Page 69

The language is clinical. The tone is flat. And the man delivering it is my father, the wolf who taught me to hunt, who held me through my first shift, who stood beside me when I took the alpha’s chair and told me he was proud.

“You went behind my back,” I say. “I am alpha. The decision was mine.”

“And you wouldn’t have made it.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do know that. Because you’re standing here now with that woman’s scent all over you and your mate bond in pieces and the look on your face tells me that if I’d asked permission, you’d have found a way to protect Marco instead of doing what needed to be done. You’d have relocated him. Given him money. Set up a new identity. All of the things that make you a good alpha and that would have left the threat intact.”

He’s right. I hate that he’s right. If Viktor had come to me a year ago and said Marco Marchelli knows what we are, what do you want to do about it, I would have found an alternative. I would have managed the risk without ending a life. And Viktor knew that, which is why he didn’t ask.

“His daughter is my mate,” I say. The words come out low, rough, scraped from a place that doesn’t have room for diplomacy. “You killed the father of my mate. And you let me bring her into this family without telling me.”

“I didn’t know she was your mate. Not until the bond formed. I couldn’t unkill a man, Dominic. All I could do was hope that whatever you built with his daughter was strong enough to survive the truth.”

“It wasn’t.”

“Then build it again. Stronger.”

The arrogance of it. The absolute, unbending certainty of a man who has been making life-and-death decisions for three centuries and has calcified around his own infallibility. Viktor doesn’t doubt himself. He can’t. Doubt would require him to reconsider every decision he’s ever made, and the body count of those decisions would bury him.

“Your authority in this pack is over,” I say. “You don’t attend meetings. You don’t speak to my wolves. You don’t make decisions about who lives and who dies in my territory. If you have an opinion, you bring it to me and I decide what to do with it. Father or not. You made me alpha. You don’t get to keep ruling from behind it.”

He looks at me for a long time. The silver eyes are steady. Something moves behind them, deep and complex, and I recognize it because I’ve seen it before in moments when my father’s composure cracks along fault lines that are centuries old.

Pain. At the distance between us, the canyon that has been growing since he handed me the alpha’s chair and watched his relevance diminish year by year.

“Your mother would have said the same thing,” he says quietly.

I leave before the words land fully. I walk out of his suite and through the compound and into the cold air and I stand in the courtyard and breathe until the rage settles from a boil to a simmer.

My phone rings. Lex.

“We have a problem.” His voice has the compressed quality that means something has gone very wrong very quickly. “DeSanto just resurfaced.”

“Where?”

“That’s the problem. Twenty minutes ago. Outside the West Loop apartment building.”

The world stops.

For one suspended second, I hear nothing. Not the wind. Not the traffic. Not my own heartbeat. In the fraction of a second between Lex’s words and my comprehension of them, the wolf surges forward with a force that tears through every mechanism of control I’ve built over more than a century.

“What did they do?” I ask, but I already know. I know because the bond, which has been transmitting Sophia’s pain for two days, just went silent. The abrupt, total absence of signal that means either the bond has failed, which is impossible, or she’s unconscious.

“Sophia,” Lex says. “They took Sophia.”

I try to speak. The words don’t come. What comes instead is a sound from the wolf, a snarl so deep it vibrates through my chest, and I can feel my teeth lengthening and the shift pressing against my skin with an urgency that is beyond anything I’ve experienced in all my years.

“How?” My voice is barely human.

“Three men, black SUV, no plates. They waited until she came out of the building alone. Katya had left twenty minutes earlier. There was a gap in coverage. They knew our schedule.” He pauses. “Dominic, this was planned. DeSanto has been watching us for weeks, waiting for an opportunity.”

The separation gave DeSanto his opening. Sophia was at that apartment because she left me. She left me because of choices I made. Cause and effect. Sophia would appreciate the clarity.

I don’t.

The shift hits me before I can think. My clothes tear. My body convulses. The courtyard tilts as my perspective drops from six feet to three, and then I’m on four legs with my muzzle pointed toward the sky and the howl that comes out of me is not communication. It’s a declaration. A promise. A sound that carries across the compound and into the woods and tells every wolf within earshot that the alpha’s mate has been taken and what follows will be total and absolute and without mercy.