She peers out the window. “He has tripled security. I don’t think I can even go get a glass of water without running into a guard.”
When I don’t say anything, she glances at me, and her expression softens.
“You’re very calm,” she murmurs. “Considering the circumstances.”
“I’m not calm at all,” I confess. “I just don’t have anywhere to put my anxiety, so I’m keeping it bottled up.”
That pulls a small laugh from each of us. It doesn’t last long.
“I’ve never been afraid like this before, Violet,” I say, thinking about the waiting, the not knowing, the feeling that everything I’ve spent ten years grieving has come back, close enough to touch, yet may still be taken away. “I mean, I’ve been afraid. After he disappeared, I was afraid for a long time. But it was different then. That was the fear that comes…after. This is—”
“The fear that comes before,” Violet finishes for me quietly.
“Yes.”
Both our heads turn when we hear it.
A single thump. Like something heavy was dropped just outside the sitting room door, soft enough that it could have been a book falling from a shelf in the corridor. Maybe a guard shifting position, leaning back against the wall.
We look at each other.
“Probably one of the guards,” she says, already uncurling from the armchair.
“Violet—”
“I’ll go check.” She is already moving toward the door.
She opens it and steps into the corridor. I hear her footsteps, unhurried, moving toward the main hallway.
I sit straight up on the settee and wait.
Twenty seconds.
Thirty.
Forty.
I don’t like how long this is taking. Slowly, I get up to go look for her.
The corridor is empty.
No Violet. No sound of her footsteps returning. The guard who should be posted at the far end of the hall is absent, his post empty and wrong in a way that makes stomach clench.
“Violet?”
Nothing.
I move toward the main hallway junction. My wolf is up and pressing on me hard now, a low warning vibration that runs through my entire chest. I turn the corner—
And stop.
Violet is at the top of the main staircase, completely still, looking down. The front entrance door at the bottom of the stairs is open. It should not be open.
I smell the blood before I see it. I gasp audibly when I look down and see the bloodbath. The soldiers Darius tasked with protecting his mate are dead. So many that I can’t even count them through my horror. Some of the guards look like they were trying to transform into their wolves but were killed mid-shift. Some are still wearing their human skin.
How did this happen?
Before I can process what I’m seeing, six men rush in, wearing black gear and face masks. They move in perfect unison, leaping over the bodies and heading for the stairs.
