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“We knew what to say, how to say it, and how to grease his palm. That led to the cabal coming for him, punishing him. He knows the truth now, I’d bet. He knows I never had anything to do with your parents’ deaths. Being almost killed by one’s true enemy has that effect.”

“So now what? Now they know you have me. Now they know the game is over. Does that mean this is over?”

“No,” he says. “This means the game has entered its final and most dangerous stage. The cabal will not be able to give up their grip on power. They’ve had it for decades, if not generations. Your family carries the blood of the original shifters. It is power in its purest form. They are obsessed with it. They will not give up on it. They will try to take you and breed you and when they have enough pups from you, they will kill you. Or they would, if I had any intention of letting that happen.”

“So we kill them first.”

“Yes,” he says. “We kill them first.”

CHAPTER 10

Fiona

I sleep well that night; well, to be more precise, I sleep well that early morning and into the following afternoon. When I wake up, I am ready to go and get them.

I’m a little surprised Henry didn’t insist we all move last night, scuttle off to another safehouse, but I think something has changed in him as well.

One of the first things I notice as I get up is that the collar is gone. He removed the silver as I slept. He is trusting me.

I go downstairs, past Marcus, who is posted up outside the bedroom. He gives me a respectful nod as I pass. Funny how things change. Funny how being proven right makes the attitudes of those around you shift. I should have killed Kyle when I was in the room with him. The fact they stopped me from my mad rampage that day is the same reason my brother almost died. I think about this, and other things as I go down to breakfast.

Someone has brought donuts. They’re sitting open on the counter while Henry and the others sit around looking faintly tactical and waiting for me.

“Is Rick alive?” I ask the question as I pick a chocolate-covered one from the box.

“Yes,” Henry says, getting up to pour me a coffee. “He’s stable.”

I nod. And then I get down to what I consider to be business.

“These people have no honor,” I say. “They will never see us coming, because we Swales have been sitting around for years just asking to be picked off. I think they only half-slaughtered Rick for the fun of it. They wanted to torture him, and me. Like they’ve been doing forever. Like they’ve been doing since my mother died. They think I am going to sit around and wait to be taken. They are wrong.”

“You could be right,” Henry says. “Sick bastards, the lot of them. I’ve been trying to work my way in for a long time using proxies. It was safer, and more civilized, I thought, to do that. But they’re escalating. They’re mocking all of us. So yes. We will help you kill them. And we will restore…”

“No,” I say. “I don’t want to restore any of it. I want to burn it to the fucking ground. We can keep the family name. We can have pups. But I’m not going to be the same kind of Swale my mother was. It’s time for a new way of being.”

Henry smiles at me, his lips parting in a slow expression of approval. “In that case,” he says. “I think we can be creative.”

* * *

Henry

Do I want my probably-by-this-time pregnant mate fire-bombing houses? No. Is that what she’s likely to do anyway? Yes. I fell in love with her because she showed me her most feral side, and taming her was always going to be a fool’s errand. Add to that the fact that a generational cabal has been attempting to control her family through coercion and murder, and this was never going to end any other way.

Perhaps that’s what fate intended when it made us mates. I thought it wanted me to make her safe, small, and manageable. It took me too long to consider my role might simply be to break the very same structure that once tried to break me.

“Come with me,” I tell her. “It’s time we left this place.”

She nods, gives a look around the kitchen and the people in it for the last time. We will not be coming back here to this compromised place. It’s already on the market, in fact. Later on today, an agent will bring people through, and the place will be spotless and nobody will be the wiser. The sod outside has already been replaced.

Fiona cocks her head to the side as I lead her out to the waiting vehicle. “You’re not going to put me in a cage and spank me until I agree to be a good little captive mate for you?”

I laugh at that, rather a lot. The idea of her being a good little anything, let alone a captive mate is very amusing to me.

She gets into the car, quite relieved I’m not thrashing her, I imagine. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to punish the rebellion out of her, an absolutely pointless exercise. Still, perhaps, if the mood takes me, I might spank her later. Her curvy ass demands it, but I have no intention of punishing her for what she feels compelled to do regarding her family.

* * *

Fiona