CHAPTER FOUR

Ryker's POV

The color left her face so completely it was like watching someone turn off a light.

"That cannot be true." Her voice had dropped to something barely functional. "My sister is not a murderer. She was a teacher. She taught primary school children in Valen's Crossing, she — " She stopped, shook her head, shook it again like she was trying to physically dislodge what I'd said. "Mia was not a killer. You are lying."

I looked at her carefully.

Either she was the finest actress The Covenant had ever produced, or they had sent her here with nothing but a story and a blade and a grief they had deliberately kept raw and unexamined for five years.

Looking at her face right now, at the particular quality of her devastation — not the sharp, controlled devastation of someone whose cover had been blown, but the deep, disorienting kind that came from the ground shifting under your feet — I was increasingly certain it was the latter.

They had used her. Completely. And she had let them, because they had given her something to aim her pain at.

"Your sister was a hunter," I said. I kept my voice even, because she didn't need me to be cruel right now and cruelty wasn't the point. "Not a teacher. Or perhaps she was that too — people are capable of being more than one thing. But her primary occupation for at least three years before she came to my territory was killing werewolves for an organization that has had one goal since its founding." I held her gaze. "The hunters want our race gone. Not contained. Not pushed back behind our borders. Extinct. And the way they have always recruited, the way they have always built loyalty, is by telling people like you that we are the monsters. That we prey on humans. That we terrorize and dominate and deserve whatever violence is brought against us." I paused. "The truth is that this pack has not crossed into human territory unprovoked in over twenty years. We stay within our borders. We govern ourselves. We ask only to be left alone. It is the hunters who come to us."

"Stop." She pressed both hands flat against the sides of her head. "Stop talking. Why would I believe a single word that comes out of your mouth? You are the one who killed her. You stand there and say her name and expect me to — " Her voice cracked, and she sealed it shut with visible effort, jaw clenching. "If you're going to kill me then just kill me. Stop feeding me lies and just do it."

"I'm not going to kill you," I said.

Something moved across her face — relief and its opposite, simultaneously.

"But you will pay for what you've done." I stood, and I watched her read the finality in my posture, watched her body pull inward slightly in anticipation. I crossed to her, took her arm, not roughly but without gentleness either, and walked her to the door.

Bram was in the corridor where I'd stationed him. He was one of my senior guards — steady, reliable, someone I trusted to follow an instruction precisely.

"Lock her up," I said, and I passed her over. "The holding cage. No harm comes to her, but she doesn't leave."

Zara didn't fight it. That was what struck me as Bram took hold of her arm and began walking her down the corridor — she went quietly, her shoulders dropping, her steps steady. No screaming, no struggling, no further argument. She had the posture of someone who had already processed what came next and decided to meet it without resistance. Whether that was training or something closer to exhaustion, I couldn't tell.

I watched until they turned the corner at the end of the corridor. Then I stepped back into the room.

Caden was already inside, standing near the window with his arms crossed and his expression set in the particular configuration that told me he was choosing his words carefully.

"I owe you an apology," I said, before he could speak. "I doubted your judgment. You were doing your job and I overrode you because I didn't want to hear it." I met his eyes. "That won't happen again."

He was quiet for a moment. Then he uncrossed his arms. "That's why I'm here, Alpha. To catch what you miss." He didn't say it with any sharpness. It was simply true, the way a blade was simply sharp. "Just be more careful next time. The bond — even an artificial one — it gets into the instinct. It made you want to protect her before you had any reason to."

"I know."

"What do you plan to do with her?"

I moved to the chair by the window and sat down, pressing my fingers together in front of me while I thought it through. "They sent her here with a constructed version of events. Five years of grief, a dead sister, a cause to die for — and not one piece of accurate information about who or what she was actually working for." I exhaled. "She came here to kill me, yes. But I think she genuinely had no idea what Mia was. What any of them are." I looked at Caden.

"Which means she knows things she doesn't know she knows. The Covenant's structure. Their communication methods. Safe houses. Operative protocols. Information she'd have absorbed without realizing its value." I paused. "She can be useful. Not as a prisoner we break, but as someone who might eventually understand what was done to her."

Caden considered this, then gave a single slow nod. "Smart. I'll make sure she's comfortable enough to stay functional." He moved toward the door. "Sleep, Alpha. What's left of the night."

He left, and I sat alone in the room with the particular silence that followed a thing going badly in a direction you had almost hoped it wouldn't go.

How could I have been so foolish?

I had been foolish, and I had been foolish because I had been desperate, and desperation in an Alpha was a liability that enemies would always find eventually.

The council's deadline had arrived in my life six months ago like an unwanted guest who refused to leave. Find your mate, they had said, Find your mate, or we will have cause to question your fitness to lead. Nine months, they had given me. I had three months left.

Before the deadline I had never particularly ached for the bond. I had wanted it the way a person wants something they believe will arrive in its own time — with patience and without urgency. After the deadline, something had shifted. I had begun to want it with my teeth, and wanting anything with your teeth made you stupid in ways that all your training couldn't fully compensate for.

I stood, crossed to the bar on the far wall, and picked up the decanter.

I was still holding it when the window exploded inward.

I was on the floor before the glass finished falling, the decanter abandoned, every trained instinct firing simultaneously. Two figures dropped through the shattered frame — dressed entirely in black, faces masked, moving with the specific economy of people who had rehearsed this. Professional. Coordinated. Not opportunistic wolves from a rival pack.

Hunters.

The calculation took half a second: they'd known. Either they'd been monitoring the girl's progress and realized the mission had failed, or — worse — she had never been expected to succeed. She had been the distraction, the thing that made me lower my guard while the actual assault positioned itself.

The first man was still finding his footing when I reached him. I took his knife arm at the elbow, heard the snap, and as his body folded with it I drove the back of his head into the floor with enough force to end the conversation. The second one was faster, and we moved through the room in a series of exchanges that broke two pieces of furniture before I found the angle I needed and used it.

Outside, the compound had erupted. Gunfire, shouting, the distinct bone-deep sounds of a pack defending its territory. My men were handling it.

But the holding cage was on the ground floor.

I was running before I had consciously made the decision to run.

I heard her voice before I reached the door.

"What are you doing? I'm one of you — I'm one of you, stop — "

I came through the door fast and took in the scene in an instant. Zara was on her knees on the stone floor, and the man standing over her was dressed in the same black as the two who had come through my window. His blade was already raised. It was already coming down.

I crossed the room.

I hit him at full force, driving him sideways into the wall hard enough that the impact rattled the door in its frame. He was good — he recovered faster than most, brought the blade around, and we went through a sequence that was brief and very violent before I locked his head between my hands and removed the problem permanently.

I turned around.

Zara was still on her knees. She was shaking in a way that went all the way through her, the kind of shaking that was the body's response to having been two seconds from death. Her eyes were on the man on the floor. Then they came up to me.

"They — " She stopped. Swallowed. "They want me dead." She said it again, quieter, like she was verifying something she hadn't fully processed yet. "They want me dead."

"Yes," I said. I crouched down to her level, which put us at eye height, and I kept my voice steady. "They do."

She just stared at me.

"Did you think they cared about you?" I asked, and I wasn't cruel about it. I genuinely wanted to know what she had believed. "Did you think The Covenant sent you here because your life had value to them?" I watched her face. "You were a tool, Zara. Your grief was a tool. Your sister's death was a tool. You were useful to them as long as you were moving in the direction they pointed you, and the moment you were captured you became a liability they needed to close." I held her gaze. "That man was not here to rescue you. He was here to make sure you couldn't talk to me."

She said nothing. She was still shaking, her hands pressed flat against her thighs, her eyes too wide and too bright. The tears were there again, the ones she kept refusing to let fall.