It was Canaan.
A sound like that doesn’t come from doubt or confusion. It comes from loss.
And I think Canaan deserves to have Rennick with him when he finally has to face it.
“You need to go find him.” I start wiggling in his arms, silently urging him to put me down. When his arms don’t loosen like I want them to, I start shoving at his chest and shoulder. “You need to go, Ren. Before he gets here and sees?—”
The sound that tears through everything is the most horrific thing I have ever heard in my life.
It isn’t a scream. It’s pain, ripped out of a chest with such violence that the night itself flinches from it. The road goes silent all at once, the sound has stripped the air of everything else. No voices. No movement. Just the echo of it hanging between breaths.
Everyone standing in the bloody wreckage turns as one.
Canaan stumbles out from the tree line. He’s human, bloodied and unsteady, emerging from the shadows the same way Rennick did, only slower. Like he already knows he’s lost and doesn’t have to rush. His eyes sweep the road once, unfocused, searching….
And then they lock.
The spear is still there, driven clean through her chest, the ice sharp and intact, refusing to melt in the bitter cold.
We’re all helpless to do anything but be spectators to the moment Canaan Roarke’s world stops.
I see when it happens, when the space his dead bond left behind tells his body what to do. The mate connection is gone, but the way it shaped him isn’t, and his feet carry him forwardthe same way they always did. Toward her. He doesn’t run. He can’t. He moves slowly down the road, through the blood, mud, and snow.
He drops to his knees beside Rhosyn, close enough that his movement jostles Siggy, who’s still sitting vigil at her side. That seems to be what finally breaks Siggy free from whatever frozen place she’s been trapped in. Her head lifts. She turns toward him, eyes blown wide and shining. Hands shaking as she pulls back at last, giving Canaan space. Giving him his mate.
I look away only long enough to watch Siggy stagger into her mother’s waiting arms. Yrsa catches her without a word, holding her off to the side while Siggy, who’s still babying her broken arm, folds into her. In my peripheral vision, I catch the shape of a large dark wolf stepping out of the trees near them, but I’m already turning away and don’t look back to see who it is.
Rennick has been holding me tight and unmoving, his face stoic as he works through what’s unfolding in front of us. Then his grip shifts. One arm slides beneath my knees, the other across my back, and he cradles me against his chest. I don’t think there’s anything strong enough to make him let me go in a moment like this.
Canaan reaches for Rhosyn with a tenderness that’s unbearable to witness. His hands hesitate first, hovering like he’s afraid to touch her, like he knows she’s too still, too quiet, and can’t reconcile that with the way his body remembers her.
When he finally pulls her into his arms, he does it slowly, carefully, adjusting his grip again and again as if he can find a way to hold her that won’t make this worse.
He can’t make it whose.
Holding death doesn’t hurt the dead. It only hurts the living.
His broad shoulders shake as his head dips to her, his forehead resting against her temple. His lips are moving and he’s saying something that I can’t hear, but hope to Goddess thatsomehow Rhosyn hears them wherever she might be. Canaan is pressing a kiss to her wild curls when he can’t keep it at bay any longer. Another guttural sound escapes him that I know will be imprinted in my memory for the rest of my life.
It tears free from his chest in a way that’s broken to the point of being utterly unrecognizable. It carries across the road, and I know with a sick certainty that I’m watching a man fracture beyond repair. You don’t lose your mate like this and walk away unchanged. It reshapes who you at your core, steals something from you that you can’t ever get back.
I can’t bring myself to keep watching his descent.
My face turns into the crook of Rennick’s throat and I close my eyes, shutting out the sight of it even as the sounds of his pain continue at my back. Canaan’s grief spilling out across everything. Every unfiltered and raw noise that slips from him weaves itself with Rhosyn’s final words echoing in my head until I can’t separate them anymore.
I stay where I am and let myself come undone as quietly as I can, tears falling without sound, because in my mate’s arms, I know I’m safe to break.
Chapter 49
Rennick
Islip into the bedroom quietly, easing the door shut behind me. It’s still early, the gray light of morning just beginning to bleed through the wide window across the room. Patrol had me up before dawn, the kind of hour most people resent, but I didn’t. Sleep hasn’t been coming easily the last few nights anyway, my thoughts refusing to settle. Eventually, I give up and turn toward Noa instead, watching her sleep in our bed, or her nest when that’s what she needs. I focus on her breathing, the steady rise and fall of her chest. It settles me in a way nothing else does.
That’s all I need right now. Noa, alive and breathing beside me.
And three days after the attack, my pack can finally breathe again, too. Not relaxed or whole, but we’re no longer braced for the next impact either. The tension that once engrained itself into this territory has thinned, replaced by something fragile and unfamiliar. A sense of things being…contained.
With Pack McNamara decimated and a significant portion of Tanith’s coven erased, peace has edged its way back in. For now. I don’t trust it to last, but I also won’t deny that it’s here.
