Taken by storm(73)

Maddy was lying on her side, her face ghostly pale, blood smeared on her dress. And there, in her lap, was a baby.

A pup.

The newborn must have Shifted during labor, or soon thereafter, because there wasn’t a hint of baby-pink skin to be seen—only short, spiky fur, sticky and standing straight up.

Her baby eyes were closed.

“You’re mine,” Shay said, leaning over Maddy, kneeling next to her, his voice vibrating with power and want and need.

“No. I’m. Not.”

Maddy spat at him, on him, but she was too weak to move. She couldn’t move.

“Maddy,” I said, wary of coming to stand within Shay’s grasp, but knowing I had no other choice.

If he kills me, I thought, Callum will kill him. Right now that was cold comfort.

“Maddy?” I reached out to touch her cheek. Shay growled, but there was nothing he could do about it—first come, first serve, and he hadn’t managed to break his way through Maddy’s defenses yet.

She was fighting him—but she might not fight me.

“Mads?” There was a question in my voice. She hadn’t wanted this—not last winter, not when she’d left us in the motel room.

She nodded.

“Yes,” she said, reaching out and taking my hand, pressing my nails into the flesh of her neck. I felt my fingers curling, felt myself digging in deeper, drawing blood. Then I took all that I was—all that my pack was—and I threw it at her.

Chase and Lake and me.

Devon, at home with the kids.

Lily, Katie, Alex, Ali, Mitch.

Phoebe, Sage, and all the rest.

This was what we were. We were a pack made by choice. We were family.

Power exploded out of me. The air hummed with it. I stopped breathing. Maddy stopped breathing. When we started up again, we breathed as one.

Pack. Pack. Pack.

She was mine.

I turned to Shay, expecting to see rage marring his features—so like Devon’s I wanted to hurl—but the only thing on Shay’s face was a smile.

I didn’t realize I’d let go of my Resilience until it flared back up. This cave was too small, Shay was too big, too strong, and he was smiling.

We have to get out of here, I told Maddy, the words flowing freely from my mind to hers, as if she’d never left, as if it had always been this way between us, this easy.

Eyes on Shay’s, I hooked my arms beneath Maddy’s armpits. I pulled her backward. She scraped her heels against the floor, pushing, propelling herself out toward the mouth of the cave, toward morning’s first light, toward freedom.

Shay followed, but stopped when Chase and Lake came to stand in front of us, their lips curled upward, mouths open, canines gleaming.

Maddy was ours. If he attacked one of us, if he made a move against us, my wolves could attack him—and if his pack didn’t want to face the wrath of the Senate when it was said and done, they’d leave him to fight us alone.

Us, I thought, and reflexively, I scanned the woods for Caroline and found her, poised behind a rock, twenty yards away, gun in one hand and crossbow in the other.

“It’s over, Shay.” I shut my fear away—didn’t give him the chance to smell it. He couldn’t fight me, not unless he wanted to start something that Callum would end.

“It is over,” Shay agreed amicably. “And you, my dear, have something that belongs to me.”

At first, I thought he was talking about Maddy, but then a garbled cry escaped her throat, and I realized that he wasn’t talking about the girl.

He was talking about the pup.

No. A child was born into his or her mother’s pack. There was no Marking, no claiming. It was automatic—but Maddy’s child was born in No-Man’s-Land. She was born to a lone wolf.

I’d claimed Maddy after the child’s birth, not before.

With horror, I realized the implications. Maddy had fought Shay. She’d resisted. She’d been able to. But the baby—

“No,” Maddy said, the word halfway between a howl and a growl, not human in the least. “You can’t have her. You can’t.”

Shay walked between Chase and Lake, like they were nothing. To him, they probably were. He knelt, and as bile rose in my throat and my dry eyes burned with tears that wouldn’t come, he ran one hand gently over the sleeping pup’s head.

Maddy trembled, on the verge of a Shift. Shay gestured to someone behind us, and another Were came to stand beside him.

“Careful,” Shay told Maddy. “You might hurt her if you Shift.”

The Snake Bend alpha stood and faced me, my body dwarfed by his massive dimensions. “The little one is mine,” he said, “and there’s nothing you or your reinforcements”—he jerked his head toward Caroline, leaving me to wonder how he’d known she was there—“can do about it.”