"Not his storm, Isla. Yours."
She could see it. That was the worst part. Standing on the shoreline with the storm screaming overhead and the resonance cracking her open, she could see the dock at Ardenmere with perfect clarity. Her father running through the rain. The boats listing in the harbor. The sky lit up with lightning that moved in patterns, her patterns, the same signature she'd spent a year learning to recognize as her own. And her father on the dock, arms raised, pouring everything he had into a counter that was never going to be enough because the source was his own terrified daughter feeding the storm with every ounce of fear in her seventeen-year-old body.
She'd told herself it was his storm. For ten years she'd told herself that. She'd repeated the story so many times it hadbecome the truth. His storm. His power. His loss of control that sank those boats and brought the mob to the dock. She'd built her entire identity around that version, the girl watching someone else's catastrophe.
But she hadn't been watching. She'd been the source. The men on the pier had finished a man her power had already destroyed.
The storm exploded.
Three lightning columns erupted from the lake surface simultaneously, the charge so intense it lit the entire valley in white. The wind went from channeled to chaotic in seconds, gusts tearing across the shoreline from every direction, the water rising in swells that crashed over the rocks where she stood. The pressure differential between the lake surface and the upper atmosphere collapsed and the result was a downburst that flattened the grass for two hundred yards in every direction.
Isla fell to her knees in the shallows. The water was cold around her legs, the stones cutting through her jeans. Her hands hit the surface and discharged into the lake in a burst of light that turned the shallows electric blue for three full seconds.
Malrick was still standing holding the bracelet. Still talking, but she couldn't hear him over the wind and the thunder and the sound of her own blood in her ears. She could see his mouth moving. She saw the satisfaction on his face, the pale brown eyes bright with victory.
She'd done it. The boats. The crew. Her father. She'd been the storm all along, the raw uncontrolled force that had sunk two vessels, drowned men who were doing nothing more than working the water, and broken her father so completely that by the time the survivors reached the dock he couldn't defend himself. She'd spent ten years running from it, telling herself a different story, hiding behind a version of events that made her the witness instead of the weapon.
The sky answered her grief. The second set of columns went up from the lake, taller, brighter, the discharge pattern radiating outward in six lines that cracked across the water's surface toward the dock, the shoreline, the town. The energy was moving through her body, more than she'd ever channeled, more than she knew she carried, years of suppressed power breaking loose because the wall she'd built around it was made of a lie.
She could stop it. She knew that somewhere underneath the grief and the noise and the resonance. She could reach into the connection and pull everything back the way she had in the square, the way she had last night. The skill was there. The training was there.
But the training had been built on a woman who believed her father's storm sank those boats, who believed the mob killed him. If that woman didn't exist anymore, what was the control built on?
The wind drove rain into her face. The lake surged around her knees. She was crying, she realized, tears mixing with rain and lake water, her hands flat on the surface, the charge still arcing from her fingertips into the water. The sky was hers, furious, uncontrolled, and she didn't know how to tell it to stop because stopping meant accepting what she'd done. She wasn't ready. She wasn't strong enough. Maybe the only gift she had left was to let the storm take her the way it had taken her father, burn herself out before the damage reached the dock, the town, the ship, to the man who'd called her extraordinary.
Malrick stepped closer. She could see his boots at in the shallows. He crouched and held the bracelet toward her, the resonance screaming.
"Let it go, Isla," he said. His voice was almost kind. "Let the storm do what it wants. When it's over, no one will blame you. They'll blame the weather. They always do."
The wind howled. The lake churned. She closed her eyes and felt the power pulling her under, years of it, a decade of compressed grief, fear, rage breaking the surface.
Then, through the wind, the rain, the thunder, the resonance, the roaring in her own blood, she heard it.
"ISLA!"
Rafe's voice. Distant. Coming from the path and coming fast.
She opened her eyes.
33
RAFE
He saw her on her knees in the shallows and the shift took him before he could think.
It had been years. He ran routes, negotiated contracts, managed a crew. He lived in his human skin the way most shifters did after enough time on the water, the wolf pushed down, managed, kept behind discipline and routine. But the moment he cleared the trees and saw Isla kneeling in the lake with her hands in the water, the charge arcing from her fingers, the storm screaming overhead, and Malrick crouched ten feet from her, holding something silver that pulsed with light, the wolf simply took over.
The shift was instant. No buildup, no conscious decision. One stride he was a man running through the rain. The next his boots split, his jacket tore, and his bones reshaped themselves with a speed that should have been agonizing but felt like breathing after being held underwater. The wolf hit the ground on four legs at full sprint, two hundred pounds of black fur, muscle, fury. It covered the distance between the tree line and Malrick in under three seconds.
Malrick turned. His eyes went wide, the first real, unguarded expression Rafe had ever seen on his face. He tried to step back but was too slow.
Rafe’s massive wolf form hit him in the chest. Full body, full speed, the impact driving Malrick off his feet and onto the rocks with a crack that might have been stone or ribs. The bracelet flew from his hand, spinning through the rain, and landed in the shallows six feet from Isla with a sound like a bell struck underwater. Malrick scrambled backward across the wet rocks, his coat torn, his hands scraping on stone, and the wolf stood over him with its head low, teeth bared, a growl rolling out of its chest that vibrated the ground beneath them.
For a moment, Rafe let his wolf have him. Let Malrick see what he was.
Then he pulled back. The shift was forced, his wolf resisting, every instinct screaming to finish this, but Rafe dragged himself into human form with a wrenching effort that left him on his hands and knees on the rocks, naked, rain streaming down his back, breathing like he'd surfaced from a deep dive. The shift back was harder than it should have been. The wolf didn't want to let go.
Malrick was on the ground, clutching his ribs, staring at Rafe with an expression that had lost every trace of polish. His coat was shredded across the chest and blood ran from a scrape on his temple.
