My head was like lead, but I shook it hard. “I…don’t want—”
“I don’t care what you want.” Silas’s voice had deepened, his eyes now dark. “Because of you I might have to rebuild my family from the fucking ground up.” He pulled me into his chest,his lips inches from my face. “Why not start with a human as strong as you, hmm? Then, everyone will see that I’m not the villain here. Humans have an opportunity to bebetterwith the new order.”
“You… killed the alpha… who turned Toya against her will,” I stammered through labored breaths. “If you do this…what makes you better—?”
“He was an idiot,” Silas snapped. He turned and studied my sister as she crawled desperately toward us, dragging against the hard ground. “He thought with his dick, offering the Bite to any woman with a pretty face.” When he turned his head back to me, his gaze was a million miles away. “He got lucky with her,” he muttered.
Joanna!Was that Marcus?
Silas’s green eyes were still vacant when his canines lengthened from his gums.
“No.” I tried to push him away, my chest tightening with fear. He was too strong. “Please, Silas.”
He heard his name, and his fanatic stare snapped to my face, cutting through me like a blade. My breaths quickened, leaving me gasping for air. My body trembled when his hands tightened around my arms, and he drew me in closer.
“Don’t,” I pleaded. “I don’t want this. I don’t want this!” I squeezed my eyes shut. “Please!”
But he’d already opened his mouth and begun to lower his head.
Chapter Twenty
Marcus
Joanna’s scream broke something in me. Something I had no chance of ever getting back. Because no matter where we went from here, Joanna had been in pain. Regardless of whether I killed Silas, he still hurt her.
But I was going to kill him.
I would just have to hope his death would be enough.
There was a werewolf gnawing on my flank. One on my hip. One on a hind paw. The pain they caused—inconsequential.
Blood was spurting from wounds that might’ve healed with time if I was lucky…
But Silas had latched his teeth to the base of Joanna’s neck, and that was all that I could think about, the only pain I could feel.
Rage blazed through me, hot and all-consuming until red veiled my vision.
My wolf knew what to do.
I reduced my shift to my hybrid form, screaming through the pain when the werewolves’ teeth ripped from my body as I regressed to a smaller frame. I grabbed the two closest wolvesby their necks and squeezed, boring into their flesh with my claws. Their blood dripped down my arms in rivulets, the tang of copper further fueling my demand for death.
The wolf by my feet ran.
I threw the limp bodies to the ground and sprinted for the last of my prey.
He should’ve been faster.
I lunged on top of him, slamming his head into the ground. When I snatched his head up from the cement, he whimpered. He struggled to break free from my grasp, begging me to spare his life. But I snapped his neck, reveling in the sharp crack of bone as I let him fall.
I allowed my wolf to fully take over once more.Silas!
Silas stood, his hand leaving Joanna’s face.
Joanna was back against the Hummer where I left her, as if this had all been a nightmare. But she was shaking uncontrollably, her hand to her neck.
“You’ll thank me one day,” Silas said. His confidence was like a second skin, the provocative gleam in his eye innate to an alpha who’d spent his life radicalizing our kin.
I charged toward him, slamming into his wolf as he shifted.
