I need to prove to myself I don’t need him. I begin to name all those who’ve wronged me.
Jim, Bob, Zella, Thaddeus…
I shift, trying to alleviate the weight of the silver around my wrists, my ankles, my throat. My skin is blistered and bleeding. My head throbs. My wolf stirs sluggishly inside me, too weak to do more.
I’m beginning to doze when the psychic shockwave hits like a physical blow, tossing me across my cell.
“What the fuck!?”
I push to my knees, shaking my head against the ringing in my ears. Every supernatural creature within a thousand miles will have felt whatever the fuck that was.
My wolf stirs for the first time in days, lifting her head with hope.
Free,she whispers.The Grand Alpha is dead.
The knowledge arrives with absolute certainty, hitting me with the same devastating clarity as the power shift itself. That kind of psychic disruption only happens when an alpha of immense power dies violently.
Did Ryker kill him? Or someone else?
“You feel that?” Kier asks.
“The whole supernatural world felt that.” I push to my feet, shuffling over to the wall.
“You okay?”
I rub my head. “Yeah. You?”
“Ready for my five o’clock massage but otherwise fine.”
From the corridor outside, I hear shouting. Multiple voices, all talking at once, their words overlapping into chaos.I press my ear to the door, straining to catch fragments of conversation.
“—can’t be right?—”
“—felt it too, that had to be?—”
“—get out of here before?—”
The guards hurry past my cell, leaving behind the sour tang of panic. In the days since my capture, I’ve never heard the guards sound anything but coldly professional. Now they’re falling apart.
This can’t be good.
“You hearing this?”
“Yeah. Guards are spooked, and it sounds like it’s about more than the death of the Grand Alpha.” Kier resumes his scratching at the wall. “Think your pack tracked you down?”
I want to believe that, but doubt gnaws at me. If Ryker had found this place, there would be violence. Alarms. The sound of battle echoing through stone corridors.
Instead, there’s just nervous conversation and the pacing of unsettled guards.
Hours pass. The arguing grows more frequent, more heated. I catch fragments as different groups move through the corridor.
“—should evacuate while we still can?—”
“Our orders were to maintain position?—”
“What orders? From who? Dead men don’t give commands?—”
I lean down to the hole and begin to scratch, searching for a piece of rock big enough to use as a weapon. “This might be our chance to escape.”
