Her hand stopped.
I looked down at her face to count the freckles across her nose, to see the way her mismatched eyes were swimming with tears she refused to shed.
She didn’t twist.
“I hate you,” she whispered. The words caught in her throat, rough with everything she was holding back.
I stared straight into her eyes. “I know.”
Her jaw clenched.
The hunters were repositioning. I could hear boots on gravel, the click of weapons being adjusted. Not darts this time. The barrels were different. The shots they were loading would definitely kill, not sedate.
She pulled the dagger out. The withdrawal sent a fresh wave of fire through my chest and my knees buckled, both hitting the ground. Blood soaked through my shirt, warm and spreading.
The hunters raised their weapons. Two aimed at Solomon’s prone body. One tracked to Percy. Three more pointed at me,and the thrum from those cylindrical attachments intensified to a pitch that made my wolf growl.
A blur of movement.
A figure erupted from the tree line and hit the closest hunter with enough force to send the man’s weapon spinning into the dirt. The figure moved down the line, taking out the shooters before they could reorient and disabling them.
The shots never fired.
“Move,” the figure ordered. A voice that carried the weight of years spent surviving alone. “Now.”
Solomon and Percival were already moving. On their feet despite the darts. Solomon reached for me and Percival turned back toward the clearing.
Toward Mira.
I did the same. Every inch of my body pulled toward the woman standing alone between twelve hunters with my blood on her hands and our children in her body. We couldn’t leave her.
The hunters fired rounds.
The crack of live ammunition split the pre-dawn air and the figure threw himself into the path, claws out, moving with speed. He swatted the first round out of the air, deflected the second with his forearm, and the third grazed his shoulder without slowing him.
Giselle materialized as her claws caught a fourth shot aimed at Solomon’s back, deflecting it into the dirt, and she fell into formation beside the figure without a word exchanged.
“Go!” The roar tore from his throat. “They will put you in the ground. Go now!”
Percival was shaking beside me, his whole body angled toward the clearing, fighting every step that carried him in the wrong direction. Solomon had my arm over his shoulder, hauling me forward, but his head kept turning back. Even the man who never broke protocol couldn’t stop looking.
Another volley cracked through the trees. The figure and Giselle held the line, drawing the fire, giving us the distance we needed.
I looked back one last time.
Mira stood in the clearing. Head down. The dagger hung at her side, dripping with blood that belonged to the three of us. The hunters were regrouping around Thiago, whose expression had shifted from satisfaction to calculation.
She didn’t lift her head.
The trees swallowed us.
The figure caught up moments later, moving through the forest. Pre-dawn gray was just beginning to thin, the first light filtering through the canopy in pale strips that turned everything to shadow and suggestion.
Behind us, the sound of pursuit. Boots crashing through underbrush, hunters mobilizing to follow. Then a snarl from theeast, a crash, and the pursuit scattered in the wrong direction. Giselle, drawing them off our trail.
He stopped at a rock formation. Turned toward Solomon.
The early light caught his face.
