68. Annabella
Chapter sixty-eight
Annabella
“The dome is remarkable. Your doing, I presume?” Kane stood twenty feet from the temple steps, hands loose at his sides, studying the barrier overhead with the same expression he’d worn studying me through prison bars.
“Your cellular structure is, by all available data, unique. I told you once that I wish to study you. That has not changed. If anything, this,” he gestured at the dome, “has deepened my interest considerably.”
“And I’m pretty sure I told you I had no interest in being your science project. If that was unclear in any way, let me clarify it for you: no, now fuck off.”
He clasped his hands behind his back. Parade rest. “Come with me willingly. In exchange, I’ll guarantee the safety of Three Rivers. My forces withdraw. Your friends will be unharmed. All I ask is cooperation. Time. The opportunity to understand what you are.”
I hesitated, and Kane’s eyes flashed. He had me, and he knew it.
What I wouldn’t give to keep Sam and Ellie and my mom safe.
Kane knew that, knew I would protect them with my life.
But could I trust he would stop after he had me?
This operation wasn’t about me; it was about silencing what he thought my father was about to say to the world.
My eyes flickered to the dome overhead. I could open a door, let me and Kane’s army out.
Kane might not know that he couldn’t get back in afterwards.
Could I convince him to take me out of here before he double-crossed me and came back to try to finish the job?
It was a risk I would have to take. Anything that might save Sam and my sister was worth trying.
I put my hand flat on the temple stone. Pushed. My arm shook, my vision grayed at the edges, and for a second, I wasn’t sure my legs would hold.
They held.
I stood.
I opened my mouth and Sam stalked into view.
My wolf lunged toward him so hard I nearly staggered.
The bond flared—bright, desperate, alive—and for one stupid, dangerous second, everything else fell away.
Kane, the soldiers, the utter exhaustion.
All of it gone, replaced by the singular, overwhelming fact of Sam Shaw walking toward me like fifty armed soldiers were a minor inconvenience.
He looked terrible. Blood down his jaw, shirt half-shredded, favoring his left side in a way he was trying to hide and failing. But his eyes were locked on mine, and his mouth was already curving into that infuriating grin. The one that said, “I know this is insane, I’m doing it anyway.”
You idiot. You beautiful, reckless idiot.
“Now, I heard her tell you to fuck off, Victor. You getting deaf in your old age?” he drawled.
Kane’s expression didn’t change as he tracked Sam’s movements.
“Kill him,” Kane said. “Capture her.”
Rifles snapped up across the semicircle.
Sam was already sprinting toward them. Straight at the nearest cluster of soldiers, closing thirty feet in the time it took the first rifle to find its mark.
The shot went wide. Or maybe it didn’t. Maybe he’d Shifted at the last second, that wolf-fast lateral movement that made him impossible to track.
And then he was among them. Inside their line.
Too close, too tangled, every shot a risk to the man beside you.
Clever bastard. He’d read the formation. A semicircle meant every rifle was pointed toward the center, toward the soldiers on the opposite side. Get inside the arc and they couldn’t fire without cutting down their own people.
It forced hand-to-hand. And hand-to-hand against a wolf was a different equation entirely.
Sam dropped the first soldier without breaking stride. Put the second on the ground with something fast and vicious that used the man’s own rifle as a lever. The third came with a silver blade, and Sam let him come, sidestepped, and drove an elbow into the base of his skull.
And then the soldiers around me attacked, and I lost sight of Sam.
Silver blade, swinging for my throat. I dropped under it and drove my elbow up into the soldier’s windpipe.
He went down choking. The next one was already on me.
I grabbed the knife from the first man’s hand and buried it in the second man’s thigh, deep, twisting, hitting the artery.
He collapsed sideways spraying red across the temple stone.
A third. A fourth. I killed one with his own blade through the gap between his vest and his collar.
Put the other down with a blast of magic so weak it barely knocked her off balance, but it was enough to get inside her guard and slam the heel of my hand into her nose.
Bone crunched as it went into her brain. She hit the ground and didn’t get up.
My vision grayed. Came back. Grayed again.
The dome was eating me alive. Every heartbeat cost something. Every breath was a negotiation between keeping the barrier up and keeping my legs underneath me, and both were losing.
A soldier caught me across the face with his rifle.
I tasted blood, staggered, threw a wild elbow that connected with something and kept moving.
Couldn’t see properly now. Fighting on wolf-instinct—scent and sound and the feel of bodies in the air around me.
Silver everywhere. That hot-metal stink, blades and ammunition, and my skin was burning where the fragments had grazed me.
I went down on one knee. Couldn’t stop it. My body was just…stopping. Shutting down, system by system, the way a machine powers off when you pull the plug.
Get up. Get up, get up, get —
Pack bonds hit me like a wall of heat. Every Three Rivers wolf inside that dome, connected to me through the territory I’d claimed, and they were pushing.
I could feel them. Ryan’s Alpha dominance hauling me upright.
Derek’s iron discipline like a rod through my spine.
Their bonds threading into mine, feeding me something that wasn’t energy but was close enough.
A collective refusal to let me fall. A hundred voices saying the same thing.
Stay alive. Stay alive. Stay alive.
And through it all, louder than anything, Sam. The mate bond blazing between us, his heartbeat hammering under my own, his wolf howling through the connection with a fury that said, “You do not get to die, not here, not now.”
I got up.
Borrowed time in a borrowed body, running on the collective stubbornness of my Pack.
A soldier rushed me. I took his blade arm at the wrist, redirected it, and drove the silver edge into his own neck. He went down gurgling. I was already past him. Already fighting forward, toward Sam, because the bond was a rope and I was hauling myself along it with both hands.
Sam was cutting toward me. Fifteen feet apart. Ten. I could see him now—or sense him, my vision still swimming—a blur of violence and movement, burning through Kane’s soldiers.
A rifle cracked. Stone exploded beside my hip. I didn’t stop. Stopping was dying, and I was not dying ten feet from Sam Shaw.
He broke through the last soldier between us. I crashed into him, and his arms came around me, and for one heartbeat, the mate bond sang so loud it drowned out everything.
“Hey, Moonbeam.” Ragged. Blood on his teeth.
“Don’t call me that.”
“Yeah, you’re fine.”
Kane’s soldiers were regrouping. We had maybe four seconds before the next wave hit. Bodies littered the ground around us. Some still moving, some groaning. Most not. The surviving soldiers were pulling back into formation.
“How many did you get?” Sam asked. Like we were settling a bar bet.
“Eight.”
“Twelve.”
“You had a head start.”
“Excuses, Moonbeam.”
Fur and flames. I grinned as I leaned back into him.
Felt the heat of him through what was left of his shirt, and underneath it the wrongness, his body running too hot on the left side where silver was working deeper.
I could smell it. That chemical burn, spreading.
His hand, where it rested against my hip, was shaking in a way that had nothing to do with adrenaline.
“How bad?” I said quietly.
“It’s a scratch.”
A scratch. Right.
Kane walked through his reforming line. Unhurried. Pristine. Not a drop of blood on him because men like Kane sent other people to fight for them. He stopped fifteen feet from the steps and studied us.
“You continue to impress me.”
“Wish I could say the same. Fifty soldiers, and you still can’t close the deal. That’s embarrassing, Kane.”
His mouth thinned. “You are simply a mongrel with aspirations, convinced they belong at a table built for adults.”
I glanced sideways at Sam. “Are you going to let him talk to you like that?”
“Wait…was that aimed at me?”
“Mongrel with aspirations? That’s clearly about you, Shaw.”
“Fair point. I am aspirational.”
Thirty soldiers left. Two of us. Sam’s silver poisoning spreading by the second.
My magic guttering, the dome overhead pulling at reserves that were already gone.
The Pack bonds had gotten me back on my feet but they couldn’t keep me there forever.
I was running on borrowed heartbeats, and the clock was almost up.
We weren’t going to win this.
Kane knew it. I knew it. Sam knew it too, though he’d die before he said it out loud.
So this is how it ends.
Something settled in my chest, cold and clear. I wasn’t going with Kane. Not breathing, not conscious, not in any state he could use. I’d die on this step beside my mate before I let that man strap me to a table and take me apart to see what made me tick, and use that against other Shifters.
I felt Sam gather everything he had left—which was nothing, just fumes and stubbornness and a wolf that would not lie down—and set it beside everything I had.
I took his hand one last time, wishing we’d had more time, wishing we’d had more kisses, more hugs, more absolutely mind-blowing sex. “Together?” I whispered.
Sam glanced at me and smiled sadly. “Always, Moonbeam.”
Kane’s hand dropped.
The second wave charged.
Before they got five steps, the forest erupted from the east.
A howl—real, enormous, shaking the air itself, vibrated through us.
Every soldier in the clearing stumbled. Some grabbed their heads.
One dropped his rifle. Something older than training, older than discipline, older than Kane’s careful planning, reached into their brainstems and screamed at them that they were prey in a predator’s territory and that predator was coming.
The charge broke apart.
Kane’s head snapped round.
Ryan exploded out of the trees. His power slammed across the clearing in a wave that sent Kane’s soldiers staggering back, something ancient in their brains screaming “Submit, flee, this is not your territory and the thing that owns it is here.” Ryan was in his True Wolf form, massive and blood-soaked, and every inch of him radiated a single message: “This land is mine, these people are mine. You threaten them and you die.”
Derek came next, blood in his hair, a gash across his forehead, combat blade in each hand, gray eyes locked on his twin. He didn’t look at Kane’s soldiers. They weren’t relevant yet.
Mason appeared behind them, his eyes sweeping the clearing—positions, threats, numbers—and landed on Sam’s bleeding side with a focus that would have terrified me if I’d been the one who put the silver there.
Sam exhaled beside me. A long, shaking breath that he tried to turn into something casual and failed completely. Through the bond—relief so sharp it cut.
“Took your bloody fucking time,” he said.
Derek’s gaze scanned the area. “You started the party without us, bro. Not cool. Not cool at all.”
“Will the dome hold?” Ryan asked me.
“For now.”
He nodded once. “Good.”
“Touching reunion,” Sam said. “Really. Hallmark moment. But could we maybe—?”
“You’re bleeding,” Mason said.
“I’m aware.”
Mason tilted his head, studying the wound. “Silver?”
“Yep.”
“Systemic?”
“Not yet.”
“Good.” Mason turned to face the clearing. “Plenty of time.”
Kane was recalculating. I could see it behind his eyes: new variables, new arithmetic. “Three more,” he said. “The situation has not materially changed.”
Derek didn’t even look at him.
“We didn’t come alone, Kane.”
Sam leaned into me. “I love my brothers,” he murmured. “Remind me to tell them that. After I kill them for taking so long.”
Sofia came out of the trees. My cousin. My blood. She had two bloodied knives in her hands and dirt on her face, and she walked straight to Derek’s side. He opened his mouth, and she cut him dead with a look.
A wolf emerged behind her. Lean, dark-furred, muzzle slicked red, moving with the barely contained energy of a Shifter who’d been fighting all night and wasn’t done yet.
I’d never seen Jase in wolf form. Didn’t matter.
The Pack bond told me who he was the same way it told me my own name—bone-deep, undeniable.
And underneath the fierce determination, underneath the bloodied teeth and the enforcer’s stance, I could feel his grief.
Raw and enormous. Carlito’s loss sitting in him like a wound no one could stitch.
He took position beside his sister and didn’t flinch.
The wolf behind him was Amara. I knew that too.
To the right, Evelyn. The bonds named them for me, one by one, wolves in their Shifted forms, bloodied and exhausted and snarling, and I knew every single one of them without ever having seen their wolves before.
The territory had claimed me, and I had claimed it back and now it was showing me my Pack.
Mine. All of them. Mine.
Zeke came next, then Bethany Rose and Annika. Mai and Wally and wolves I knew must be Bridgetown Shifters.
The numbers shifted.
Kane’s thirty trained soldiers against a Pack. Battered, bleeding, exhausted, furious, but here.
And I was standing at its center.
I looked at Kane.
“You wanted us divided,” I said. “Wolves against witches. Humans against all of us. You thought it would make us weak. You thought if you set us against each other, we’d be too busy fighting to notice who was pulling the strings.
” I looked at the line behind me. Wolves and witches.
Pack and coven. Human allies and half-breeds and every kind of person Kane had tried to turn into an enemy.
“But here’s what you didn’t account for, Kane.
You gave us something: a common target. Every border you drew, every wall you built, every lie you told about who deserved to exist; it showed us what we had to lose, showed us what we were willing to fight for.
Every person you threatened fed our anger.
Every right you stripped away fed our resistance. You think you divided us, broke us?”
Sam’s hand was in mine. His brothers beside us. My family behind us.
“You forged us.”
Kane’s face didn’t move. But underneath the starch and gun oil, his scent curdled. Sharp. Sour. He was rattled. “That’s a lovely speech. Very dramatic. But speeches don’t stop bullets.”
He nodded once, and his soldiers opened fire.