*Vanessa*“Everything’s gone a lot more smoothly than I could’ve imagined,” Elder Henley says. He chuckles to himself, shaking his head. “I’ll acknowledge that I was rather skeptical when you first introduced the idea, Shawn, but it’s gone rather well.”The other Elders at the meeting seem to concur. Shawn inclines his head at them. “Well, we have a strong team. Everyone standing in front of you here more than pulled their weight,” The Alpha says breezily, and I have to commend how well-planned that comment is. By shifting the praise to the team of section leaders behind him, including me, Shawn has inadvertently reminded everyone in the room of my contribution without being overtly obvious. It also cements my place as one of them. Even though I agreed to face this thing and let him help me, I made it clear to him that I didn’t want it to be obvious that he was in my corner, mainly for the sake of his standing with the pack. Until the truth was actually prov

*Shawn*“We’ve been combing the surrounding trails, but it’s like her scent just vanished,” Aaron says, his face hardened with concentration. He keeps pace with me as I head to the meeting room, my eyes set dead ahead. “I’ve sent out some of our patrol scouts to extend the search area, but I didn’t want to add any more numbers until I got your permission.”“Thank you,” I reply, and the sound of my own voice is foreign to me. “Keep them on the trails, but don’t send any more shifters out until we get more information. I want everyone who saw her in the last four hours in that room.”“Already done,” Amara notes, flanking my other side. Her tears have dried leaving only the evenly-tempered and focused healer I know to solve any problem with ease. The time immediately after Amara told me that Vanessa was missing felt like an eternity of terror rolled into a single moment. Everything felt wrong–the air was too suffocating, my skin was too tight, my heart too fast but at

*Vanessa*I’ve spent most of my life accustomed to the feeling of fear. I know the taste of it, the way it wraps itself around one’s bones and paralyzes even the bravest of shifters. I’d feared many things over the course of my time in Helbane and even more during my stay in Ashborne, rejection, and exile being the two most primal.And I would’ve expected to feel more of the same now, being dragged back to this hellhole I once called home. I thought I’d be terrified if I ever came back here, scared of being torn to shreds. But now that I’m here, staring at the face of the person who betrayed me, I feel nothing but rage. “Ramona,” I say, the ice in my voice at odds with the fire I feel pouring out of my glare. Ramona, for her part, shows nothing less than her fake saccharine smile. "Vanessa!”She walks toward me, her arms open and I scuttle back on the mattress, making it obvious that I don’t want her near me. “Don’t touch me.”She stops, as though

*Vanessa*It takes every ounce of my self-control for me to stifle the howl of pain clawing its way up my throat. I shift back quickly after I manage to retrieve two mini coils from the mattress. In my human form, the freshly scraped skin left by the shackle around my wrist is poked with angry red welts, which I ignore in favor of bending the coils at the correct angles. Why it took me so long to think of ripping the wires from the mattress, I don’t know. But once I shifted and managed to tear through the material with my teeth and claws, I realized I hadn’t thought about the fact that the shrunken shackle would cut into the thicker wrist of my wolf form. I was swiftly reminded though, and painfully so. But my adrenaline kicks in once I begin to pick the lock, muting the pain in my wrist. After what feels like a mini eternity, the restraint falls from my arm and I assess the damage, touching the flaming skin gingerly. Once I’m sure it’s nothing too serious,

*Shawn*“Where is Trent?” The shifter shakes his head viciously, blood dripping from his nose and mouth. I raise him up a few more inches by the scruff of his shirt and his feet lift off the ground completely. His eyes widen in terror.“I’ll ask one more time. Where is Trent?” I snarl. “I don’t … I don’t know!” he splutters, shaking his head again as though this is a nightmare he can wake himself up from. I click my tongue and drop him, and he scrambles away from me. “I swear I don’t know! I’d tell you if I did. I always hated that son of a bitch, and now look at what he’s gotten us into!”I raise a brow at that. So much for loyalty. But I believe the shifter and don’t press further. “Shawn!” Aaron comes running over to me. He’s already sporting the evidence of battle, covered in blood that’s a mix of his own and others. But his face is resolute as he takes in the melee around us. “I can’t find him anywhere. And there’s no sign of Vanessa either.”