Page 16 of A Wolf's Revenge

“Father—“

“Report for work tomorrow morning.” He was already walking. “We won’t speak of this again.”

One of his men hit me from behind. I went down hard, my head cracking against the marble, and lay there in the spreading dark of my own blood — the wound trying to close and the aconite holding it open — listening to my father’s footsteps move toward the door and out of the building.

Somewhere above me, the ceiling began to burn.

Jeff’s face swam into focus above me.

“Let me help you up.”

I swung at him. He caught my arm.

“I know,” he said. “I know, Z. I’m sorry.”

“You told him.” My voice didn’t sound like mine. “You told him about Kerra.”

Jeff’s face was wrecked with something that might have been genuine. “You were going to throw everything away. The pack. The family. Everything we built. Over a Conti.” He let go of my arm. “I covered for you for months. But you stopped being you. And someone had to make the call.”

“She is carrying my child.”

He flinched. Just barely. “I didn’t know that.”

“Now you do.”

The fire was moving down the staircase. I could hear it — the deep crack of timber giving way — and under it, fainter, the thing that turned my stomach worse than the smoke: the aconite cooking off in the heat, doubling, the whole house filling with a poison that meant not one wolf in it could save itself the way our kind was built to.

I got up on my own.

The stairs were still passable but barely. I went up through thickening smoke, one hand on the wall, bent low where the air was thinnest. The east wing corridor was already lost — a solid wall of fire from the junction to the end, the heat hitting me ten feet before I reached it like a physical barrier. My wolf strained against the cage of the poison, wanting to give me the speed, the resilience, the body that might have made it through. It had nothing to give. None of us did. That was the design.

I stood at the junction and understood, with the clarity that comes in the absence of any other option, that there was no way through.

I turned back.

Kerra was where I’d left her, in the dining room, on the floor now, her back against the wall, her hands moving slow and deliberate over her belly the way she did when she was frightened and trying not to show it. When I came back through the door without the children, her face told me she already knew.

“I couldn’t get through,” I said. “The corridor. I’m sorry.”

She closed her eyes for one second. Then she opened them. “Okay,” she said. “Okay. Help me up.”

I soaked the curtains from the dining room in the kitchen sink, working fast, the smoke already thickening in the lower rooms. I wrapped them around her, lifted her, and went for the nearest exit.

The windows on the ground floor were jammed — locked from outside, which meant my father had sealed the house before his men went in. I put my shoulder into three of them and got nowhere. My shoulder was a man’s shoulder tonight, not a wolf’s. The smoke was getting into my lungs and staying there, each breath shallower than the last.

We were running out of time.

I carried her to the far end of the corridor where the fire hadn’t yet reached, set her down against the wall, and crouched in front of her.

“Zimife.” Her voice was barely there now, scraped thin by the smoke. She was coughing between words, her face pale beneath the soot, but her eyes were on mine and they were clear. “Stop looking at the windows.”

“I’m going to get you out.”

“Listen to me.” She reached up and put her hand against my face. Her fingers were cold. “You came back for me. You came into a burning building you couldn’t turn inside of, and you came back for me.”

“I should have kept you out of it entirely. I should never have?—“

“Zimife.” Her thumb moved against my jaw. “I know what you are,” she said quietly. “I think I’ve known for a while. The way you’d go still when my grandfather’s name came up. The way your scent changed.” A pause that cost her air she didn’t have. “It doesn’t change what you are to me.”