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Why was she here? What the hell did she have to do with my mother?
They were in the kitchen, at the rear of the house. I rushed on, the fear in me so heavy it was beginning to weigh me down.
There was blood on the marble tiles just outside the kitchen doorway.
And more blood on the door itself.
And smears of something else—something that almost resembled flesh—on the wall inside.
Please don’t let it be Mom. Please don’t …
I swept into the room. Saw Riley. Rhoan. Hunter.
Saw them hunkered near the center island.
Moved to the right so that they no longer blocked my view.
Saw the hair. The face. The head.
Just the head.
Mom.
Everything seemed to explode. My brain, my heart, my strength.
My body re-formed and I dropped to the floor, as bloody as the tiles that surrounded me. There were gasps, movement, hands on my skin, questions.
But I couldn’t move, couldn’t think, couldn’t see.
All I could do was scream.
THE DAYS PASSED IN A BLUR.
A never-ending, agony-filled blur.
Because of Mom’s death, because of the way she’d died—and because I’d pushed my body to extremes and had all but broken it.
And the worst of it was, I didn’t care.
Not about anything or anyone.
Especially not myself.
I’d failed the most important person in my life, and there was no escaping that knowledge. No escaping the guilt of it.
Riley took me home. Not to my home, but hers, keeping me safe, keeping me away from anywhere and anything that might remind me of Mom, of the way she’d been tortured and then dismembered.
I was never alone. Someone was with me twenty-four/seven. I was aware of them on a peripheral level, knew that they kept me alive and functioning, and updated on what was happening.
But nothing really registered on a conscious level. I didn’t care what they said. Every inch of me was raw—and it was a rawness that was both physical and emotional.
My body was battered and bruised, and my sight, like my hearing and my voice, had been damaged. It would recover, because I was half wolf and self-healing was a part of my heritage, but it would take time.
It could have taken an eternity and I doubted it would matter. Nothing mattered. Nothing could matter. Not when I failed to save my own mother.
Part of me wanted to die, to just walk away from the heartache and the pain that burned through every fiber.
It would be easy enough to do. I could slip away to the gray fields, let my body waste away and maybe find a peace in death that would not be possible in life.
