Taken by storm(71)

Because what I really needed was to add more to the list of things that could kill me.

One by one, I surveyed our little group. We’d survived. All of us. But as I met Lake’s eyes, I realized something was wrong.

“Where’s Griffin?” I asked.

She didn’t respond, and I realized that he hadn’t come back. Wherever he went when he wasn’t here, wherever Wilson had sent him—he hadn’t come back.

“Bryn.” Sora—a clothed Sora—called my name from the Stone River side of the Montana-Wyoming border. I forced myself to tear my attention away from Lake, even as I felt her fighting a silent battle with herself—

Not to care.

Not to let it hurt this time.

Not to think about burying him again.

I staggered toward the border, turning my eyes and mind away from Lake, giving her what little privacy I could.

“Thank you,” I told Sora quietly, wondering if taking her twin’s heart had provoked in her some measure of what Lake was feeling now.

The bond between them had outlasted even death—and now he was gone. Really gone.

Sora inclined her head slightly, but didn’t otherwise acknowledge my thanks in any way. I waited for her to speak and wondered if there was something I was supposed to be saying.

Hallmark didn’t exactly make cards for occasions like this.

“You promised me,” Sora said finally, her voice dry and hoarse, “that when this was over, you would give Callum a chance to make things right.”

Apparently, the fact that she hadn’t died didn’t void that promise in her eyes, and that made me think—

“Make what right?”

There was another long silence.

“Make what right, Sora?”

She may not have been part of my pack, but I was an alpha, and that dominance was audible in every single syllable as it exited my mouth.

“Griff!” Lake’s voice broke into our standoff, and reluctantly, I tore my eyes from Sora’s in time to see Lake launch herself at newly reappeared Griffin. In a flurry of overly long limbs, her body collided with his, nearly bringing them both down. She wrapped her arms around his body and squeezed, hard enough to leave marks.

Anyone else’s hands would have passed through him, but not hers.

Never hers.

Griffin ran a hand through Lake’s hair and tweaked the end of her ponytail, a calming gesture and a familiar one. Then he pulled back. He untangled himself from Lake’s arms, extracted himself from her steely grip, and turned his attention to me—and by extension, to Sora.

“It’s Maddy,” he said.

The second I heard her name, my insides twisted—a portent of things to come.

“She’s in labor,” Griffin continued, sounding calmer than he looked. “I would have stayed with her, but I couldn’t. The baby—it made me—I felt it—I couldn’t be there.”

I nodded, like I understood, even though I didn’t. The only thing I was able to wrap my mind around was the fact that something was about to go down.

Something bigger than Maddy giving birth.

“Sora?” That was all I said—no elaboration, no pretense that what she was about to say might not rock me to my core. I waited for her to speak, feeling emptiness bubbling up inside of me instead of anger, exhaustion instead of fear.

I didn’t want to hate Devon’s mother again, didn’t want to look at her and see the bad things, instead of the good. She must not have wanted that, either, because she expelled a long breath and then started talking.

“What exactly did Callum tell you about Maddy?” she asked. “What did he tell you about the Senate?”

Callum had told me that Maddy might be rabid.

I’d discovered she wasn’t.

He’d told me that if Maddy wasn’t the killer, the Senate wouldn’t be able to enact the vote.

“He told me she was safe,” I said, realizing even as I said it that those words had never left his mouth.

He’d said that the Senate couldn’t enact the vote.

He’d said that they wouldn’t be able to cross into our land without permission.

He’d never said they wouldn’t come after her. He’d never said that she was safe.

“Maddy’s in No-Man’s-Land.” My thoughts went from my brain to my mouth with no filter. “And once you get there, No-Man’s-Land is fair game.”

The other alphas couldn’t cut through my territory to get to Maddy, but they might not have to. By definition, any slice of No-Man’s-Land fell between two territories—maybe more. Maddy’s cave was in the mountains, and the mountains were accessible from Cedar Ridge territory, from Shadow Bluff, and from Vallée de Glace in the North.