3 I Warned you

JAMIE

I ran to Thomas’s house without feeling the wound on my arm, even though blood was still running down to my fingers. The closer I got, the more familiar faces I recognized among the chaos, and the more something inside me refused to understand what I was seeing.

Marcus had a deep cut above his eyebrow. Will was pressing a cloth against his own shoulder, already completely soaked in red. One of the guards was sitting on the ground, leaning against the wall, breathing heavily while two women tried to tend to a wound in his stomach.

People were crying.

No one needed to tell me it had been serious.

When they saw me approaching, some of them became even paler.

That was what truly frightened me.

“Where’s Thomas?” No one answered. I kept walking. Will stepped in front of me.

“Jamie…”

“Where is he?”

“Wait a second.”

I tried to get past him, but he grabbed my arm.

“Don’t go in yet.”

My heart skipped a beat.

“Let me go.”

“Jamie, just…”

“Let me go, damn it!”

I yanked my arm out of his grip so hard that the movement reopened the cut I already had. Will tried to grab me again, and Marcus came from the other side.

“Don’t get in my way,” I said, looking at both of them. “Don’t try to stop me from entering my own home.”

“You need to calm down first.”

“Calm down?” My voice rose.

“The place is destroyed, there are people bleeding on the ground, and no one wants to tell me where Thomas is. How the hell do you expect me to calm down?”

Marcus lowered his eyes.

That was all it took.

Just the way he avoided looking at me.

My stomach sank.

Then I caught the strong smell of blood coming from inside the house.

I stopped breathing for a moment.

“No…”

Will said my name again.

I didn’t hear the rest.

I shoved them both aside and went inside.

The living room was destroyed. One chair had been broken, the smaller table was overturned, and there were claw marks across the wooden wall. Shattered glass covered part of the floor, mixed with drops of blood that formed a trail leading toward the hallway.

I followed the drops.

“Thomas!” Nothing.

My heart was beating so hard it was starting to hurt.

“Thomas?” I passed through the kitchen and down the hallway before stopping in front of the office door.

The same door where I had stood earlier, complaining about Caleb while Thomas drank his coffee and pretended to be seriously annoyed with me.

It was slightly open.

The smell of blood inside was almost suffocating.

I pushed the door open slowly.

And my world disappeared.

Thomas was on the floor.

For a second, my mind simply couldn’t comprehend the image.

The desk had been shoved aside. There was blood on the wall, papers scattered across the floor, and a deep mark cutting through the wooden bookcase. Thomas was lying near the desk, motionless, one hand open beside his body.

No…

I ran to him.

My knees slammed into the floor hard enough that they should have hurt, but I felt nothing.

“Thomas?!” I held his face.

He was too cold for a wolf.

“Thomas.” I shook his shoulder.

Nothing.

“Hey. Wake up.'' My voice sounded strange.

I shook him harder.

“Wake up, damn it.”

Nothing.

Panic climbed up my throat.

“Stop this. Thomas, stop messing with me. Wake up!”

I ran my hand over his chest, searching for any movement, any breath, anything that could prove this wasn’t happening.

I found nothing.

Tears came before I even realized I was crying.

“No… don’t do this to me.”

I gripped his clothes between my fingers.

“Please, don’t do this to me.”

My vision blurred.

For a few seconds, the man in front of me wasn’t Thomas anymore.

He was a younger Thomas, crouching in front of me when I was still little, trying to convince me to eat after I had refused food for three days.

He was the one lifting me off the ground during training and telling me that I could cry or try to hit him again, but staying down was never an option.

I remembered him sitting beside my bed after a nightmare, pretending he had only come there because he couldn’t sleep.

Thomas was always standing.

Thomas always survived.

He couldn’t be lying on the floor like this.

“Wake up…” My voice broke.

I heard people entering behind me. I turned so quickly that I nearly lost my balance.

“Who… who did this?”

No one answered.

“Who did this?!”

Will was standing in the doorway. His face was covered in blood that didn’t even seem to be entirely his.

“We… don’t know.”

I stood.

“How can you not know?”

“They came from the west. More than ten, maybe fifteen. Some were transformed, others weren’t. It all happened too fast.”

“And you didn’t see anyone?”

“We’ve never seen those wolves before.”

“So they just left?”

My voice was getting louder, and I could no longer control it.

“They came here, attacked everyone, killed Thomas, and just left?!”

Marcus appeared behind Will.

“They… were looking for something.”

I looked at him.

“What?”

“We don’t know.”

I looked back toward the destroyed office.

That was when I noticed another scent.

Beneath the blood, broken wood, and Thomas’s familiar scent, there was something that didn’t belong there.

The scent of another wolf.

But different from the man who had attacked me in the forest.

This scent was cleaner, sophisticated, mixed with new leather and a bitter fragrance that reminded me of cedar and spices.

It wasn’t the scent of someone who lived on the road.

It was the scent of someone with enough money to never have to look dirty.

I committed it to memory.

“Jamie…”

I didn’t answer.

My eyes had stopped on Thomas’s hand.

There was something beneath his fingers.

A piece of paper.

I knelt down again and slowly pulled it free.

It was a small sheet stained with his blood.

My hands began to tremble before I even opened it.

There was only one sentence.

I warned you.

That was all.

No explanation.

No name.

But this time, there was something in the bottom corner of the paper.

A seal.

I ran my thumb over it, smearing some of the blood still coating my fingers.

A wolf’s head surrounded by two moons.

And beneath it, a few words engraved in tiny letters.

Silver Howl Academy.

I stared at it.

Behind me, no one said a word.

“Do you know it?” Will asked.

I slowly shook my head.

I had never set foot in that place.

But now, someone from there—or someone who desperately wanted us to believe it—had left its name beside my father’s dead body.

I closed my hand around the letter.

That was when another thought struck me.

Thomas had sent me out on patrol that morning.

A patrol that normally wouldn’t have been mine.

And while I was gone, our home had been attacked.

I looked at him again.

“You knew?” I whispered, even though he could no longer answer. “Is that why you sent me away?”

No…

Maybe it was just a coincidence.

Maybe it wasn’t.

At that moment, it didn’t matter.

I wiped my face with the back of my hand and stood.

My legs were shaking, but I remained upright.

Will took a step toward me.

“Jamie, don’t do anything right now. You’re injured. We all are. We need to understand what happened before…”

“I’ll understand.”

He stopped.

I looked at Thomas on the floor one more time.

The pain was still there.

So immense that I could barely breathe around it.

But something else was growing alongside it.

Anger.

An amount of anger I hadn’t felt since I was a child.

“Whoever came in here made a choice,” I said, tightening my grip on the bloodstained letter. “They came into my home. They hurt my family.”

My voice faltered as I looked at Thomas.

I swallowed the lump in my throat.

“And they killed my father.”

Will opened his mouth, but I didn’t let him speak.

“I’m going to find out who did this.”

I looked at the seal again.

Silver Howl Academy.

“And when I find that person, they’re going to wish they had killed me along with him.”