Page 66 of Wolfsbane

And gathered close to him, I watched the enormous red wound on my mother’s throat spread. Blood gushed down her front as she clutched her neck to try and stem the flow.

I—I felt the slippery chunk of flesh in my mouth and, with a whine, opened my jaw. It flopped into the mud.

A second later, she fell too.

Destiny ran to her side, shouting.

But I knew it was too late. This wasn’t—this wasn’t a hand to reattach.

Mother’s heartbeat slowed.

It stopped.

And I shivered back into my own body, water pelting down my naked skin, clutching Viktor’s arm harder than I’d ever held onto anything.

I’d killed her.

I’d killed my own mother.

CHAPTER 37

Viktor

The wretched scream that came from Daire’s throat in that moment echoed through the whole square, and everything around us seemed to go silent and still, even the rain.

Like the whole world took a breath, waiting to see what happened next.

Daire’s naked body whipped around and curled into me, burying his face in my shoulder, his whole frame shuddering with emotion.

I couldn’t have said what exactly the emotion was, but I recognized it.

I remembered the night I had killed our captors in the camp in Russia.

A few of them had been kind to me, sometimes. I remembered laughing with one when we had succeeded in a mission and found a whole kitchen of food we could appropriate for the camp. Another time, asking for a cigarette from a guard out of sheer curiosity, which he’d freely given and lit for me. Sure, the thing had been disgusting, but there had been a sort of camaraderie there. Kinship.

And then I’d sneaked into his room and cut his throat in the night, because none of them would have allowed us to escape. If I’d left him alive, he would have either come after us, or his own people would have killed him for his failure.

This wasn’t even as simple as that.

Ermengarde hadn’t just been Daire’s captor. His sometimes-kind tormentor.

I doubted she’d ever been kind, but she’d literally been his mother.

It seemed appropriate to me that she’d been killed by the very tether she’d forced on Daire and me, but I would probably never say that to him. Certainly not now, while he was trying to deal with the immediate fallout.

I also wasn’t going to tell him about the tiny stab of jealousy in me because I’d wanted to be the one to end the toxic bitch.

That was the last thing he needed.

Instead, I wrapped my arms around him and held him tight. The witch who’d caught Ermengarde’s body turned to stare at me with hatred radiating from her black eyes—or more likely at Daire. Before she could so much as say a single accusing word, though, Evie came bounding out of the space between the houses in her wolf skin, teeth bared. She growled at the witch, who clumsily tried to put the body of her leader between herself and wolf fangs.

Evie took a menacing step forward, and the witch started to babble. It wasn’t even a spell, just some kind of mantra, and I couldn’t tell if she was out of strength or just terrified entirely out of her wits.

She had just seen a wolf—Daire the wolf—tear out her leader’s throat.

She might even understand it had happened because of the tether they had put on us, and the way she’d thrown me away from him. I doubted any of them had the decency required to feel sorry they’d done a thing, but at least she could regret it.

Aleks strode out to the center of the old square, where the witch sat with Ermengarde’s body in her lap. Other witches were rushing out of the woods and darting over to join her, trying to put forth a strong front, but it wasn’t hard to see that they were terrified.