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She shrugged. “I live with the guilt.”

I took one small step closer. “Do you often infiltrate secret supernatural communities?”

“This was my first.”

“Planning another?”

She held up her free hand. “Absolutely not. The onboarding process was exhausting.”

I smiled. So did she. Around us, the pack remained unusually quiet for people who had no respect for privacy.

I ignored them anyway.

“Nice to meet you,” I said. “The real you.”

Sloane’s fingers tightened around mine.

“Yeah,” she said. “It really is.”

24

SLOANE

IT WAS THE RAISINS

The wolfsbane smoke had thinned to almost nothing by late afternoon.

The air around Hudson’s house still carried a bitter, herbal sting that caught in the back of my throat whenever the wind shifted. Council responders wearing respirators moved in and out, checking every room with handheld monitors while the pack waited across the yard, huddled under blankets, jackets, and whatever else people had grabbed before the houses were declared unsafe.

Nobody had died.

I kept circling back to that fact.

Hudson sat under a large oak tree with a bottle of water in one hand and an oxygen mask resting beside him on the grass. He looked exhausted, pale, and irritated by every person who asked whether he needed to lie down.

That meant he was improving.

I had spent enough time around him to recognize his stubbornness as a vital sign.

Every few minutes, I found a reason to look at him. Each time, he was still there. Still breathing. Still alive.

He’d exerted all his extra energy checking on me and making sure I’d come out of the whole ordeal unscathed.

And somehow, despite everything I had done, he had given me another chance. The enormity of that hadn’t sunk in yet. I wasn’t sure when it would.

Trust didn’t suddenly reappear because we performed a second first meeting in the middle of a disaster scene. Yet he had opened a door, and I intended to spend however long it took to prove I deserved to walk through it.

Of course, that wasn’t why I had entered the houses.

I hadn’t seen the smoke and thought this might be my chance to earn forgiveness. I hadn’t dragged Hudson across the floor because I hoped he would wake up, gaze into my eyes, and decide the deception no longer mattered.

I had believed he might never forgive me.

I had believed none of them would.

And I went inside anyway. Because I loved them.

They were my family before they knew the truth. That didn’t mean I had a right to claim them now. It only meant their safety mattered more than what happened to me afterward.