest aching, the half-healed scars from the Alchemist’s blades pulling tight. The tragedy of his past was a warning, a mirror of what was waiting for me in the dark.
“Because I won’t repeat your mistake,” I said quietly.
My hand went back to the Treaty Court marks at my wrists.
“If I follow Sloane, if I force myself into her space to secure your quorum, I will trigger the same Heat. I will not sacrifice her life to buy your revolution, Reed. I’d rather spend the rest of my life as a ghost in the dead zones, keeping her alive from ninety miles away, than watch her burn. ”
Reed stared at me. The alpha authority rolled off him, but it was no longer trying to crush me. It was just heavy with the weight of two men who understood the exact, brutal cost of the bond.
Slowly, the weight of the aura receded. Reed looked at my ash-stained wrists, his face showing a rare, raw crack in his composure. His hands shook.
“Come home when it’s done,” Reed said, his voice rough, stripped of all formality. “That’s not an order. I don’t have one that reaches you anymore. It’s your brother asking.”
“I heard you,” I said.
I shouldered the pack and left.
The timberline took me in and the camp fell away behind me—foil-crackle, the exhausted joy, the low ache of unmated wolves, all of it thinning until there was only my boots in the duff and the heat and the enormous indifference of a mountain.
Every mile I chose to walk away from those dots on my paper map was a mile I chose for her. The wolf did not understand that and never would. It walked backward the whole way, hackles up, keening low in my chest.
She’d walked into the dark, away from me, to keep her cover and her network, and I was going to honor it the only way my blood knew how—by clearing the monsters out of the country and never, ever putting myself in the same room as her.
I had it perfect. I was sure of it.