“Then let me do it.”
“The killing?”
“Yes, and leading the family. I’ve learned everything I need to know to change things for the better. Go back to your mates knowing you are free from all of it. Let me do it, Gideon.”
“No! No! Gideon must do it. He’s mine. Born under the Hunter’s Moon…fates…light and dark…” Carnell mutters, eyes slipping closed before opening again. “Vengeance and…light.”
“Look,” Connall says, “we can stand here until he dies, but if I may offer some advice?”
Gideon nods once.
“You don’t have to do this last thing to be free of him. Just choosing to walk away means you won. Choose to live in the light with your mates.”
Choose to live in the light.
Wasn’t that what his mates had been telling him all this time? That he chooses to be good, so he is. He can choose to walk away and let Connall finish this, so that his mates are safe. He’s avenged them with a fatal blow, just as Nix had done all those months ago.
Would he say Nix’s freedom is any less a victory because he hadn’t watched him die? Hadn’t sped Hayes’s death along? Never.
“I can walk away,” he says quietly, and finds Luca and Leo again.
Leo smiles and holds out his hand.
“I can choose to live in the light,” he says louder.
The beginnings of what feels like freedom tingle in that place Leo’s words had warmed earlier.
“You have been, no?” Connall clarifies. “Don’t give him one more second of your life.”
When he lets the idea take root, it’s surprisingly easy to nod.
“You’ll make sure…”
“You severed his spinal cord, but I promise he won’t live longer than the time it takes for you to walk away. I’ve been waiting a long time, living in the dark, too. It’s time.”
Gideon nods. “Don’t be a stranger when you’re back in Nashville?”
Connall’s eyebrows go up. “I’ll see you at Quest sometime?”
With a nod, Gideon turns away without a backwards glance, his father’s plaintive voice fading behind him.
“No!” Carnell says again. “Allistair must lead. Born under the Hunter’s moon…one must stay.”
Behind him, Gideon hears Connall growl.
“Not to make you feel better or anything, you psychotic fuck, but I stayed. And my birthday is October thirtieth. Born under the Hunter’s Moon.”
Luca leaps into his arms, his legs wrapped around his waist and his cold nose pressed into his throat over his mating bite, while Leo puts a hand on Gideon’s lower back under his t-shirt, guiding Gideon at a fast walk toward the light at the far end of Carnell’s—Connall’s—compound.
He’ll never admit it, but he doesn’t relax until he hears a garbled moan and a sucking, fleshy sound from behind them.
And he still doesn’t turn around.
26
Unity in Purpose (Jay)
Jay cannot take his eyes off Rowan-wolf, suspended thirty feet above the stone platform—lips pulled back over his monstrous teeth in a snarl, eyes flashing red as he’s held immobile over the stone rampart.
