I was surprised they hadn’t turned on each other more often. Keeping them busy had helped: Training drills, building projects, clearing that apple orchard and turning it into an open field last month. Still, it was only a matter of time before the whole place exploded.
And those kids were getting out, one way or another. Theyhadto. Because if they didn’t, if I failed them, I wasn’t sure I could live with myself.
I studied each face as I passed by. Most pretended to ignore me while tracking my every move with sideways glances. The last few months as Arabesque’s enforcer had bought me respect born of fear. Fear worked fine. Fear kept me alive.
A broad-shouldered wolf with a jagged scar across his nose lumbered toward me, his eyes glittering with some dumbass idea.
“Foster,” he grunted.
“Bryce.” I didn’t break stride, didn’t offer anything more.
“The boys are saying you’re being soft on those pups.” He matched my pace, muscling into my space. “ ’specially the girl.”
“The boys should mind their own business.” I kept my voice monotone and bored.
“Maybe itistheir business. Maybe everything in this camp is everyone’s business. Ain’t that what pack means?” His lips peeled back from yellowed teeth.
I stopped, turning to face him fully.
“You redefining pack law now, Bryce? Because last I checked, Arabesque putmein charge, not you. Not ‘the boys.’Me. The only one here with fucking alpha blood. Stand down or die.”
The dominance rolled off me in waves along with a quiet certainty that made lesser wolves drop their eyes. Bryce wasn’tanywhere near my level, but he was stupid. He’d been testing the waters for weeks, but he wasn’t ready to challenge me directly. Not yet.
“Just passing along what I’m hearing,” he muttered, taking a half-step back.
“Pass along this instead: Anyone touches those kids, they answer to me. Anyone gives them trouble, they answer to me. Anyone even looks at them wrong—”
“They answer to you. Yeah, I get it,” he sneered, but the stink of fear leaked through his bravado. “You’ve made your point. Just makes me wonder why you care so much about some random pups.”
“Maybe I don’t like waste.” I leaned in close, my voice dropping to a growl. “Those four have potential. Potential I can use. Potential that gets squandered if some asshole decides to take out his frustrations on them.”
He held my gaze for three heartbeats before looking away.
“Whatever you say,alpha.”
I watched him slink off before resuming my circuit of the camp. The exchange had cost me precious minutes. The barn was on the far side of the property from here, and I needed to get there without drawing undue attention before Dominic and the others arrived.
I didn’t know the details of King Julian’s plan, and I didn’t want to. Plausible deniability would keep them and me alive. All I knew was that I needed to get them to a rendezvous point by midnight to meet the king’s contact. Which meant they needed to be on the road within the next thirty minutes.
Problem was, the Gravewrought were already prowling.
#
The day Arabesque returned from Europe, every rogue had been on edge, disturbed by something they couldn’t name, but could sense, a wrongness that made their wolves pace and whine. An hour after she arrived, I’d been summoned to the farmhouse.
“Foster,” she’d said, her green eyes gleaming, “I’ve brought us some new friends. Aren’t they magnificent?”
That was a month ago. Now her “friends” had names and territories carved out across the property, and the rogues gave them a wide berth.
The Gravewrought. Arabesque’s latest weapons.
Four days after their introduction, I’d found a rogue named Mercer emptying his stomach behind the storage shed, trembling so hard, his teeth chattered.
“I saw it,” he’d gasped between dry heaves. “That white thing. It looked right through me like I was already dead.”
The next day, two rogues tried to desert. They made it half a mile before we heard the screams. Arabesque had me retrieve what was left and display it at the camp entrance as a warning.
The Gravewrought were three twisted perversions of things that Arabesque had dug up from their graves, bound to her will, and turned into something worse than dead.
