Carefully, I get to my feet, dusting off my jacket with my free hand. That’s when I see it.
A photograph, face up among the wreckage.
My phone starts ringing.
I reach for the broken picture frame with one hand and answer my phone with the other. The picture stares back at me, and my heart sinks. It’s a child.
As I look at her, my head starts to spin.
No. How is this possible?
It can’t be.
“Darius, you there?” I hear Ethan’s voice coming out of the phone in my hand. “We have a major problem.”
I can’t respond. My eyes stay fixed on the child in the picture.
“Zion found Violet. Both she and her mother have been imprisoned. They’re—”
“Hybrids.” The word comes out numbly. “They’re hybrids, aren’t they?”
The photograph trembles in my hand. Young Violet stares up at me, held safe in Lillian’s embrace, and everything I thought I knew crumbles to dust.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Violet
I wake to the acrid smell of iron and damp stone. My head is throbbing, and when I try to move, metal bites into my wrists. The chains rattle as I jerk forward, panic flooding my chest.
“Violet?” My mother’s voice cuts through the fog in my head.
I blink hard, forcing my eyes to adjust to the dim light. We’re in a cell. The walls are rough rock, slick with moisture, and the only illumination comes from a single torch flickering in the corridor beyond the bars.
My mother sits slumped against the wall opposite me, her wrists bound by chains identical to mine. Her hair hangs limp around her face, and bruises bloom along her cheekbone.
“Are you okay?” she asks. She sounds exhausted, like every word costs her something vital.
I nod, though I’m not sure it’s true. My throat feels raw, like I’ve been screaming, and my wolf is eerily quiet. Too quiet. Like she’s been muzzled.
The panic rises again, sharp and suffocating. I yank at the chains, flinching at the way they sear my skin. “We have to get out of here. We have to—”
“Violet.” My mother’s voice is firm despite its weariness. “Calm down.”
“Calm down?” My laugh comes out brittle. “They chained us up like animals!”
“I know.” She closes her eyes. “But there’s no escaping our fate now.”
The finality in her words steals the air from my lungs. I force myself to breathe, counting each inhale and exhale like she taught me when I was small. Back when she still touched me with something resembling gentleness.
It’s one of the few memories I have from before the massacre.
“That’s it,” she murmurs. “Breathe through it.”
My chest still heaves, but the rhythm steadies. The panic doesn’t leave, but it becomes manageable. Barely. I stare at the chains binding my wrists, then at my mother across from me. The silence stretches between us, heavy with all the things we’ve never said.
“Are we really hybrids?” I whisper just loud enough for her to hear.
She stares straight ahead at nothing. “Yes.”
