Page 162 of Glitched Fates & Stolen Mates

“This entire operation was entirely my plan,” I said proudly, unable to keep the satisfaction out of my voice. But I’d hacked a military facility, created a diversion, freed Kit, and blown the whole place to smithereens. Not bad for someone who usually spent his days debugging code and avoiding eye contact.

“Shh.” Seb held up a hand, his expression deadly serious. “Be quiet. I’m thinking.”

We all fell silent. Even the wolves seemed to sense his authority, their restless pacing slowing to a halt.

“What will happen if Kit asks the wolves to shift back?” Seb asked Isla.

Isla shifted uncomfortably under Seb’s piercing stare, snow collecting on her ginger hair. “Technically, they should have their minds back,” she said. “The control chips need constant connection to the central server to maintain neural dominance. With the facility destroyed…” She gestured weakly at the burning mountain behind us. “The network’s gone.”

“But?” Seb pressed, clearly hearing something in her tone.

Isla’s shoulders hunched further. “But… I think they’ll be severely disoriented. The chips suppress higher cognitive function. Language centres. Personal memories. Some of them have been under control for…” She swallowed hard, guilt written across her pale features. “Some of them for years.”

“Years?” Rory snapped. “Jesus Christ, Isla!”

She hung her head.

The wind picked up, sending fresh snow swirling around us. Vicious shivers racked through me, and I pushed as much of my body into Kit as I could.

“So if Kit commands them to shift back,” Seb said slowly, “we’ll have a hundred naked, confused, potentially traumatised people who don’t remember who they are, standing in a Swiss snowstorm.”

Seb remained perfectly still for nearly a minute, gaze scanning the scattered pack, the burning facility, the endless expanse of snow-covered wilderness around us. Then he pulled out his phone, held it to his ear, and waited.

“Guten Abend,” he said when someone answered, launching into rapid German that I hadn’t the slightest hope of understanding. His tone was crisp and commanding, the voice of someone accustomed to having his orders followed without question.

I leaned down and pressed my lips against Kit’s furry neck, breathing in his familiar scent beneath the smoke and mountain air. “We’re safe now,” I whispered into his ear, my fingers tangling in his thick coat. “You’re never leaving me again.”

Kit’s ears twitched, and I felt rather than heard the low rumble of contentment in his chest.

I scratched between his ears, adding shyly, “My mate.”

38

Kit

The log chalet felt like living in a Christmas card—all warm honey-coloured wood and flickering firelight, with snow pelting the windows in thick sheets. The storm had been building for hours, turning the world beyond the glass into a white void.

I still couldn’t quite believe we were here.

Seb had somehow hired two coaches to meet us on the main road. Don’t ask me how he managed it from the side of a bloody mountain in the middle of the night—the man operated on a level I’d stopped questioning years ago.

The coach drivers had kicked off a proper fuss in German when they saw what we wanted to bring aboard. Apparently Seb hadn’t actually mentioned they’d be picking up a hundred animals, not humans. Took a large sum of money being instantly transferred into their bank accounts for them to finally agree to the modified passenger manifest.

While we drove, I very slowly worked my way through the wolves, one at a time. Encouraging them to shift back wasn’t like flicking a switch—these weren’t pack wolves who knew me, trusted me. They were broken things, fragments of people who’d been carved apart and stitched back together by Greywatch’s bloody experiments.

The first few were the worst. A young woman, maybe twenty-five, who’d shifted back screaming, clawing at her own skin like she was trying to tear something out from under it. Rory had wrapped her in a blanket whilst Isla murmured soft words. Another man—older, scarred—had come back speaking only Russian, his eyes vacant as windows in an abandoned house.

Each shift took everything I had. The effort of reaching into their fractured minds, finding the human thread amongst all that synthetic wolf programming, left me shaking. Felix pressed water bottles into my hands, steadied me when the exhaustion made my legs wobble.

Some fought the change. Others seemed grateful for it, collapsing into tears the moment they remembered their own names. By the final wolf, I was operating on fumes and stubbornness alone.

But I’d done it. We’d done it. We’d got them out. All of them. Every single wolf Greywatch had broken and twisted into weapons. They were free now. Something in my chest—some weight I’d been carrying since Pakistan, since Cara died in my arms with Greywatch’s lies still ringing in our ears—finally loosened.

I did it, Cara. Rest easy now.

We reached Saas-Almagell just before dawn with a hundred humans crammed into two coaches, lots of them wrapped in emergency blankets, all of them traumatised beyond measure. Equally, the coach drivers had gone pale and quiet. Thankfully, Felix had disabled their internal CCTV, because otherwise they’d have quite the story to tell.

Saas-Almagell, a remote valley tucked near the Italian border, felt like the edge of the world. Seb, being Seb, had commandeered an entire ski resort that was closed for renovations, scattering our shifters across the luxury chalets in small groups while we rested and regrouped. Dr Hartwell, who’d helped us after Scotland, was already on a plane to us, to see about removing each wolf’s chip before we got them home.