LOGIN|| Mira || We moved down a back staircase and through a passage that smelled like stone and cold air until we were outside. It was fully dark with the moon and the stars being the only source of light. Two black SUVs were running on the gravel, exhaust coming up in thin streams. Men stood waiting near the back one. Where was he taking me? My heart skipped at the thought. Kael stopped. Let go of my arm as one of the men approached with a strip of dark fabric. I stared at it with fear crawling up my throat. "No." "That wasn't a question." "Neither was that." His jaw tightened. "You have two choices. Put it on yourself or I'll do it." "And if I scream?" "Nobody will hear you." There was no drama in his voice. Just a fact. "Blindfolding me doesn't change anything. I already don't know where I am." "I like to keep it that way," he said. "I have no one to tell and nowhere to run." "I know and that's not why I'm doing it." "Then why?" "Because I want to see you
|| Mira ||Night fell too quickly for my liking.One minute there was a thin line of light coming through the tiny space in the boarded window near the ceiling. The next it was gone. The room felt smaller without it. Like the walls had moved in while I wasn't looking.Kael had been gone for hours but his last words were still hanging over my head. Tonight is going to require more from you than today did. I had turned that over a hundred times since he left and I still couldn't figure out what it meant, only that it wasn't nothing. Men like him didn't warn you by accident.I couldn't sit still. I tried the bed, the floor, and the edge of the window. Nothing helped. There was a bad feeling building in my stomach, the feeling of knowing something was coming but not knowing what. I couldn't shake it.Kael was somewhere in this house planning whatever tonight was. I could feel it the same way you felt bad weather before it arrived. The air in the room felt too heavy.I had been in difficul
|| Kael ||"Get up."I pulled a shirt over her head and hauled her upright before she could decide whether to fight me.Her laugh came out frenzy. It was short and breathless. "Back to the cage?"I grabbed her around the waist and put her over my shoulder.She went rigid after a gasp. "Put me down, you asshat.” Her fists hit my back. I ignored her tantrums and walked."I said put me down." She kicked ball hard enough that I staggered in my steps and bent over a little with a wince. "I can walk.""I don’t give a shit.""Then why are you doing this?""Because I can." I resumed my strides. “And I have.”She hit me harder. "You enjoy this, don't you? Having someone to carry around like a trophy. Does it make you feel powerful?""Not particularly.""Then put me down.""No.""I swear to every goddess that exists, the moment these chains come off I am going to make you regret every single decision you have made since the night you took me.""Looking forward to it."She twisted hard, trying
|| Kael ||The hunting horn split the forest open.Everything in me answered before my thoughts caught up as blood pumped in a rush through my body. The shift came fast, bone and muscle tearing apart and rebuilding in one breath, my wolf surging forward with only one goal in mind. To hunt down Mirabel Sloan.I roared into the sky to start the hunt. Multiple growls from my men tore into the air in response.Then her fear hit me through the bond, pouring through like a current pulled tight.I could hear her heart beating several miles away, and I felt good about it because it meant Mirabel had finally understood this was a setup.She had fallen right into it. This was good.This was exactly what I wanted. Her fear. Her panic. To give her enough time to think she was safe, enough looseness in the buckles that she'd believe the gap was real, that freedom was something she'd earned and not something I'd built around her. I wanted her to run. I wanted her to have hope of seeing her family a
|| Mira ||The air hit my face chilly and alive, nothing like the stale silver-tinged air of that room. The smell that infiltrated my nostrils was pine and wet earth. My lungs opened like they'd forgotten they could, and I ran harder.Off the porch and straight into the trees, bare feet in wet grass before the forest swallowed me whole. The light hadn't reached the deep parts yet, just shadow and open space, and I ran toward it because I knew stopping isn't an option. Not because I'd decided anything. Because my body simply wouldn't stop.For the first time in days, the weight on my chest eased. Just eased, not gone, but I knew the difference and I took it."Anya." I pushed into the place inside me where she lived. "We're out. I need you."The pause stretched too long.Then she stirred, slow, like something pulled up from deep water. "I'm here. I'm trying.""Shift. We can't outrun them on two legs.""I’m aware. Just give me a minute."I didn't have a minute, so I ran anyway.Branches
|| Mira ||The smell of bacon woke me.For one second I forgot where I was.Half-asleep, half-somewhere else, I was home. I could almost hear my brothers in the kitchen — the crash of plates, the noise that used to fill the pack house from floor to ceiling. For one heartbeat, my life was still mine.Then I moved my arm.The drag of iron across my skin pulled me back so fast my breath caught.The dream of being home was gone. All of it.I lay down unmoving with my eyes fixed on the ceiling. I'd catalogued every inch of this room by now — the uneven dip near the closet, the smell of sealed air, the crack in the corner that may or may not have been wider today. The particular silence of this place that felt less like quiet and more like being buried standing up.Then I saw the nightstand.A tray. Bacon, eggs, thick toast, orange juice sweating in the cool morning air.I didn't knock it over.Yesterday had taken that impulse clean out of me. Kael didn't care about hunger strikes. He wasn'
||Kael|| I walked fast, down the corridor, past the omegas’ quarters, past the narrow window where dark trees pressed against the glass, and didn’t slow until I reached my office and got the door shut behind me. It was the one room in this house that was entirely mine. I stood in the dark and
||KAEL||I stood in the silence and couldn’t move.There was only the dim light, the blood on her lip, and my wolf tearing into me.“You let her bleed for your pride.” he was enraged.I pushed him down, crossed to the dresser, pulled the first-aid kit from the top drawer, and sat on the edge of the
|| Mira ||I should have looked away sooner.Anya was screaming at me to. She'd been screaming at me from the second it started, her voice crashing against the inside of my skull, and I still couldn't make myself turn away.I watched Kael grab Jessica's hair and pull her into him. His mouth came do
||Mira|| The glass hit the side of his head and shattered. Water ran down his face. He didn't flinch. His jaw went tight and his eyes darkened and he stood there dripping like a man deciding how much of a problem he wanted to make of this. "Clean it up," he said. "No." "Mirabel." "Let m







