I inhaled. It burned. I exhaled. Smoke leaked from my nose and curled up around my face, hanging like a storm cloud.
“I thought….” He laughed, but it didn’t sound like he found anything funny. “I thought things would be different. After.”
After we’d come back.
After Richard was dead.
After the separate packs had come together.
Always after, after, after.
“You thought wrong.”
“I guess I did.”
I felt him watching me.
The tip of the cigarette flared in the dark. It looked like the color of his eyes as a wolf.
He growled low in his chest. I heard the grinding shift of bone and muscle.
I looked back a moment later.
The clothes he’d been wearing lay on the porch.
He was gone.
OX WAS waiting for me when I went back inside. “You told me once it was a wolf who killed your mother.”
Shit. “I lied.”
“Why?”
“I wanted you to hate them as much as I did. I was wrong.”
He nodded slowly. “You don’t, though. Hate them. Not anymore.”
“It’s… no. I mean, it’s complicated.”
“Is it?”
Fucking werewolves.
THE GIRL. The Omega.
She was broken.
“Alpha,” she pleaded. “Alpha.”
She reached for Ox.
She reached for Joe.
She saw me, and her eyes flashed violet.
She growled, a cornered animal ready to lash out.
Elizabeth whispered in her ear, her hand around the Omega’s arm. Little trails of blood dripped from where her claws dug in.