Page 215 of The Werewolf’s Wrong Mate

Silas Thorne stood at the fountain’s edge. He was tall, silver-haired, broad through the chest, dressed in a dark coat that looked too elegant for the rain. He didn’t have Evelyn’s bright cruelty. His was older. Colder. He watched us enter with the calm satisfaction of a man who had set the room on fire and intended to charge for warmth.

Ronan stopped at the top of the courtyard steps. His wolves filled in behind him.

No one had shifted. Not yet. Secrecy still held by a thread.

Silas smiled. “Ronan.”

“Silas.”

“Your hospitality has declined.”

Ronan held his stare. “You brought soldiers into my hunt course.”

“You slaughtered guests under protection.”

I felt Cassie move beside me, taking a step forward. Every human head turned at once.

Her father’s face broke open. “Cassie.”

Tessa made a sound that hurt to hear. “Oh my God!”

Cassie stood in the rain, pale and bruised, with damp hair around her face and the borrowed strength of a woman who had decided if death wanted her, it could look her in the eye.

Her mother started crying harder.

Grant stared at her like he had never seen her before. Maybe he had not.

Cassie’s father lurched toward her and the Thorne wolf beside him backhanded him across the face.

Cassie lunged before I could stop her. I caught her around the waist. She cried out when the movement hit her stitches, but she fought me anyway.

“You touch him again and I will shove that knife so far up your ass you’ll be tasting the handle,” she snarled.

The courtyard went silent for half a breath. Even some of Ronan’s wolves stared.

Silas laughed. It was a pleasant sound. That made it worse.

“I see why Ian didn’t mind the leash.”

The word moved through me like fire through dry brush.

My claws slid out.

Cassie felt it.

She twisted in my hold, not away from me, but toward Silas. “I have had enough with the leash bullshit.”

“Cassie,” I said.

“No.” Her voice rose across the courtyard, raw and furious enough to cut through the rain. “No, I am done. I have been bitten, hidden, hunted, voted on, lied to, dressed up as a problem, and now apparently every man with a supernatural superiority complex wants to call me a leash because that is easier than admitting Ian has a conscience.”

Silas’s smile thinned.

Cassie kept going. “He never needed control. He never needed a leash. He is better than all of you. He is the only one here besides Sava who has given one actual shit about what happened to me instead of what I mean for someone else’s power.”

My heart broke harder with every word.

She really believed it. She stood there bruised because of me, marked because of me, and still reached for the part of me I no longer trusted.