“Ethan is mine when this is over.” His voice has gone soft now in something that turns my stomach. “I’ve already made the arrangements. By the time Leon figures out which directionI have gone, I will be out of the country and off every grid that exists.”
“Coach will never let you take him.” My pulse is hammering in my throat.
“Leon will have no choice.” Derek sneers. “He will be too busy burying his other son and his fated mate.”
He looks toward the door, and my eyes catch movement to the side. Ethan’s eyes are clearer now, and he is watching me and Derek. There’s something moving behind his eyes. I shake my head subtly and then tilt it toward the door, signaling for him to run when the time is right.
My hand goes behind me, the sheath leather sliding silently against my coat lining. The knife comes free. I have it low against my thigh, and I take one step.
Derek hears me. His head whips around, and his arm sweeps backward without looking. I see the impact coming and cannot get out of its path. The back of his hand catches me across the cheek. The room tilts. I hit the side wall hard enough that my teeth snap together, and my left shoulder, the one Vanessa shot through a week ago, screams white hot pain down my arm. The knife stays in my hand.
A small, sharp snarl rips up from the concrete.
Ethan is on his feet. His pajama shirt has split at the seams. Bone is moving under his skin, fur the color of wet bark pushing through, his face caught half between a four-year-old boy and a small wolf pup the size of a fox. His teeth are bared, too big for the size of him, and he is growling at Derek with his small chest heaving.
“Ethan, no—”
He launches at the back of Derek’s calf with everything he has. Derek staggers a half step in surprise. Ethan’s small jaws lock, and he hangs from Derek’s leg by his teeth, a feral noisepouring out of him that does not belong to my sweet boy who cannot sleep without three bedtime stories.
Derek looks down. The corner of his mouth pulls.
“Brave little thing.”
His leg snaps out. Ethan flies backward off his leg, hits the side wall ten feet from me with a yelp that punches the air out of me, and slides down to the concrete in a small heap of patchy fur and torn pajamas.
“No!” I howl in fury.
Derek turns toward me at the same moment I throw myself at him, too slow to read it as a threat. I drive for the gap. The shoulder that took the bullet screams in protest, and I push through it on nothing but desperation and adrenaline. The blade goes into his right eye to the hilt.
He screams. The sound is so loud and so wet that I let go of the handle and stumble back. He stumbles forward, both hands over his face, his good eye squeezed shut against the spasm, blood and clear fluid running between his fingers from the socket where the knife is buried. For one second I think it is over.
Then the air around him bends.
The shift comes through him in a hard wave, the fur breaking through his skin in patches, his shoulders climbing up into the bigger, heavier silhouette I saw kill Vanessa. The handle of the knife snaps off as his head changes form. The blade stays in.
The wolf turns on me with one eye and a ruin where the other was, enraged beyond reason.
I do not have time to run. He hits me at full speed. My back slams into the concrete floor, and the air goes out of me in one wet wheeze. He is on top of me. His paws pin my arms, his jaws above my throat.
Then he stands on my chest.
My ribs go in three places. I hear them before I feel them. The sound is small, dry, and final. The pain that follows hasme opening my mouth to scream, but instead of sound, I get the warm copper taste of my own blood across my tongue. The wet drag of the next breath tells me one of my lungs has been punctured.
Fuck.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Grayson
The locker roomis half the noise it usually is after a win. Most of the boys have already cleared out for the press room, leaving Brody half-naked at his stall with a towel around his neck. Samuel sits on a bench with his phone in his hand and a small frown that does not belong to a man whose team has just won by three.
“Coach wants you.”
I’m pulling on a fresh shirt. “Now?”
“In his office. He said pull you out of the press scrum if I had to.”
“He said if you had to?” I give him a doubtful look.
