My fingers barely brush the handle before something slams into my ribs. A boot. The kick precise and intentional.
Pain explodes through my side, and my body lifts clear off the ground. I come back down feet away, chest-first. The impact knocks the air out of my lungs so thoroughly that I can’t cry out.
I twist, curling onto my side instinctually as I try to get my body to accept oxygen again.
Footsteps approach.
When I look up, an ex-council member stands over me, the alpha male’s face twisted with contempt.
“You’re as much trouble as your mother,” he sneers, his hand poised and ready to come down, his fingernails extend into claws. For a moment, I’m certain he’s going to carve me open right here in this road, and I brace myself for the pain, frozen and helpless in the muck.
Then the air shifts. Magic, not dark, but familiar this time.
The pressure changes so abruptly my skin prickles with goosebumps. I turn my head, sensing the source, just in time to see it happen, the precise moment a concealing glamour falls away. It doesn’t tear or shatter, it simply peels back, as if someone has carefully lifted a blanket off the world.
Amara’s coven stands where there had been nothing a heartbeat ago, close enough that my mind stumbles to catch up and accept what I’m seeing is real. And then, between them, Fallamhain wolves step forward. One after another, familiar bodies filling the spaces, closing ranks without a word. They aren’t the pack’s fighters, but they stand all the same. It isn’t a barricade they form. It’s a declaration. They’ve brought the fight to the enemy, and the way they claim their places, digging theirheels in, makes it clear this road is where they intend to make their stand, no matter the cost.
Amara stands at the front, fire coiling and ready in her palms. And Rhosyn—Rhosyn is here too, positioned at the High Priestess’s flank in her fawn wolf form.
I think back to earlier, to the moment in the car when I tried to reach Rhosyn’s mind and thought I felt her closer than the others. It happened too fast for me to really trust it as real.
Now I know why.
Amara doesn’t waste any more time. The fire in her hand forms a tight ball and then she hurls it.
It slams into the council member still standing over me with violent force and sends him flying backward. His body flings off the road and crashes into a sturdy trunk there. The cracking of his bones on impact is something everyone hears, the silence left behind when the Ashvale coven’s glamour falls making sure of it.
The breaking of the ex-councilor’s spine is all it takes.
Amara and Rhosyn lead the witches and wolves into the madness.
Tanith’s coven collides with Amara’s, magic slamming into magic, until the air hums with it. McNamara wolves crash into Fallamhain wolves, bodies hitting hard, snarls splitting the night open.
The road vanishes under the roar of it all, snow and mud are kicked skyward, screams and howls stacked on top of each other.
A sharp yelp cuts through it.
I whip my head around in time to see Zephira move. She’s on her back in the freezing slush and mud, her face a mess of blood and shredded skin, but her hands lift anyway from trying to fight Juno off. Her fingers shape something invisible to anyone who doesn’t know what they’re looking for. I do, and I spot the faint shimmer forming between her palms.
An illusion.
Whatever she crafts, I can’t see, but Juno’s body language changes instantly.
The omega’s distress is unmistakable and nearly tangible. She staggers back with a soft, broken sound that hits me straight in the ribs. Her gaze is fixed on something that isn’t there, and her body shakes and braces for a blow that doesn’t come. I still don’t know Juno’s full story, but I know enough. This is a Nightingale who has already endured too much—survived so much unspeakable pain, she’s been stuck in her wolf’s skin for months because the world has taught her it’s safer to not be human at all.
Watching her break further beneath the weight of Zephira’s magic cracks something wide open inside my chest.
Heat blooms there, filling a part of me that’s been dormant and quiet long enough for me to forget about it. It spreads faster than I can make sense of it, and beneath it, my wolf surges. No longer content with her measured pacing or the quiet she’s been choosing for days. Her anger meets mine head-on, and the two of them braid together and demand space I don’t have to give.
Juno’s agony fuels it, the sight of her fighting and bleeding out pain is something neither of us can tolerate. The pressure keeps building until it’s clear this much fury was never meant to be held inside a single body.
I’m on my feet before I consciously decide to move. The blade lies where Zephira dropped it, half buried in mud and splatters of her blood. I don’t break stride. I scoop it up, my fingers curling around the smooth bone handle, and the rest of the distance between us is gone in seconds.
There’s no pause, or second thought to be found.
Zephira has just pushed herself up to her elbows when I reach her. I don’t allow her to rise higher. With my free hand on the center of her chest, I shove her back into the dirt. A halfsecond later, I plunge the knife into the damage Juno already left behind—into the ruined socket where an eye should be.
The blade drives home.
