Naia almost blew it.
One wrong move, one step too far out of cover, and we would’ve been dealing with multiple hostile wolves in unfamiliar territory, outnumbered and unprepared. Reckless doesn’t even begin to cover it.
I unlock the door to the apartment and step inside without a word, already running through everything we heard and everything we saw. The moment the door shuts behind us, the quiet hits again, muting the outside world and leaving me to my thoughts.
Naia moves past me, and the tension still radiates off her in waves.
Good. After that, she should be tense. At the very least, I hope she’s thinking about how that could’ve jeopardized everything, but I don’t bother wasting my breath over it.
“You want to explain what that was back there?” I ask, shutting the door harder than I mean to.
She doesn’t hesitate to turn on me, still just as angry as before. “They were right there.”
“That’s not good enough,” I mutter, exhaling sharply as I drag a hand through my hair. “You can’t just charge into a situation like that without thinking. Not when we don’t know exactly what we’re up against.”
“I was thinking,” she snaps. “I was thinking about taking down the wolves who sold me and making sure they couldn’t do the same to anyone else.”
“That’s well and good, but getting yourself killed in the process won’t fix anything.”
“You don’t know that’s what would’ve happened.”
“I do,” I counter with a step closer, gaze on her intensely. “I was there, and you were about two seconds away from making a mistake you couldn’t recover from.”
As more tense, suffocating silence falls between us, I assume she’s going to argue again. To push and fight like she always does because she can never let anything go. Instead, she turns away sharply and crosses her arms.
“It doesn’t matter now,” she mutters, bristling.
It doesn’t…what matters is what we got out of it, even if the thought still irritates me.
Taking a deep breath, I force myself to let it go for now, and I shift gears. I gesture vaguely to the sofa nearby. “Sit.”
Unsurprisingly, she doesn’t move.
“Naia.”
“I’m fine standing.”
“Fine, then stand,” I say, moving toward the kitchen again to lean back against the island. “But listen.”
She doesn’t respond, but after what we saw in the woods, I already know she’s paying attention.
“You heard them…this isn’t an isolated thing. They’re running some kind of system, and they’re organized.”
“They mentioned a shipment,” she says quietly, allowing her thoughts to wander.
I nod, and her jaw tightens.
“They’re still taking others. They could be shifters, but they might not be. Maybe it has more to do with magic, but we need more proof,” I continue, arms crossing over my chest. “None of this seems random.”
That gets her attention. She looks at me with more focus now, rather than with sarcasm or irritation. “You think this is targeted?”
“It has to be,” I say. “You said it yourself—they used magic on you. That’s not exactly easy to come by on the island, but it isn’t impossible to find.”
Her expression shifts slightly, more considerate now. “They knew I’d fight back…they knew brute force wouldn’t be enough.”
“Exactly.” Silence stretches as we both piece it together, and I hold her gaze. “Start from the beginning. Everything you remember from when they took you.”
Her shoulders tense again, more like she doesn’t want to revisit that time, regardless of how crucial it could be. “I already told you—”
