INICIAR SESIÓNChapter 57 Kellan “You believed them because they needed you to,” she said. “Because a boy who thinks his mother is dead doesn’t go looking for her. And I needed you not looking, Kellan. For a long time, I needed that very badly.”“Who is this,” Ryder said again, louder now, and I realized he’d moved close enough to hear part of it, and Sophia had too, her face pale in the dark, watching me the way you watch someone standing too close to a ledge.“Put it on speaker,” I said, my voice barely mine. “Everyone needs to hear this.”There was a pause on the line, a small huff of something that might have been amusement. “Bringing in an audience already. You always did like proving things in front of people. Fine. Go ahead.”I hit the button with a hand that wasn’t steady and set the phone down on the counter, and the voice filled the dark kitchen, low and even, carrying itself like it had all the time in the world.“I want to be clear before anyone panics,” she said. “Your men on the east
Chapter 56KellanThe lights went out while I was still standing there with my finger pointed at Harland’s chest, still halfway through telling him exactly how convenient it was that he happened to be alone with Sophia the same night my men got pulled into a lie four hours south of here, and one second the kitchen was lit up yellow and the next second it wasn’t, and none of us said anything for a solid three seconds because none of us understood yet what had actually happened.“Generator,” Ryder said first, already moving toward the window. “Storm probably took a line down somewhere.”“There’s no storm bad enough to take a line down in this county,” I said, and I was already reaching for my phone, already pulling up the radio channel my men used, because something in my chest had gone cold and tight the way it always did right before something went wrong, and I had learned a long time ago not to argue with that feeling.I keyed the radio. “Perimeter, report.”Nothing came back except
Chapter 55SophiaRyder did not ask permission before he pulled his phone out and hit call. He set it down flat on the counter between the three of us and put it on speaker, and the sound of it ringing filled the whole kitchen while none of us breathed right.It picked up on the fourth ring. “Ryder? Hey, sorry, I was resting, what’s wrong?”Her voice was steady. Too steady for someone who had supposedly been in a car wreck a few hours earlier. There was no beeping in the background, no hum of hospital fluorescents, no nurse calling a name over an intercom, just quiet, the kind of quiet you only get at home with the television off and nobody moving around.“Where are you right now,” Ryder said. He kept his eyes on me while he said it, not on the phone, like he already knew what he was about to hear and wanted a witness standing there when it landed.“Home. Why, what’s going on, you sound weird.”“You’re not at the pack clinic.”A pause. Small, but I caught it, and I could tell Ryder ca
Chapter 54 Ryder Harland set the gauze down on the counter and did not pick anything else up after that. He had been checking the marks for almost ten minutes, way longer than checking a few dark lines under someone’s jaw should ever take, and both of us knew it, and neither of us said a word about it because saying something out loud would have made it real in a way neither of us was ready for at one in the morning with Kellan gone and the house sitting too quiet around us.“You should sit,” he said. “You’re still shaking a little.”“I’m not shaking.”“You are. Just not where you can see it.”I sat anyway because my legs agreed with him even if my mouth did not want to admit defeat that easily. He crouched down in front of me the way he always did, slow and careful, like my body was something he needed to read line by line instead of a person standing right in front of him, except his hands had stopped being careful somewhere in the last twenty minutes and neither of us had bothere
Chapter 53 Ryder I got home and Solia was already awake, sitting on the edge of the bed with her knees pulled up and her phone in her hand like she had been staring at it for an hour instead of actually looking at anything on the screen. She heard me come in and she did not turn around right away. That was the first sign something was wrong. Solia always turned around. She always had something to say the second I walked through a door, some complaint about the pack or something one of the elders said or some story about her day that she needed to get out before she could breathe right. Tonight she just sat there.“You’re up late,” I said.“Couldn’t sleep.”I dropped my keys on the dresser and pulled my shirt over my head. My ribs still ached from the airport. Kellan had cracked something and it had not finished healing all the way, and every time I twisted wrong it reminded me exactly whose fist had done it. I sat on the other side of the bed and started working my boots off.“Where
Chapter 52Kellan POVThe car smelled like my woman.I do not know how that was possible. Sophia. But I could smell her anyway. Roses. Something sweet underneath. It was in my head. It was in my skin. It was everywhere.I gripped the wheel and drove.The motel was behind me now. Solia was behind me now. But her words were not. They kept playing in my head like a song I could not turn off.Little does he know what I am planning.What was she planning? What else could she possibly do? She had already sent Elina. She had already created chaos. She had already made me walk out on the only person who mattered.I pressed the gas harder. The road was dark. Empty. Just like I felt.I thought about Sophia's face when I left. The way she looked at me. Not with anger. Not with hate. With something worse. Disappointment. Like she had expected me to leave. Like she had known I would.That was the worst part. She had known. She had known I would choose Solia. She had known I would walk out. She had







