Chapter 4

The spell churned through everything it could reach.

Me at five years old, sleeping in a doorway with my wolf pressed flat and frightened inside me. A Pack shelter that gave me a bed when no one else would. The first night I met Isolde — she sat down next to me at the shelter's common table and talked to me like I was worth talking to.

Cael at a Pack gathering two years later. Across a crowded room. Looking at me like I was worth looking at.

The memories cycled without pattern. Childhood. Isolde. Cael. The wedding. They kept coming and going — everything the spell could reach, nothing that mattered.

The witch lowered her hands.

"Her Wolf Soul is blocking the extraction deliberately. I've never encountered resistance at this level. The spell alone can't break through."

I looked at Cael. My lips moved. I couldn't produce sound anymore.

He took it as contempt. I watched something in him make a decision.

He grabbed the witch by the front of her robe.

"Any method. Whatever it takes."

A she-wolf near the front of the crowd — one who had spent a long time watching Cael before he ever looked at me — stepped forward and caught his sleeve.

"Silver severs the Wolf Soul's connection to the body at the point of contact. A direct shot through both palms — the Wolf Soul can't sustain a block when the pain goes that deep. Nothing can."

Vivienne was already moving. She left the hall and came back with a silver-loaded pistol and put it in Cael's hands without a word.

The crowd found its voice.

"Do it. Every day the trafficker stays free, more She-wolves end up in places like that."

"She's survived everything so far and hasn't said a word. She won't break any other way."

Cael walked over to where I sat. He picked up my left hand. He turned it palm-up and held it there — his thumb moving once across the center, slow.

Then he raised the gun.

"You'll regret this," I said.

"The only thing I regret," he said, "is how long it took me to see what you are."

He fired.

Silver doesn't burn the way other things do. It goes straight to the Wolf Soul — every nerve lit up at once, body and spirit together, my wolf throwing herself against it and finding nothing but more silver burning through her. I couldn't stay in the chair. Whatever sound came out of me wasn't something I recognized as mine.

"You'll regret this," I said again. I don't know if it came out as words.

He moved to my right hand.

"I only regret one thing," he said. "And it isn't this."

He fired again.

The blockade in my Wolf Soul cracked apart.

The memory that came through wasn't one I had been trying to show them.

A corridor at Crescent Bay. Late — the main rooms had gone quiet. I was moving along the wall, staying out of the light, when I heard Isolde's voice from behind a door. Strained. Half-crying. Her name came into my mouth before I reached the handle.

I went through the door without thinking.

I caught the person inside from behind and we hit the floor together. The memory lurched with the impact — the floor, someone's arm, the door swinging back. Then I was on my back and the person above me straightened up and looked down.

The Packhouse hall went completely silent.

Every face in the room wore the same expression.

"That can't be right."

"What is Seren showing us?"