“What else is there to talk about?” Avery spat out.
Wren chimed in. “We don’t know that a shifter killed him,” she said almost quietly. “His body was never found.”
Avery gaped, flickers of hurt piercing her already tender heart. “What did we bury then?” Her voice cracked, tears bleeding into her eyes as she slumped back in her seat.
“An empty casket.” Her mother’s voice was flat as she picked cat hair off the table.
Avery’s nails dug into her palms. “How do you know he’s dead?”
“Our intelligence suggests he is.” She stated it like it didn’t matter that her husband could be somewhere out there. Herfather.
“But—”
“Avery,” she said. Her eyes snapped up to Avery’s, the finality in her tone brutal. “If your father were alive, he wouldn’t have left you to grieve for the last year.”
A bitter smile pulled at Avery’s mouth, the tears finally falling.
She got up from the table, not bothering to look back as she stormed out of the room.
The hallway blurred. Her teeth sank into her bottom lip, hard enough that she tasted copper. The pain was grounding, real, something to hold onto when everything else was spinning apart. Rain slammed into her the moment she stepped outside, the sky crying with her. The guards called after her, but she didn’t stop, didn’t slow. She ran through the garden paths, her feet slipping on the wet stones, the rain indistinguishable from the tears on her face. She ran until her lungs burned, until her legs screamed, until she physically couldn’t push herself anymore.
She didn’t know where Felix was. Didn’t care.
Moonlight turned the grand oaks to towering shadows. Almost subconsciously, she had come back to the same spot thathad started this all. A choked sound came out of her as she took shelter under an oak tree across from the statues, her back slamming against the bark as she slid down to the ground and tucked her arms around herself. A cavern cracked open in her chest. The feelings that she had been burying deeper and deeper down rose to the surface, as desperate as someone who was drowning clawed their way to breathe.
Her breaths came in shallow gasps, each one doing less than the last. Her limbs tingled, and her body flushed cold as the panic crested far past the point where she could talk herself down. The edges of her vision darkened, her head swimming as she became ravenous for air. She surrendered to it, let it almost pull her under.
It had been years since she’d had a panic attack.
Through her blurred vision, she saw the silhouette of Felix in front of her, not the cat, but him, his sleeves rolled up, the rain drenching his shirt as he crouched in front of her. One look from him and a sense of calm washed through her before the panic snatched it back again.
Avery tried to scramble back. “No! Get away from me.”
“I’m not going anywhere, Avery,” he said, voice gentle, rain dripping from his hair.
She pressed her palms against her eyes, the pressure doing nothing to stop the tears.
“You’re a monster; all your kind are,” she said, the words coming out strange and distant, as if they didn’t belong to her.
He visibly flinched at that one. “Yes,” he said.
Shadows appeared at her side, slithering across the forest floor like snakes. But they weren’t coming from Felix, she realized.
They were coming fromher,bleeding out of her in wispy tendrils. Felix must have noticed them too, because she saw his surprise as he tracked them across the ground.
“Your kind murdered my father,” she spat, not caring about the implications of standing up to a shifter. How stupid had she been to trust one of them; if only she had known earlier. Now she was fucking bound to one. A sickness rose in her throat, tightening it even further.
“Probably.”
The confirmation broke something in her. Her breath hitched as a sob tore from her throat. She folded in on herself, her arms wrapped tightly around her ribs because she was going to split apart, she was going to shatter into a thousand tiny pieces next to the very thing that broke her.
For a moment, the shadows were calm. Then they exploded outward. Tendrils of darkness writhed through the rain, lashing against the tree trunk, coiling around her arms. The shadows twisted and snarled, feeding off her grief and rage, growing darker and more violent with each breath.
Felix’s eyes went wide, watching her detonate in front of him. She tried to stand, but her legs gave out. The shadows surged higher, blocking out what little light remained. They were going to consume her. She was going to drown in them.
She sensed that he was closer, moving through the darkness that lashed like a tornado around them. The shadows recoiled from him slightly, as if recognizing him. Warm hands pressed on her shoulders.
She froze. “Don’t.”
