The headlights.

Chapter Three

SLOANE

The second car comes out of nowhere.

One second the old man is gripping my wrist, mouth open around whatever he’s about to tell me, and the next there’s a horn blaring and headlights swallowing the whole road and a sound I will hear in my sleep for months afterward, metal and bone in the same instant, wrong in a way that doesn’t belong to either one alone.

He’s thrown sideways off the road into the ditch grass.

The car that hit him doesn’t stop. Taillights flare once, twice, and then it’s gone around the bend like it was never there at all, gravel spitting from the tires.

For a second nobody moves. Not me. Not the driver, still gripping the wheel with both hands like she hasn’t caught up to what just happened in front of her own headlights.

“Oh my god.” Her voice comes out cracked in half. “Oh my god, oh my god—”

“Move the car.” I’m already out the door, already running toward the ditch before I’ve decided to. “Pull it onto the shoulder, put the hazards on, go—”

“Is he—”

“I don’t know. Move the car!”

She moves the car. I drop to my knees in wet grass beside the old man and my hands are shaking so hard I can barely find a pulse, but it’s there, thin and fast under my fingers, which feels like the only good news I’m going to get tonight.

“Sir. Sir, can you hear me?”

His eyes are open. Barely. Fixed somewhere past my shoulder like he’s looking at something I can’t see.

“Sloane,” he breathes. Not a question, this time either. Just my name, like he’s confirming to himself that this part, at least, is real.

“I’m here. You’re going to be okay, I need you to stay with me—”

“They know,” he says. “They’ll have heard the horn. We don’t have time—”

“Time for what? Who’s they?”

His hand closes around my wrist again, weaker this time, but urgent in a way that scares me more than the blood soaking into the grass beneath him.

“Don’t let them find you before I—”

The driver is back, crouched on his other side, face bone white in the glow of the hazards. “We need to get him to a hospital. Right now.”

“No hospital.” His voice cracks on the word, but the force behind it doesn’t. “No hospital. Take me to Nora.”

“Who’s Nora?”

“She’ll know,” he says. “Tell her…… tell her it’s about the Bishop girl. She’ll know.”

The driver and I look at each other over his body, and I can see the same question in her face that’s sitting in my own chest, ugly and urgent. What is happening tonight.

“Do you know a Nora?” I ask her.

She’s quiet a beat too long. “Yeah,” she finally says. “I know a Nora.”

Her name is Rhea. I learn that in the car, on the way, because it feels wrong to keep calling the woman who might have just watched a man die “the driver” in my head.

She drives faster than the road deserves, both hands white on the wheel, and the old man is stretched across the back seat with my jacket pressed hard against the wound in his side, and none of us say very much, because there isn’t very much to say that doesn’t sound insane out loud.

“How do you know Nora?” I ask, mostly to fill the silence, mostly because if I stop talking I’m going to start thinking about the wolf that rejected me two hours ago, and I don’t have room in my chest for both things at once.

“She helped my daughter once. A few years back.” Rhea’s eyes flick to the rearview, checking the old man’s breathing without taking her hands off the wheel. “People go to her when they don’t want questions asked. Hospitals ask questions.”

“What kind of person doesn’t want a hospital asking questions?”

“The kind bleeding out in my back seat, apparently.”

Fair enough.

Nora’s house sits at the end of a gravel drive so far off the main road I lose count of the turns, half-hidden behind a stand of pine that blocks it from view until we’re almost on top of it. Lights are on despite the hour. Rhea barely gets the car in park before she’s out, banging on the door hard enough to rattle it in the frame.

The woman who answers is younger than I expect — not much older than me, dark hair pulled back, sharp eyes that go from Rhea’s face to the car to me in the space of one breath, cataloging the whole scene before either of us says a word.

“Bring him in,” she says. No hello. No what happened. Just that, already moving, already clearing a long table in what looks like a kitchen that’s been rearranged a hundred times for exactly this purpose.

Between the three of us we get him onto the table. He’s grey around the mouth now, breathing shallow and fast, and Nora’s hands move over him with a competence that makes my stomach unclench half an inch, the first good sign I’ve had all night.

“He asked for you specifically,” Rhea says. “Said to tell you it’s about the Bishop girl.”

Nora’s hands go still for exactly one second. Then they’re moving again, faster.

“You’re the Bishop girl,” she says. Not a question. Her eyes flick to me, then back to the wound. “Tonight. The rejection. Word travels.”

“You know about that already?”

“Everyone within thirty miles knows about that already. Alphas don’t reject Bishop women in front of two hundred witnesses without the whole county hearing about it by sunrise.” She presses something dark and herbal against the wound, and the old man makes a sound low in his throat that turns my stomach. “Hand me the green jar. Second shelf.”

I hand her the jar because it’s easier than standing there useless.

“Who is he?” I ask.

“Someone who should have been more careful.”

“That’s not an answer.”

She looks up at me then, just briefly, something sharp and assessing in her face. “No,” she agrees. “It isn’t.”

The old man’s eyes flutter open again. His hand finds my sleeve, weaker now, barely more than a twitch of fingers.

“Sloane.”

“I’m here.”

“The rejection.” His breath rattles wet in his chest, and Nora’s jaw tightens at the sound. “It wasn’t the Hallorans. That was never—” He coughs, and it costs him something visible, some last reserve he didn’t have to spend. “Your mother. Ask about your mother. She knew what you were before you—”

“Before I what?”

“He needs to stop talking,” Nora says, sharp, “or he’s not going to finish that sentence at all.”

“Before I what?” I press, because some things matter more than being told to be quiet.

The old man’s eyes find mine, and for a second, one second, they’re perfectly clear.

“Before you were ever born,” he says, “they knew exactly what would happen the night your bond broke.”

Headlights sweep across the kitchen window.

Nora’s head comes up fast, every line of her body going still and alert in a way that has nothing to do with medicine.

“Get away from the windows,” she says. “Now. Both of you.”

“Who is that?”

“Whoever hit him.” She’s already moving, already reaching under the counter for something I can’t see, and the calm competence from a minute ago has curdled into something harder, more careful. “Whoever hit him doesn’t usually miss twice.”

The engine outside cuts off.

A car door opens.

“Rhea, get the girl to the back room,” Nora says, low and even, in the voice of someone who has done this exact thing before and knows exactly how badly it can go. “Now.”

Footsteps on the gravel outside. Slow and Unhurried. Like whoever it is already knows nobody in this house is going anywhere.

I don’t move toward the back room. I move toward the window instead, just far enough to see past the curtain, and what I see standing in the drive, backlit by his own headlights, makes every hair on my arms lift at once.

It’s not a stranger.

I know that jacket. I know that walk.

Marcus.

Roan’s second, standing in Nora’s driveway less than three hours after the worst night of my life, looking at this house like he already knows exactly who’s inside it.