“Kevin, I’ll be right back. I’m going to move my truck closer to the store.” As soon as I find Pryce. He’s got the keys.
With a loud click, the back door to the store shuts. My wolf growls, low but threatening. I should run the other way, but I catch that hint of a scent that screamshome.
Slowly, I open the door to the back alley. There, standing before me in the middle of the day, a tall, healthy, and very alive Ronin.
He’s alive. No, I’m imagining him. I extend a shaking hand and touch his arm. Warm flesh. Very alive.
“Is that really you?” I whisper as if talking any louder will make him disappear. “You’re dead.”
“So are you,” he says with a wide, playful grin before his expression turns deadly serious. “It’s taken me a long time to find you, Lina. I’ve been tracking down stories of a blonde shifter with blue eyes rescued from a research lab.”
One step, then another, I draw close to him. My hand shakes as I reach out to touch him, to test if he’s real or imagined.
My fingers press against his face to discover warm flesh.
“I’m real, Lina,” he says, as he captures my hand in his.
The shock is so great, my mind can’t process what I’m seeing… or what this could mean. Hope swells within me. “Are there others?”
“Yes, but not as many as you’d hope.”
“I had no hope. Only… images of dead shifters everywhere.” I swallow hard. “Who? How?” I’m afraid to ask for names, to have my new-found hope crushed with confirmation of my family and friends’ deaths.
“A hunting party that was late getting back. A few shifters visiting relatives in other packs. Many who ran, clawed and foughttheir way through the perimeter the WSSO had set up. And you, Lina.”
Tears stream down my face. Some of my packsurvived.
“When we got separated… I was so scared, Ronin. I made it to the pack, but they were all…” I don’t want to remember the images, let alone speak the words.
When he takes the box of filters I’m still holding and sets them down on a garbage can, I know I don’t have to say anything. He knows what I’m thinking.
“I’m sorry your parents and brothers did not survive.”
It’s the blow I knew was coming, but that doesn’t make it easier to hear. My knees buckle, and he catches me.
“I can’t believe I actually found you. Come, Lina, we have a long journey ahead of us.”
“You have the truck?” The terror of that moment, the tree crashing down on our truck returns with a vengeance and I start to shake all over again.
“No, that’s still sitting under that branch that fell it. We’re on foot.”
“Who’s we?”
“Saber, Henry, and a few others. We’ve been following up on every lead. When I heard rumors of a blonde-haired shifter rescued by one of the packs in this region, I headed south. Something told me it was you.” His smile fills his face, a huge comfort right now.
“Damien Black’s pack rescued me.”
“I’ll thank them at the next opportunity. Are you ready to go?”
“Go? Go where?”
“Our new home.” He hesitates. “It’s best if I don’t say the location out loud, in case anyone’s listening. We relocated the pack. We couldn’t take the chance the WSSO would find us again. No one knows our location and we have to keep it that way.”
“Understood.”
“Ready to go?”
“I can’t. I mean, not yet. Or… I don’t know. I have to speak with Garrett.”
