Page 105 of Silver Claw

Then he dropped the gun while those with him fell upon the Iron Fang alpha and made sure he would not rise again.

“Kait,” Jared said. “Kait.” There was nothing else he could say. And then because he seemed to see in my face that I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, he murmured, “He’s not dead, wolf.”

Rick wasn’t dead.

He wasn’t a ghost, he wasn’t gone, he wasn’t ended.

He was there.

And oh my god, was he raging.

I would have fallen then, but behind me, Jared slid his arms around my waist and held me up, just as Rick reached me.

Rick yanked me into his arms and he didn’t care that my entire face was torn and bloody. He wrapped me in his arms and lowered his mouth to my battered, swollen lips, and he forced me out of the darkness.

“Kait,” he whispered against my mouth, “don’t ever die for me.”

And as I began to fall into a darkness of another kind, my alpha separated us, but gently. “She will shift now,” he told Rick. “She will heal.”

“Will she?” Rick asked, full of despair.

“Oh yes,” Jared assured him.

“She’s too weak to shift,” my mother said, abruptly beside Rick.

“I will help her,” Jared said.

As he always did.

And then Remy, Joe, and Zach were there, and Sam, who peered into my face, smiling and proud, though I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why.

Joe wasn’t smiling. Joe was pissed. He balled his fist and hit Sam in the face. “You were going to let her die,” he roared.

Something terrible burst to life in Sam’s eyes as he wiped blood from his face, there and gone. “She was never going to die,” he said. “She’s not fucking human, asshole.” Then he went after Joe.

“No,” I murmured. “No more. Stop.”

My alpha thrust me at Rick and waded into the fight, breaking it up almost before it got started. Emotions were high, and everyone needed to give themselves a chance to come down from a night that had apparently been hellbent on killing us all.

My legs collapsed and my mind blinked out, for just a moment, and then I was in Rick’s arms, cradled against his chest, staring up at his face. He tried to smile, but he failed miserably.

“You’re alive,” I whispered. “You’re alive.”

Jared reached for me, and after the tiniest hesitation, Rick handed me over.

“I’ll bring your wolf,” Jared promised, then looked at the detective. “She’ll be okay.”

And maybe I would.

My alpha carried me away from the noise, the blood, and the violence, and as Gavin’s beta and his wolves buried their former alpha in my woods, Jared brought my wolf to life.

He pulled her from me gently, but firmly, insistent when my poor battered body rebelled.

And then he shifted, as well, and curled up around me on the ground. With his heat and his love seeping into my body, my heart, my very soul, I slept, and I began to heal.

Despite the madness of the moon, the brutal battle, and my own best efforts to do otherwise, I began to heal.

Epilogue