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“I don’t know why, but I thought he might,” I breathe, my heart pounding in loud, exaggerated beats. “Help me up.”

The wound is healing. Ever since I mated Robert and my healing returned, it’s faster than it ever was. I’m no longer bleeding, but I’m still in pain. Robert helps me to my feet and blinks confusedly when Arabella hands him her cardigan.

She looks away, and I realize what she means.

“You’re naked.”

Robert rolls his eyes but wraps the cardigan around his waist. I look over at the fighting and try to be as loud as I can as I yell, “Stop fighting!”

I don’t expect it to work, but the drugged shifters freeze in place.

“Am I seeing things?” I feel so confused. “Why are they listening to me?”

“Your blood.” Ricky is climbing the steps, his right arm and his face badly bruised. “You have both wolf and vampire blood in you. It could be that.”

The shifter who is holding Terrence has his eyes fixed on my neck. Ricky notices his line of sight, and his eyes tighten. “May I?”

“What?”

He leans forward and wipes some of my blood off my neck. Approaching the shifter, he holds out his finger. In what looks like a wildly inappropriate scene, the shifter leans forward and licks the blood off Ricky’s finger. For a few moments, nothing happens. Then, the shifter makes a choking sound, and his body starts contorting. Fur bursts out of places where there is skin, and he goes down on all fours.

“He’s shifting!” Robert whispers in surprise.

Within minutes, a large wolf is lying unconscious in the shifter’s place.

“Your blood is the key!” Robert looks awestruck. I stare at the wolf, stunned.

I see movement from behind Robert, and I’m about to warn him when he turns around swiftly and thrusts his hand into Terrence’s chest. His voice is dark and cold. “She never would have chosen you. Even if I hadn’t been in the picture, my mate wouldn’t have given an insignificant insect like you a second glance!”

Terrence’s eyes stare blankly, blood appearing in the corner of his mouth.

Robert yanks out his heart, and Terrence’s body crumples to the ground.

I see him go down, and I feel nothing.

The fighting has stopped. The wolf shifters are looking around, not knowing what to do. I see the other two Alphas approaching us, and Robert immediately turns me around so I don’t have to look at their naked bodies.

“Are you okay, Charlotte?” Morris asks, his voice kind.

“Yes.”

Robert quickly catches them up on what has happened. In the meantime, I see the vampires from the Nelo Clan standing at a distance, nobody brave enough to attack the wolves. This whole thing has been very anticlimactic, and my knees are shaking now, my wound still hurting.

“If my blood can reverse the effects of the drug, we need to do it,” I say quietly so only Robert can hear me.

“Charlotte—”

“Losing a little blood isn’t going to kill me,” I tell him. “But before that, I have to do something else. I need your help to walk.”

With Robert assisting me, I make my way down the mansion’s entrance stairs to the place where the clan leaders are standing. They give me wary looks, and I meet their gazes steadily.

“This is a monumental moment. What you decide here will impact the future. It’s true that I am Jean Sanguinite’s descendent, and I have reason to believe that there is a prophecy in place. Jean Sanguinite brought a golden era because she united the wolf shifters and the vampires into one cohesive unit. She mated a wolf Alpha like I have. I have proof of my words if you wish to see for yourself. You can decide what you want, but the Nelo Clan will no longer exist. Its practices have destroyed too many lives. If you wish to keep your oath of allegiance, then bear in mind, it will be an allegiance to my pack, not the Nelo Clan. Take your time to think about it.”

I look at Robert and murmur. “Let’s go.”

My heart is heavy and light at the same time.

It’s been a long day.

******

The next couple of weeks are hectic, to say the least. Each and every affected shifter was reverted and saved, using my blood. For every drop I lost, Robert was there to give me more. The recipe for the drug was found and burned.

As I had suspected, there was no shifter blood in the drug. The version Robert had discovered had been planted to throw them off. Terrence had experimented with the drugs and had figured out that putting a vampire’s blood in the drug helped control the shifter who ingested it. But he had never accounted for me.

An anomaly, as Ricky has put it. For some reason, the fact that I had both shifter and vampire blood was overpowering for the drugged shifters, and once they caught my scent when Terrence attacked me, their loyalty switched to me.

It is incomprehensible to me when I think about it, but Ricky was not surprised. Blood, as he told me, is a powerful tool and not to be underestimated.

With so much going on with Angie’s death, and the chaos that followed my father’s death, as well, Ricky simply forgot about the macaroons. If he had remembered earlier, I wonder how things would have gone. But the moment he did remember, he tried to contact me, and when he couldn’t, he showed up at the cafe, only to find out from Jazz that I had left with Terrence.

Sometimes I wonder if the world runs on coincidences. If Ricky hadn’t gone to the cafe, he wouldn’t have called Robert, and Robert wouldn’t have rushed to the compound in time. Terrence had installed jammers to prevent me from calling for assistance. But whoever sold them to him gave him a shitty deal, and he got faulty jammers. Another coincidence.

The clan leaders ended up choosing to view the evidence with Robert and me. One of the things we discovered was that the last person to access the cave where we found Jean and Lucian’s entire life was their oldest daughter, Lillith. The cave had been her parents’ meeting spot, and in their later years, it had become their private living space. Lillith’s last act on their behalf had been to bury her parents in that cave. Robert and I have decided to preserve the place as it is, after making copies of the journals.