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“Yes, the beta’s daughter shifted. Nobody ever told her what to expect, and—”
“This isn’t about her. Not completely.” When all he does is stare at me, I snap my jaws close to his face. “She was your fated mate, you fucking idiot! Didn’t you feel it? How did you not notice?”
He looks back at the building, where, for all I know, everyone still inside has been crushed. “She is?”
“Not is,” I snarl. “Was. She was, but she isn’t anymore because you broke the connection like the careless asshole you are.”
“I did? I broke the bond?” It’s the genuine confusion in his voice that calms my rage, if only by a degree or two. I could still kill him right now, but I’d feel better about it if he didn’t sound genuinely confused. That doesn’t change what he’s done, but knowing it wasn’t deliberate eases my fury.
Though I doubt that makes a difference to Fate and the magic he broke.
“Yes, you fucking did. That’s what made her go berserk. You interfered with the magic.”
“Oh, shit. What do we do now?”
“How the fuck should I know?”
His head snaps up. “We have to go,” he decides. “Right now.”
“Go where?”
“Where do you think? Home! Back to our territory. We have to get out of here.”
“And what’s that going to do? She’s still going to tell her pack what happened. And they’ll know who was involved once she describes the two of us, so they’ll know it was our pack, and our pack will be at war with hers because of this. Like we need another fight.” To think, I got involved so our pack wouldn’t suffer the fallout of us watching an alpha murder his beta.
My wolf’s consciousness is stronger now, clearer, and there’s no pretending he doesn’t challenge that excuse. He senses something wrong with it even if I don’t know what it is. I have no other reason to get involved—fuck, I watched the little wolf flail and gurgle in the lake and didn’t do a damn thing. She means nothing to me. I was behaving as my father’s—my pack’s—emissary.
Forrest shakes his head, pawing the ground. Uncomfortable with my very realistic predictions. “All right, it doesn’t need to get to that point.”
“But it will!” Why can’t I get through to him? “Because you were so fucking careless, you’ve broken the most sacred bond we have. This isn’t the kind of thing that gets glossed over or forgotten. When the beta finds out, he’s telling the alpha, and then we’re all fucked.”
He paces back and forth in tight circles, growling, and it’s all I can do to keep myself from tearing him to pieces. He’s done some baffling shit before, but this? Nothing has ever compared to this.
“What if we don’t give her time to go back to her pack?”
“What are you saying?”
He jerks his head toward the building. “You saw what she did back there. She’s probably collapsed by now, unconscious. If she didn’t get crushed by the ceiling when it started to fall in. Not even a wolf high on their first shift could survive something like that.”
“What’s your point?”
“What if we don’t give her a chance to go back to her father?”
The truth of what he’s saying finally hits me like a bolt of lightning. “You can’t be serious.”
“We could kill her! Shut her up permanently. Problem solved.”
The worst part is that I see his point for one brief, breathless moment. How easy it would be. If we get rid of her, the whole thing is over.
And who would bother looking any deeper into it? I’ve already seen what her pack thinks of her, how they treat her. Okay, so she shifted finally, but so what? If she ended up tragically dying in the destruction she set off, I doubt anybody would dig much deeper into the situation. We could always say we tried to keep things from escalating, but there was nothing we could do. She exploded—almost literally—and was killed by the force of what she couldn’t control yet. No war between our packs. We would still be united against the witches.
Something about it is too convenient, and it’s painfully obvious. “It wouldn’t work.”
He growls loudly. “Then I’ll kill her. You can wash your hands of the whole damn thing if it means that much to you.”
“That would only make it worse!” When he stares blankly at me, I snap at him again, this time dangerously close to his face. “Did you just see what happened back there? You have no idea what being in the same proximity to her will do, much less what would happen if you decided to kill her. You don’t know what her magic will do to you, the fated mate that broke their bond. You fucking idiot.” I turn away from him, unable to look at his stupid face for another second. This is the entire problem with him in a nutshell. He reacts before he thinks, then reacts to the mess he made and ends up making everything exponentially worse.
