51. Annabella
Chapter fifty-one
Annabella
Vivienne was still smiling when my claws opened her up from hip to collarbone.
Silver-green sparks chased along the wounds, my magic following where my claws had carved.
The magic bit into Vivienne’s flesh like venom, and the sound she made wasn’t a battle cry or a curse.
It was raw. Shocked. The sound of someone who’d spent her entire life dishing out pain and had never once considered she’d be on the receiving end.
She staggered backward. Blood darkened the gray ash beneath her feet.
I didn’t have time to think about what I’d just done; Lydia was already moving.
The spell she launched was a mind-hook wrapped in a binding lattice.
I could see it now, the structure of it, the way the red sigils nested inside each other like those wooden dolls Ellie liked.
It was designed to scramble my Shift or freeze my muscles, either way, it would not be a good thing if it hit me.
My wolf said move.
I moved.
The spell slid past my left shoulder. I caught its trailing edge with magic, a thread of silver-green wrapping around the red sigil the way a snake crushes prey. And then I did something I’d never tried before. Something that shouldn’t have worked.
I twisted it. Reversed the flow. Fed my own power into the lattice and snapped it back at her like a rubber band.
The sound Lydia made when her own spell hit her.
Hex it all. That sound. I wanted to bottle it. Wanted to play it on loop every time I remembered her leaning over Sam’s restrained body in the warehouse, ecstasy on her face while she tore his memories apart.
She fell to her knees. Her casting hand jerked, fingers spasming, the fine motor control that made her dangerous shorting out like a wet circuit. Her mouth worked, but nothing came out.
I was breathing hard. The partial Shift was holding—claws extended, my vision split into spectrums that didn’t have names.
Magic ran under my skin in bright veins, pulsing with my heartbeat.
My wolf wasn’t fighting for control. She wasn’t trying to take over.
She was just there, woven into every thought and reflex, and my magic was threaded through her like roots through soil.
This was what integration felt like. Not two halves at war. One whole thing that happened to have teeth.
Duke was staring at me. His face had gone slack. Mouth open. “What the fuck? Only Alphas can partial Shift. And you’re not…You’re not an Alpha.”
A voice behind him. Low. Deadly. Familiar in a way that made my bones vibrate. “No. She’s something a fuck of a lot more dangerous than an Alpha.”
Duke froze.
I watched his eyes widen further. Watched the exact moment he realized someone was standing behind him. Someone he hadn’t heard approach. Someone who’d just materialized out of smoke and shadows and pure, concentrated rage.
Sam.
“She’s something special.” Sam’s voice was ice and fire and everything in between. “Something rare.”
Through the mate bond, I felt him. Heat and steadiness. Fury held on a knife’s edge. And underneath it all, relief so sharp it hurt.
“And she’s mine.”
My eyes found Sam’s. The mate bond blazed between us, warm and golden and right in a way that had nothing to do with biology and everything to do with the Shifter standing ten feet away with blood on his knuckles and absolute certainty in his voice.
Duke lunged.
Stupid. Desperate. Sam met him like a wall meets a wave.
They crashed into rubble together, snarling, grappling, human forms straining against each other before Sam drove Duke sideways with a movement too fast to track. I heard bone crack. Heard Duke’s howl of pain cut short.
And then everything exploded.
Witches turned toward Sam. I could see red sigils flare across the ruins, three, four, five casting positions lighting up at once. Simon’s perimeter guard. I felt the surge of gathered power, spells building, attacks ready to converge—
A shockwave rolled through the air.
Esme.
Her power spilled out like water breaking a dam.
Three witches on the eastern perimeter lost contact with gravity.
Just…left the ground. Limbs pinwheeling, red casting sigils guttering out as their concentration broke, screams of disbelief echoing off the ruins as they shot skyward like a hand had reached down and scooped them up.
Another witch’s spell unraveled mid-cast—the red energy dispersing into nothing, the structured working collapsing—and the woman stumbled as though her legs had forgotten they were holding her up.
Esme tip-toed through them, her long skirt trailing through the ash. Magic spilled out of her. Here, the air thickened until a charging witch bounced off nothing and sat down hard, blinking. There a binding spell meant for Sam reversed itself and wrapped around the caster’s own ankles.
Jem barreled in behind her. All muscle and controlled violence, cleaning up anyone Esme missed. Gideon flanked him, as Mina’s drones hummed overhead, and Zeke shouted something about defensive wards.
They’d come. All of them. For me.
I turned back to Lydia.
She was trying to get up. One hand pressed to the ground, the other still spasming uselessly, but she was gathering something. A last-ditch mind attack, I could feel it forming, could feel the oily touch of it reaching for my thoughts.
I closed the distance in three steps.
My claws took her across the shoulder. Deep enough to drop her.
Not deep enough to kill. I wanted to kill her.
The want was a bright, clean thing, uncomplicated and honest, but I didn’t act on it because I wasn’t Simon and I didn’t execute people on their knees.
But I wanted her to know I could have. I wanted that to live in her forever: the knowledge that the half-breed she’d spent years sneering at had stood over her with claws at her throat and chosen to let her breathe.
Lydia’s eyes rolled back. She hit the ground and didn’t move. I stood over her. Breathing hard. Silver-green light running the length of my arms like foxfire.
I turned toward Sam. He and Duke were thirty feet away.
Duke had blood sheeting down his face. He was throwing his weight into every strike with the desperate fury of someone who’d run out of options and decided to spend whatever was left.
Sam was faster, sharper, targeting the wounds he’d already given Duke, but Duke knew how Sam fought now, and he wasn’t giving Sam the clean angles he needed to end it.
Duke caught Sam with something—a short, vicious elbow that connected with the side of Sam’s head.
Sam rolled with it, came back, drove his fist into Duke’s injured ribs.
Duke folded. Sam pressed forward with two rapid strikes.
Duke staggered sideways but stayed on his feet. Spat blood. Set his stance. Came again.
Howling hell. He wasn’t going to stop. There was nothing left in Duke that knew how to stop. I had to help Sam.
I sprinted toward them.
Around me, Simon’s witches were scattered across the clearing—pinned by Esme’s magic, unconscious, or fleeing. Vivienne was dead on the ground. Lydia down. Duke occupied. Petra had vanished. Every asset, every layer of protection Simon had brought here stripped away in moments.
From behind me, I felt a wave of pressure; it was a spell, a powerful one, one I felt in every cell of my body.
Fuck, this was bad.
I skidded to a halt, spinning around to see Simon Webster standing in the center of his ruined facility. His expression was something I’d never seen before. Not cold calculation. Not disappointed disapproval. Not even the false warmth he used when he wanted something from me.
Just…rage. Pure, undiluted, incandescent rage.
He understood; he’d lost.
Lost control of me. Lost his people. Lost everything he’d built here. And he couldn’t allow that. Couldn’t allow me to survive knowing what I knew, being what I was, standing with the people I’d chosen instead of the father who’d never wanted me.
Runes were igniting in the air around him. Ancient structures, layered and interlocking, each glyph feeding power to the next in a cascade that was still climbing. I could see the architecture of it, and what they told me turned my blood cold.
This wasn’t a targeted spell. It wasn’t a weapon aimed at one person. This was a detonation.
He was pulling power from somewhere deep—maybe from the ley lines that ran under these mountains, from the residual magic baked into the ruins, from reserves he’d been building for decades; I didn’t know, but the runes multiplied.
The pressure built. My teeth ached. The air tasted of ozone.
He was going to flatten the clearing. Every person in it.
Sam. Esme. Gideon. Jem. Mina. Zeke. Everyone who’d come for me. Everyone who’d chosen this fight.
He would rather kill us all than let me walk away.
Esme was too far away, untangling herself from the last of the perimeter witches. Gideon and Jem were on the far side of the clearing. Mina’s drones hummed overhead, useless against what was building. Zeke’s defensive wards were designed to hold a perimeter, not counter something like this.
Nobody else could reach him in time.
Behind me, Sam and Duke crashed into something. Bone on bone. A grunt. A snarl. The sounds of two men trying to destroy each other.
The mate bond burned between us. Bright and steady and full of Sam: his pain, his focus, his absolute refusal to go down.
I pushed everything I had through it, hoping to give him the extra strength to come out on top.
I had to trust that he could do that. Trust that I was enough to stop this.
I turned my back on the man I loved, and walked toward my father.