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Missy stared at me. Then she released my arm and picked up my overturned chair. “Text me when you’re safe.”

“I will.”

Something shifted in her face. Not forgiveness. A new beginning, perhaps. I leaned down and kissed Owen’s hair before hurrying toward the door.

Missy followed me to the porch. I waved goodbye, and then I ran.

I had spent weeks complaining about cardio. Patty’s intervals. The hills. The humiliating discovery that twelve minutes of jogging could make me question my commitment to oxygen.

None of that existed as I crossed Missy’s yard. My body moved before fear could slow it.

I reached my car at my apartment complex in record time, yanked open the door, and started the engine while still pulling on the seatbelt.

The pack property usually took about thirty minutes from my side of town.

I made it in twenty-two minutes. I remembered almost none of the drive. Curves. Mountain roads. A truck moving too slowly in front of me. My hands locked around the steering wheel. Hudson’s unfinished message replaying through the speakers.

I listened three more times. Each repetition became worse. At first, I hoped I had misunderstood. By the third, I heard the point where his body hit something. By the fourth, I knew he had been losing consciousness.

My foot pressed harder against the accelerator.

I should have been afraid of returning. I had spent the last several days convinced the pack never wanted to see me again. Now that possibility felt irrelevant. They could hate me after I made sure they were okay.

They could ban me from the property. Karen could hand me another silver coin and frame the moment for her wall. I only needed Hudson to be alive long enough to be furious.

I took the final turn and saw the smoke rising above the trees. Not dark smoke from a fire. A pale, dirty cloud drifted from the windows of Hudson’s house and the neighboring home.

Cars crowded the road. People stood across the lawn and along the gravel drive, many of them covering their mouths with shirts, towels, or sleeves. Nobody was going inside.

I braked too hard, my car skidding sideways on the loose gravel before stopping at the edge of the crowd. I threw open the door and nearly fell as I got out.

“What happened?”

Several heads turned. The reaction rippled through the pack. Surprise. Anger. Disbelief.

None of it mattered.

I looked past them toward Hudson’s house. Smoke poured through a broken downstairs window. “Why isn’t anyone doing anything?”

Patty pushed through the group. She had wrapped a damp cloth over her nose and mouth. Her eyes were red, and panic had stripped away every trace of her usual humor.

“It’s wolfsbane.”

I froze. “What?”

“Powdered wolfsbane. Maybe burned or mixed with something. Byron got close enough to smell it before he collapsed.”

Two people supported Byron several yards away. His skin had gone gray, and his breathing sounded strained.

I looked back at the house.

Wolfsbane.

It was one of the topics I’d read about briefly when researching shifters online. I didn’t remember much except that it was toxic to wolf shifters and could kill them.

I started toward the house.

Patty caught my wrist. “What are you doing?”