Thiago screamed. Not with fear. With fury. He thrashed against Solomon’s hold, triggered the injection gun blindly, and the shot fired.
Percy pulled my head down. The sound of the struggle collapsed into a chaos of impacts: bodies colliding, bones cracking, the wet sound of the vial shattering against skin. Smoke still drifted through the corridor in thin ribbons, obscuring the tangle of limbs.
Then a scream that didn’t sound human.
It didn’t sound wolf either.
The smoke shifted.
A shape emerged from the tangle. Massive. Wrong. The proportions of a wolf stretched past any natural architecture, limbs too long, jaw distended, eyes rolling with a vacancy that went beyond the standard Purifier’s destruction.
This was theupgrade.
The creature Thiago had described. More monster than wolf. An abomination that moved with a speed its size shouldn’t allow.
My heart stopped.Who? Which one? Whose body was twisted into that form?
Solomon stepped out of the smoke. Blood on his hands, a gash across his chest, but his eyes were clear.
Then Lucian. Arm hanging at an angle that said dislocated, canines still extended, alive and aware.
Which meant the monster was…
Thiago.
The creature turned.
Whatever remained of my father’s consciousness, if anything remained at all, was buried beneath the biological catastrophe his own formula had created. It lunged at Lucian with a speed that made the feral wolves in their cells look sedated by comparison.
Three wolves erupted.
Lucian shifted first. The black wolf, enormous, regal even with an injured shoulder, slamming into the creature’s flank. Solomon followed, his gray wolf driving into the monster’s legs, jaws locking on a limb that felt wrong beneath the teeth, too dense, too resilient. Percival last, his brown wolf the fastest, circling, striking at the creature’s blind spots, drawing its attention from one alpha to another.
Three wolves. Fighting together. My mates in their true forms in front of me simultaneously, and the sight was equal parts terrifying and the most visceral confirmation of what we were: a pack.
The creature fought with the mindless ferocity Thiago had promised.
The three alphas drove it into the wall, into the floor, into the reinforced glass of an empty cell, and it kept getting up. Kept swinging. Kept screaming with a voice that had nothing left in it.
They pinned it. All three wolves on the creature’s body, jaws and claws and the combined weight of three alphas pressing the monster into the concrete. It thrashed beneath them, muscles straining against the hold.
I stood.
The dagger was in my hand. I crossed the distance on legs that ached and a belly that pulled me off-center. The creature’s eyes rolled toward me as I approached, vacant, monstrous, and somewhere in those ruined pupils was the man who’d tucked me into bed and told me about monsters who would come to hurt me.
“There’s going to be a new order,” I said. My voice carried across the sublevel, past the cells where lycans pressed their palms to the glass with tears on their cheeks. “My legacy. Not yours.”
I drove the dagger into his chest.
Andtwisted.
The silver and wolfsbane coating hit the creature’s bloodstream simultaneously. The scream that erupted shook the glass in every cell on the corridor, a sound that was neither human nor wolf nor monster but all three at once, and the thrashing stopped. The massive body convulsed once, twice, then went still beneath the three wolves who held it down.
Unconscious.
The silver and wolfsbane had knocked the creature out.
I pulled the dagger free. Stepped back. My hands were shaking and my wrists were bleeding from the zip ties and my babies were kicking with an urgency that said they’d had enough of their mother’s cardio for one lifetime.
