Chapter 27 #3
She lunges. I drop. My body knows the move from three months in a locker room studying how Grayson shifts his weight, from years of ER nights with people swinging closed fists at me.
I sink low and twist so that her hand sweeps through the space my throat filled half a second ago.
Her claws are out. They weren’t a moment ago.
She comes again. “You’re why it all went wrong. He’d have come back to me. He’d have come back.”
I’m scrambling backward, Ethan’s small body on the floor between us.
She doesn’t even glance at him. Her eyes lock on me alone, burning gold now, the partial shift rippling across her face in patches.
She charges a third time. This time her shoulders are already cracking into something that isn’t human.
She’s shifting mid-charge. I won’t be fast enough.
My hand flies for the dagger at my spine.
Before my fingers close on it, a shadow fills the doorway behind her, enormous.
I catch it as a streak of dark fur, a flash of white teeth, then it hits Vanessa at full speed.
It lifts her off the concrete, driving her into the back wall before her shift can finish.
Bone cracks, wet and final. Vanessa makes one strangled noise and goes limp.
The wolf doesn’t stop. Its jaws close on her throat and pull, the room going red in one hot arc that slaps the concrete. I can’t move.
It releases the body. She slides down the wall, settling wrong, her head canted at an angle her shoulders were never built for. For one full beat, my lungs refuse to work.
It turns. Gold eyes find mine over the body, the wolf broad and dark, its head held low. It pads to Vanessa, sniffs once at her face, then lifts its head while the air around it bends.
The shift comes fast, too fast, ripping through him in seconds. Fur draws back. Bone resets. The man rising out of it stands naked, breathing hard, blood smeared across his mouth and streaked down the front of his chest. He stares down at the body a long moment, then he lifts his eyes to me.
The breath leaves me in a rush. He came for us. Vanessa’s down, Ethan’s breathing, the worst of it is behind me. Every locked muscle in my body lets go at once, and I open my mouth to thank the man standing over her.
“I told you not yet.”
My blood runs cold.
I trusted Derek because Grayson trusted him.
“Derek?” Maybe this is a misunderstanding. Maybe I heard wrong.
He smiles. He has not stopped smiling since the shift came off him.
“I don’t want you to die yet, Miranda.”
“What?”
“I want Grayson to see you die.” His eyes hold mine, calm as a lake. “It would not be the same if he found a body. He has to walk into a room with you in it and watch the light go out behind your eyes. So you live until he gets here.”
“What?” My brain is short-circuiting for a moment. I know how much Grayson loves Derek. He is all he has left of his brother. This betrayal will kill him.
If it doesn’t kill me and Ethan first.
“He doesn’t know where I am.” I breathe slowly.
“He will.” Derek tilts his head. “It will take him some time. He’ll track my scent and yours.” The fear that goes through me is cold and bright and oddly useful. It steadies my hands at my sides.
“Why are you doing this?”
His eyes flicks once to Ethan’s small body on the concrete behind me. Ethan has not stirred. His chest is rising in shallow, regular movements that mean the sedative is still in him, but the dose is wearing off. I can hear the change in his breathing. Derek does not seem to be focused on it.
“It’s not personal, Miranda. I want you to know that. I don’t hate you. I have nothing against you.”
“You just killed Grayson’s ex-wife and you are telling me you want him to watch me die, but it’s not personal?” I stare at him.
“It is not personal to you.” His mouth pulls.
“I would have left you alone if you’d picked any other man.
But the Wolfe brothers don’t get to keep mates.
That’s the rule I made the night I buried my own.
Everything’s handed to them while the rest of us claw for scraps.
I’m not watching another door open for him with you behind it. ”
“I thought you were Gabriel’s friend.”
Something flashes through his eyes. The smile slips. For one beat, I see the man Grayson told me about, the one he grew up next to, the best friend of his older brother, the boy who used to come to his house for Sunday dinners. The grief that comes through is so naked I cannot look away from it.
“I was his friend. I loved him as my own blood. I would have died for him.” His voice has gone rough. “Right up until I learned the Council approved his mate because Leon Ramirez is his adopted father, and they refused mine because she was nothing to anyone with rank.”
“That is not true. The Council—”
“Don’t speak about things you don’t understand.
” His eyes sharpen. “I lost the woman I loved because my alpha did not pick up a phone for her. Then I watched Gabriel get his woman. Then I watched you walk into Grayson’s house and start raising Gabriel’s nephew as if he were your own son.
We all grew up together, but they got what they wanted, and the woman I loved had to die. ”
The pain in his voice is unmistakable, but I refuse to feel sorry for this man. “Your grudge, it was with Gabriel and Grayson? Why did you drag Ethan into it?”
“Ethan is mine when this is over.” His voice has gone soft now in something that turns my stomach. “I’ve already made the arrangements. By the time Leon figures out which direction I have gone, I will be out of the country and off every grid that exists.”
“Coach will never let you take him.” My pulse is hammering in my throat.
“Leon will have no choice.” Derek sneers. “He will be too busy burying his other son and his fated mate.”
He looks toward the door, and my eyes catch movement to the side. Ethan’s eyes are clearer now, and he is watching me and Derek. There’s something moving behind his eyes. I shake my head subtly and then tilt it toward the door, signaling for him to run when the time is right.
My hand goes behind me, the sheath leather sliding silently against my coat lining. The knife comes free. I have it low against my thigh, and I take one step.
Derek hears me. His head whips around, and his arm sweeps backward without looking.
I see the impact coming and cannot get out of its path.
The back of his hand catches me across the cheek.
The room tilts. I hit the side wall hard enough that my teeth snap together, and my left shoulder, the one Vanessa shot through a week ago, screams white hot pain down my arm. The knife stays in my hand.
A small, sharp snarl rips up from the concrete.
Ethan is on his feet. His pajama shirt has split at the seams. Bone is moving under his skin, fur the color of wet bark pushing through, his face caught half between a four-year-old boy and a small wolf pup the size of a fox.
His teeth are bared, too big for the size of him, and he is growling at Derek with his small chest heaving.
“Ethan, no—”
He launches at the back of Derek’s calf with everything he has. Derek staggers a half step in surprise. Ethan’s small jaws lock, and he hangs from Derek’s leg by his teeth, a feral noise pouring out of him that does not belong to my sweet boy who cannot sleep without three bedtime stories.
Derek looks down. The corner of his mouth pulls.
“Brave little thing.”
His leg snaps out. Ethan flies backward off his leg, hits the side wall ten feet from me with a yelp that punches the air out of me, and slides down to the concrete in a small heap of patchy fur and torn pajamas.
“No!” I howl in fury.
Derek turns toward me at the same moment I throw myself at him, too slow to read it as a threat. I drive for the gap. The shoulder that took the bullet screams in protest, and I push through it on nothing but desperation and adrenaline. The blade goes into his right eye to the hilt.
He screams. The sound is so loud and so wet that I let go of the handle and stumble back.
He stumbles forward, both hands over his face, his good eye squeezed shut against the spasm, blood and clear fluid running between his fingers from the socket where the knife is buried. For one second I think it is over.
Then the air around him bends.
The shift comes through him in a hard wave, the fur breaking through his skin in patches, his shoulders climbing up into the bigger, heavier silhouette I saw kill Vanessa. The handle of the knife snaps off as his head changes form. The blade stays in.
The wolf turns on me with one eye and a ruin where the other was, enraged beyond reason.
I do not have time to run. He hits me at full speed. My back slams into the concrete floor, and the air goes out of me in one wet wheeze. He is on top of me. His paws pin my arms, his jaws above my throat.
Then he stands on my chest.
My ribs go in three places. I hear them before I feel them.
The sound is small, dry, and final. The pain that follows has me opening my mouth to scream, but instead of sound, I get the warm copper taste of my own blood across my tongue.
The wet drag of the next breath tells me one of my lungs has been punctured.
Fuck.