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These were the first Wolves I had faced since my return who weren’t part of the Council, or one of the medical teams working on my recovery. The silence was thick, and then I felt a tentative hand on my shoulder.
“Sir…” The man’s voice was heavy with hesitation.
“Just say it, lieutenant. No point in keeping secrets now.”
He laughed softly. “I’m sorry. I thought you were dead, and when I followed Major Peterson here, it was in your honor.”
I turned my head toward him. “And now?” It was a challenge in a small way because I was asking these military men to now follow me as Head Alpha, even if they didn’t realize it yet. But it was obvious they could tell I wasn’t there as a guest.
Biggs was quiet another moment, then he cleared his throat. “It’s an honor to serve under you again. And I’d like to extend my apologies for not finding you sooner.”
I felt Misha tense next to me, and I quickly laced our fingers together. “No one would have been able to get me out of there by storming the gates. All of this—all this underground war with the humans, the labs, the corruption in our government—it’s going to have to be handled in ways that we might not like.”
I heard a collective sigh in the car from the other Wolves, and an even softer one from Misha.
“We understand, sir,” said another voice, and it took me a second to recognize Mitchell. He was the youngest out of all of them—and he had been assigned to my company late—but he was brave, and he was clever. “We just kind of feel a little impotent right now.”
I understood that in ways they probably never would, but I wasn’t going to lay that on their shoulders. “It won’t be forever, trust me.” It was all I could offer them because I couldn’t make promises that we would be successful. We might be found out and our compound razed to the ground long before we got the chance to turn it into a formidable opponent.
We might all be gathered together and killed—or worse, though I didn’t want to think about that. For now, I decided to keep holding that sliver of hope that had sparked to life the day we crossed the gate inside the tunnels and I realized I was free.
I let Misha press against me a little closer, let him stroke his thumb around my fingers, which would only be in the shape of a human’s for a short while longer. It wasn’t enough, but it was something.
I felt it when we reached open air, and though it hadn’t been much longer than a week in the compound, it had been months in the lab and the taste of fresh air and sky had been so short. My whole body shuddered, my wolf so close to the surface that my fangs dropped.
Misha made a startled, curious noise, then I felt the tips of his fingers brush against the side of my mouth. “Can I see them?” he murmured.
I turned my face toward him and let him draw my lip back, let him drag the pad of his thumb around the sharp points. My mouth felt too full like this. The half-shift was never meant to hold. It was a prelude for changing my form and letting myself go, but the nerves settled in suddenly because this was going to be my first moment as a blind wolf.
But he will be near you, a soft voice reminded me in my head. With these careful hands and this beating heart. You won’t be alone.
I swallowed thickly and pulled my fangs back before kissing the pad of his fingers and pulling his hand back down to my lap. The car began to slow after a while, and I caught the scent of trees, and somewhere beyond that, running water.
“I won’t go far from you,” I told Misha as I heard the car’s tires start to crunch over forest floor. “But I have to tell you, I don’t know how I’m going to react in my other form for the first time since…”
He squeezed my fingers when I didn’t finish my sentence. “I’ll be wherever you need me to be.”
But for how long, I couldn’t help wondering. I didn’t say that aloud either. Instead, I just waited with a line of tension in my body that started to ache. When Biggs brought the car to a complete stop, he ordered us to stay while they scouted the area. I honed in the rest of my senses, but I knew we were alone.
He confirmed it a few moments later when the back door of the SUV opened, and the air hit me full in the face. “There’s a clearing not far from here, and it’s where most of the Wolves come to shift when their number is drawn.”
“What does that mean?” Misha asked as he climbed out after me and offered me his arm.
“There’s a drawn lot,” I explained, trying to remember what Orion had said. Most of the information had come in a rush, and it would take me months to sort it all out. “There are too many Wolves here for everyone to shift outside during the moon.”
“Think of it like a release valve,” Biggs said, and I could hear a grin in his voice. “We can hold it in for a while. And shifting at home takes some of the edge off.”
“But it doesn’t last?” Misha asked, and I assumed Biggs shook his head because Misha made a soft noise of understanding. “I see the path ahead. You didn’t bring your cane though.”
I squeezed his arm. “I trust you.”
I felt a little pulse of distress, mostly because he didn’t trust himself, but I only tripped a couple of times on rocks he didn’t see, and I never hit the ground. The three Betas stayed near, but not too close, which I appreciated because I could already feel the nervous aggression of my Wolf rising to the surface.
I wouldn’t want them near Misha. I wouldn’t want them near me when I felt vulnerable and unsure. But we needed them—at least for now.
“Okay, this is it,” Misha said. “It’s actually kind of huge. It’s not really a circle, but it stretches out for hundreds of feet. The rest of the trees look pretty spaced out too, so you can probably walk through them without an issue.”
I smiled and tugged him close with one hand. “Thank you.”
