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Moments turn to minutes, and my ragged breaths soon give way to the hope that Belle was enough of a sacrifice to appease the creature.
Please. Please, let it be enough.
Rook squeezes my hand, and I can’t help the swell of pain and fear at leaving him alone.
Rook, can you hear me?I ask, daring to hope the connection had miraculously formed.
But he doesn’t answer. Nothing lies where his link should be.
A beta under a far table pokes their head out. “Is—is it gone?” she squeaks out just as a pile of bones, sucked clean of every bit of flesh and meat, falls to the polished concrete in front of her.
It devoured Belle. Completely. Not even the shitty alphas in Laurel Cove were eaten to just bones.
“That one knew how twisted she was and did not care. I enjoyed her rotten meat immensely,” it says as it floats down to the same spot as before.
My mates close in around me as the creature approaches.
“This pack and the others on the neighboring mountains are good packs. You all try to live in harmony with your environment. You don’t collect wealth for the sake of it. You help those in need.”
Its gaze shifts behind us. “The foreign vampires are also exempt. Though if I’d come across that one’s mate a century ago, I would have feasted like a king.”
Sunny clears her throat. “Titus has changed his ways.”
“Yes.” It shifts focus to Drago. “It seems your time has come, Champion.”
“No!” I scream, and somehow my mates get pushed out a few meters from me. “You just said our packs are good. We shouldn’t have to—”
“Quiet, young beast!”
With the command, the creature steals the air from my lungs.
“I am the way of things! Your mate’s sacrifice reminds your people to stay humble. To keep greed and power-mongering in check. If it weren’t for him and the generations before, your packs would be just as corrupt as the vampire king or the witch whose bones now litter the floor.
“And so I will take what’s mine,” it says before disappearing and reappearing inches in front of Drago. “I will take what is mine, and you’ll be grateful I don’t take more.” The last word hisses from its dead lips as he carries Drago into the night by his throat.
Chapter26
Your Turn
I roar at the sky.The sound echoes in the trees, in the night, like nothing I’ve ever heard before.
It doesn’t sound like me.
It’s her.
The Werebitch.
It’s her keening howl, her pain, her failure.
At the very outskirts of my awareness, my mates call to me. They pull at my limbs, trying to bring Willa back, but…
I know now. Willa and the Werebitch are the same.
I know now that she’s always been me. The version of me I needed to become to protect myself, my guys.
The version of me I needed to be to face this thing.
Like all women, like you, I had to transform to shoulder the burdens of this life. But unlike most women, unlike you, the magic inherent to my kind changed my body.
