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Wrong.
A few stragglers race toward me, and the shadows give chase, bounding across the ground with preternatural speed. I watch in horror as one creature takes down a mother holding her toddler. Her scream cuts off abruptly, and her baby cries.
Then I’m flying backward. The ground moves away from me, and the big picture becomes clearer. I keep going, further and further, until I can see the whole country, the whole continent, then the earth itself.
Everything has been taken.
Conquered.
Decimated.
I close my eyes and try to scream, but nothing comes out. When I open them again, I’m back in Ridge’s backyard.
The witch, Gwen, stands on the lush green grass, her face pale and grave and framed by waves of bright auburn hair.
“Go,” she says.
I jerk awake, shooting up from the cold desert dirt. I clutch at the ground beneath me, struggling to breathe through the panic that stays with me in the moments after waking. My heart pounds painfully in my chest, and I swallow against the beating, trying to swallow my emotions.
It’s a recurring nightmare. I have it periodically, typically when I’m stressed or overly stuck in my feelings. But it’s also the driving force behind my three-year long search for my mates. Seeing what Gwen showed me—the dead earth, the terrified, dying people, the indistinct shadow monsters destroying everything—seeing that all over again only cements my determination to stop these men before they can unleash that on the world.
All three men are sound asleep, fanned out around me on their own patches of ground. They opted to sleep in human form, which is yet one more example of how they’re nothing like pack wolves. I would usually sleep as a wolf under the stars, but I chose human form too, matching their choice like I was calling some sort of bluff. The cold stillness of night still reigns over the desert, and none of them have moved since I awoke.
I stare at them in silence that turns to horror the longer I watch them sleep.
They’re beautiful. All of them.
But they’re poison worse than the one inside me.
How could I have teamed up with them? I chose to ally myself with the enemy. Willingly. My entire life’s goal is to protect the world from what I know they’ll do to it, and here I am sleeping beside them.
I get silently to my feet, leaving my shoes where they lie, then creep over the dusty ground.
Malix sleeps on his back, his hands clasped over his stomach and his legs crossed at the ankles. He chose to sleep closer to me than the other two, though I don’t know if that’s because he wanted to keep an eye on me or be close to me because he finds me amusing.
I ease down onto my knees next to him, staring at his handsome face. His short hair shows off his regal features. His high cheekbones arc beneath the shadow of his eyelashes, and his strong jaw and thick brows accentuate every angle. I’ve only been in his company a few hours, but I can already picture his smile in my head, the way that slash of teeth between his thick lips transforms his face from kingly to playful.
Gwen’s vision flashes in my mind. I watch the mother fall beneath the shadow creature. The baby cries. I see it, over and over again in my nightmares, and I know deep in my soul that killing these men is the only way I can guarantee that future never happens.
Lucky for me, they decided not to take my weapons from me.
Drawing my knife from the holster at my hip, I clench my jaw and stare down at him a few more seconds. If I kill them all, right here, right now, then I’ve done what I set out to do. I could crawl into the mountains nearby and let the poison take me, content in my knowledge that I’ve saved the world.
I raise my blade.
Malix’s eyes snap open. “Don’t.”
I freeze, raised up on my knees with the knife still hanging over his chest.
He doesn’t move or smile, but he meets my gaze with those stunning violet eyes and waits me out. He looks for all the world like a guy kicked back on a couch watching a game.
Meanwhile, I’m about to murder him.
“If you do it,” he says softly. “You’ll break the truce.”
“I didn’t sign a contract,” I mutter, tightening my grip on the hilt.
“You don’t believe your word to be a binding contract?” he asks, looking genuinely confused.
