“You are.” Moore wipes his eyes with the back of his hand, still chuckling. “All of you. You really think I didn’t plan for this? That a man in my position leaves anything to chance?”
The amusement drains from his face, replaced by something cold and certain. “You triggered an alarm the moment you entered the house.”
I hear Cole grunt behind me, and Kyran’s low growl from across the room. My eyes move over the walls, the ceiling, looking for cameras, sensors, anything I should have noticed and didn’t.
“Every door. Every window.” Moore’s voice is conversational, almost friendly. “I know who you are. I know what you’re capable of. Did you really think I wouldn’t prepare for the possibility of you showing up at my home?”
As if on cue, a soft hissing sound fills the air.
At first, I think it’s a trick of the adrenaline flooding my system. But then I taste it. Faint, chemical.
Every vent in the room is exhaling something thin and colorless into the space around us.
“Don’t bother holding your breath,” Moore says, rising from the couch. He straightens his pajama shirt with a sharp tug and lifts his chin, defiant. “You’ve already inhaled enough. It only affects shifters, by the way. Humans are perfectly fine.”
Using his hand, he gestures toward his daughter, who is staring at him with wide, unfocused eyes. “As you can see.”
The effect is almost instant.
My knees soften along with every muscle in my body. The power that comes with being what I am starts to drain, like someone pulled a plug at the base of my spine. I reach for the wall and miss, my hand swiping through empty air. Across the room, one of Kyran’s bears drops to a knee. Cole grabs the doorframe. Zeke sways.
“What…?” That’s as much as I can mumble. My tongue feels thick. Heavy.
“A compound of my own design,” Moore says. He’s moving now, stepping around me, heading for the hallway. “Targetedsuppression of the enhanced nervous system unique to shifters. You’ll recover within an hour or so. But by then…”
He doesn’t finish the sentence. He doesn’t need to.
I try to move after him. Every step feels like wading through swamp water. The wolf inside me is howling, raging, throwing himself against the walls of my skull, and I can’t reach him. Feeling like a door has been slammed between us.
Moore is in the hallway now. I hear him moving fast, hear a closet open, hear the jingle of keys. He’s leaving.
Without his daughter.
I turn my head—even that takes effort, my neck stiff, my vision swimming—and I see her trying to stand. She pushes herself up from the armchair, makes it halfway, and her legs buckle. She catches herself on the arm. “Dad…” Her voice is thin, barely there. “Dad, I can’t… I can’t get up…”
“Iris,” he barks on his way to the door. “Now.”
She tries again. Falls. Her knees hit the hardwood with a sound that makes something in my chest crack open. She’s reaching out one hand toward the hallway where his voice came from.
And she’s crying. Tears roll down her face, silent and steady, she’s too exhausted for anything more. “Please,” she whispers. “Don’t leave me here.”
Silence. One beat. Two.
The front door opens. Closes. An engine turns over. Tires on gravel, accelerating, fading.
He left her.
The realization cuts through the fog in my brain.
The girl is on the floor, crying, reaching for him, and he left her. He left her with a roomful of shifters he drugged and threatened and doesn’t know a damn thing about, and he drove away.
The gas is thick in my lungs, dragging me to my knees, and the room is tilting sideways. Cole is on the floor, mumbling curses. Zeke is slumped against the wall. Kyran is still upright but barely, braced against the mantle with both hands, his breathing ragged.
But through all of it, I see her. Curled on the floor next to the armchair, her hand still reaching toward the empty hallway. Her eyes are closed now. The tears are still falling.
My wolf goes quiet. Not calm, but focused. Fixed on the girl on the floor while nothing else in the world exists.
I’ve watched my brothers go through it. I’ve watched Tara go through it. I told myself it wouldn’t happen to me. Not now, not in the middle of everything, not when there’s so much at stake.
