The candle guttered.
“You’re going to get yourself killed,” she whispered to herself, putting the book away.
She didn’t owe Dominic Volkhov anything.
Not after what he did.
Chapter 5 - Dominic
Dominic Volkhov sat in the half-dark of his study, the scent of woodsmoke and the distant ocean breeze thick in the air. The maps before him blurred at the edges, their inked borders swimming in the flicker of firelight. Patrol routes, suspected hybrid trails, recent sightings. Every single detail burned into his mind.
The hybrids were moving closer. He could feel it. Not just in the reports Julian sent, but in the air. The very mountains. Call it a wolf’s intuition. He knew better than to question it. For five years, he’d held Skymist together through discipline and loyalty, through the uncompromising protection of his borders. But this was different. This was no individual threat, quickly recognized, easily dispatched. This was something bigger than he had ever faced.
He leaned back in his chair, exhaling hard through his nose. The whiskey in the glass beside him had gone untouched, its surface still and amber in the dying light.
He’d been turning the encounter in Voskresen over and over in his mind. He still wasn’t sure letting the few passing hybrids live had been wise, but there was no use dwelling on it. They’d have moved on by now.
Part of him was curious. He’d seen hybrids before, but only a handful. Never a threat. They had been strange creatures, malnourished and half-shifted. Their eyes seemed to carry madness. He’d never had a conversation with one. He’d half thought they were incapable of it. Centuries of being trapped in the shadows surely had to have had some effect on them.
But something had changed. They’d gotten smarter, more disciplined over their forms, such that they could appear as humans. Or something close to it.
The truth was, there was too much still unknown. And that was dangerous. It put his pack in danger.
His gaze drifted back to the map, but his thoughts were already wandering down that thread, slipping toward the one name he’d forbidden himself to think.
Layla.
It started as an irritation, like a splinter. He tried to push her out, to bring his focus back to strategy, to logistics, to anything but her voice. But memory had a cruel sense of timing. And he’d always felt far more protective of her than perhaps he should.
She’d seemed so scared in the bookshop the other night. But still defiant. Always that spark of defiance. The moment she’d looked up, meeting his eyes, he’d felt that old, traitorous pull, something that wasn’t supposed to exist anymore. He’d buried it long ago, along with everything else he’d been before the Alpha’s mantle closed over him.
Dominic dragged a hand down his face. The fire hissed, collapsing on itself.
He should never have gone there. Julian could have handled it. He told himself it was a precaution, that Layla’s information on hybrid patterns was worth verifying, but even he could see the weakness of the lie. He’d gone because something in him had needed to see her. Needed to know she was still there, still breathing, stillsafe.
He hated that. Hated how thinking of her made everything else blur.
Layla Hawthorne. Self-identified outcast and the sister of his oldest friend. A reminder of every line he was never meant to cross.
He thought he’d firmly locked their past away, never to be revisited. But the cracks were still there, their history bleeding through.
He poured more whiskey and swallowed it without tasting it.
Outside, the wind had picked up. He could hear it moaning against the shutters, the whisper of pines bending toward the sea. Skymist had always been restless. Founded by nomads, hemmed in by forest and tide. A fortress with two fully matured packs, but every fortress cracked eventually.
Especially when the threat wasn’t just outside the walls.
Dominic’s thoughts turned, unwillingly, to the Volnoye Pack.
Leonid hadn’t acknowledged the hybrid threat. Why should he? If Dominic sent word, it would be an admission of weakness. An acknowledgement of the legitimacy of the Volnoye.
Dominic didn’t want to send any such message.
There was no chance Leonid was unaware of the threat building. When Dominic had risen against his father, made it clear he wanted a break from the old savagery, and Leonid had taken some of his father’s best fighters with him when he left. Hunters, trackers, warriors. Males who knew their brute strength and relished it.
Perhaps he was waiting for the hybrids to weaken the Volkhov Pack before he came to finish it off. Everyone hadthought that it would be him to inherit the Alpha’s throne. When Dominic instead had claimed it…
Leonid had been a brother to him, once.
