CHAPTER 7

"Check the body again. The Alpha said no mistakes. Move."

The morgue smelled of bleach and frozen iron. Madison lay motionless on the steel slab, the metal biting into the skin of her back. The air was a razor in her lungs. She held it. Her pulse stayed buried deep, a slow, heavy throb behind her ribs that only a Royal could sustain.

"She looks dead enough to me, man. Look at her. Skin's already turning blue."

Footsteps scraped against the tile. Two shadows loomed over the table. A silver needle caught the overhead light, a thin, lethal sliver aimed at the base of her throat.

"Vanessa said the bitch is a freak. A heartbeat isn't enough to call it. Put the silver in her brain."

The killer leaned in. His breath stunk of cheap cigarettes and rot. Madison's eyes snapped open. The silver light in her pupils turned the room into a blur of motion.

She surged up, her hand clamping onto the lead assassin's throat. Cartilage groaned. The sound of his windpipe collapsing under her grip echoed off the tile walls like a dry branch snapping.

"Wait—what the hell!"

The second man fumbled for a blade. Madison shoved the first body into him, the weight of the dying man knocking him into a rack of surgical tools. Trays clattered. Scalpels skittered across the floor.

Madison rolled off the slab, her bare feet hitting the cold floor with a dull thud. She didn't give him a second to breathe. She was a blur of white heat. She grabbed the man by his lapels, slamming him against the wall of body lockers.

"Who sent you?"

The man choked, his hands clawing at her wrists. His jacket flew open. Nailed to his inner pocket was a pin—a snarling wolf head over a crescent moon. The Silver Moon crest.

"The Cains," Madison spat. She didn't wait for a confession. She saw the truth in the way his eyes darted toward the door. "Gregory couldn't even hire professionals? He sent his own guards to a hospital to kill a girl on a slab?"

"You... you're a monster," the guard wheezed.

"No. I'm the landlord. And you're trespassing."

She dragged him by the hair toward the back of the room. The heavy, insulated door of the industrial freezer stood open, a fog of sub zero air rolling out. She threw him inside. He hit a stack of frozen crates, his scream cut short as she grabbed the first assassin—still twitching on the floor—and tossed him in after his partner.

Madison slammed the heavy steel lever down. The lock engaged with a final, metallic clank.

The heat in her blood was a physical fire now. She ignored the shivering of her own limbs. She grabbed a heavy leather jacket hanging on the back of the office door and swung it over her shoulders. The scent of her own wolf was a roar in her ears, a demand for the blood of the people who had tried to bury her twice.

She walked through the double doors of the morgue, her boots clicking a death march against the linoleum. The hospital was quiet. Too quiet.

She reached the parking lot where a black sedan waited with the engine idling. She didn't get in. She looked toward the dark silhouette of the Silver Moon territory on the horizon.

Her phone buzzed in the jacket pocket. A text from Ethan Harper.

I'm outside the gate. Don't do this alone.

Madison deleted the message without a second thought. She didn't need a protector. She needed a match.