Chapter 23
title: "The Carrigan Estate" wordCount: 2233
Declan's hands are white-knuckled on the steering wheel, and there's blood dripping from his left sleeve onto the gearshift, but when I tell him to pull over, he just drives faster.
"You are bleeding."
"I am aware."
The headlights cut through darkness that feels too thick, too complete. We are somewhere outside the city limits, where the streetlights give up and the trees press close to the road like they are trying to reclaim the asphalt. My ribs ache with every breath. The silver is still in my system, making my wolf feel distant and wrong, like trying to remember a dream after waking.
"Declan—"
"Garrett's wolves hit the Conclave facility at 2:47 AM." His voice is flat. Clinical. "They killed Tobias in his office. Slit his throat and left him at his desk. The security footage shows you escaping during the attack."
My stomach drops. "I did not—"
"I know." He takes a corner too fast and the tires scream. "But the Conclave does not know that. They think you were working with Garrett. That you orchestrated the whole thing."
"That is insane."
"That is convenient." He glances at me, and his eyes are bloodshot, exhausted. "Garrett gets rid of the Conclave's leader and frames you in one move. Now you are an enemy of both the Conclave and Cascade Pack."
The watch on my wrist has stopped at 11:47 PM. It is always 11:47 PM. I press my thumb against the cracked crystal and feel the familiar bite of broken glass.
"How did you get out?"
"I broke out of medical." He says it like it is nothing. Like he did not just destroy whatever standing he had left with the Conclave. "I heard the explosion and I knew—" He stops. Swallows. "I knew you would run. And I knew they would blame you."
Something twists in my chest. Not the mate bond, exactly. That is still damaged, still wrong. But something.
"You should not have done that."
"Probably not."
We drive in silence for three miles. I count the mile markers because it is easier than thinking about Mira's body cooling on that warehouse floor, about Tobias dead at his desk, about the fact that I am now a fugitive with nowhere left to run.
"Where are we going?"
Declan's jaw tightens. "You said someone might still be alive at the Carrigan estate."
My breath catches. "I said Mira told me—"
"I know what you said." His knuckles are white on the wheel. "And if there is even a chance that she was telling the truth, we need to know."
The Carrigan estate. I have not been back since the night it burned. Since the night I watched my family die and ran like a coward into the woods.
"Declan, I do not think—"
"Where else do we go, Sloane?" He looks at me, and there is something desperate in his eyes. "The Conclave wants you dead. Garrett wants you dead. We have no allies, no safe houses, no pack." His voice cracks on the last word. "We have nothing except the possibility that Mira was telling you the truth."
I bite down on the inside of my cheek until I taste copper. He is right. I hate that he is right.
"Okay."
He nods once, sharp, and turns his attention back to the road.
Twenty minutes later, I break the silence.
"Mira told me something else." My voice sounds strange in the quiet car. "About Finn."
Declan's hands tighten on the wheel, but he does not look at me.
"She said Finn was already dying when you found him. That he had been poisoned hours before." The words taste like ash. "She said you did not kill him."
The car swerves slightly. Declan corrects it, but his breathing has changed. Faster. Shallower.
"Declan—"
"Stop."
"You have been carrying guilt for three years for something you did not do."
"I said stop." His voice is sharp enough to cut.
"No." I twist in my seat to face him, ignoring the way my ribs scream in protest. "You tied your life to mine because you thought you owed me something. Because you thought you killed my brother. But you did not. You did not kill him."
"It does not matter." The words come out strangled. "I was there. I held him while he died. I—" He stops. His throat works. "I have been punishing myself for three years, and I do not know how to stop."
The mate bond flares, sudden and sharp. Not the full force of it—that is still broken, still damaged—but enough that I can feel his anguish like a physical thing, pressing against my ribs, making it hard to breathe.
"Pull over."
"Sloane—"
"Pull over, Declan."
He does. The car jerks to a stop on the shoulder, gravel crunching under the tires. For a long moment, neither of us moves. Then Declan drops his forehead against the steering wheel, and his shoulders start to shake.
I have never seen him cry. Did not think he could. But there are tears on his face now, silent and terrible, and the mate bond is screaming at me to do something, fix this, make it stop.
I reach out. My hand hovers over his shoulder for a heartbeat, two, before I let it fall. My palm against his back. He flinches, but he does not pull away.
"I do not know who I am without the guilt." His voice is wrecked. "I have been carrying it for so long that I—" He stops. Breathes. "I do not know who I am supposed to be now."
My throat is tight. "We figure it out."
"How?"
"Together." The word feels dangerous. Like a promise I am not sure I can keep. "We figure out who you are now. Together."
He lifts his head. Looks at me with red-rimmed eyes. "Why would you do that?"
Because the mate bond is still there, damaged but not broken. Because he broke out of medical to find me. Because he is the only person left who gives a damn if I live or die.
"Not my circus," I say, and his laugh is wet and broken. "Except apparently it is."
He reaches up. His hand covers mine where it rests on his shoulder, and his fingers are cold and slick with blood.
"Thank you."
I do not know what to say to that, so I just squeeze his shoulder once and pull my hand back. The loss of contact makes the mate bond ache, but I ignore it.
"Can you drive?"
He wipes his face with his sleeve, leaving a smear of blood across his cheek. "Yes."
"Then let us go find out if my family is as dead as I thought they were."
The Carrigan estate looks like something out of a nightmare.
The main house is a burned shell, blackened beams reaching toward the sky like skeletal fingers. The grounds are overgrown, three years of neglect turning the manicured lawns into a tangle of weeds and wild grass. The iron gates are rusted open, hanging crooked on their hinges.
Declan kills the headlights before we turn onto the long driveway. The car rolls forward in darkness, gravel crunching under the tires, and my heart is trying to climb out of my throat.
I was twelve the last time I was here. Twelve and stupid and convinced that nothing bad could ever happen to me because I was a Carrigan and Carrigans were untouchable.
The scar through my eyebrow throbs.
"There." Declan's voice is quiet. He points toward the east side of the property, where the basement entrance used to be. "Do you see them?"
I do. Two figures in human form, standing near what is left of the basement door. Even from here, I can smell them. Wolf. Cascade Pack.
"Garrett has guards on my family's estate."
"That is not the whole truth." Declan's eyes are narrowed. "He has guards on something in your family's estate."
My nails dig into my palms. "We need to get past them."
"We are both injured. You cannot shift because of the silver. I can barely stand." He looks at me. "This is a bad idea."
"Yeah, no." I reach for the door handle. "We are doing it anyway."
We leave the car hidden in the trees and approach on foot. My ribs are screaming with every step, and I can hear Declan's breathing getting rougher behind me. The two guards are talking in low voices, relaxed, not expecting trouble.
Mistake.
I hit the first one before he can turn around, driving my elbow into his temple with enough force that he drops like a stone. The second one is faster—he spins, his eyes already starting to glow gold, and his hand closes around my throat.
Then Declan is there, slamming into him from the side. They go down in a tangle of limbs, and I can hear bone crack, someone's nose breaking. I grab a chunk of broken concrete from the ground and bring it down on the back of the second guard's skull.
He goes limp.
Declan shoves him off and staggers to his feet. There is blood running from his nose, and the wound in his side has opened up again, fresh blood soaking through his shirt.
"You look terrible."
"You look worse." He wipes his face with the back of his hand. "Are they dead?"
I check pulses. "No. But they will not be waking up anytime soon."
"Good." He looks at the basement door, and his expression goes carefully blank. "Sloane. Look at the door."
I look.
Silver chains. Thick ones, wrapped around the door handles and padlocked. The kind of chains that would burn through wolf skin on contact. And underneath the rust and decay, I can smell something else.
Garrett's scent. Fresh. Recent.
"He has been here." My voice does not sound like mine. "Recently."
"Within the last few hours." Declan moves closer to the door, careful not to touch the chains. "Why would he chain a basement door with silver?"
"To keep something in." My mouth is dry. "Or to keep someone out."
We stare at each other for a long moment. Then Declan goes back to the car and returns with a tire iron. He wedges it under the chains and pulls, muscles straining, and the padlock groans but holds.
"Let me." I grab the other end of the tire iron, and together we pull. The metal screams. The padlock holds for another second, two, and then it snaps with a sound like a gunshot.
The chains fall away, smoking where they hit the ground.
Declan reaches for the door handle, then stops. "Are you sure you want to do this?"
No. "Yes."
He opens the door.
The smell hits me first. Antiseptic and silver and something else, something wrong and chemical that makes my wolf recoil. There are stairs leading down into darkness, and at the bottom I can see a faint glow. Artificial light.
We descend slowly, Declan in front with the tire iron raised like a weapon. The stairs are concrete, cold under my feet, and with every step the smell gets stronger. At the bottom is a door, and beyond that—
I stop breathing.
The basement has been converted into some kind of medical facility. There are IV stands and monitors, their screens dark now but still plugged in. Cabinets full of supplies. A table covered in syringes and vials of clear liquid. And in the center of the room, surrounded by machines, is a hospital bed.
There is someone in it.
My legs move without permission, carrying me forward even though every instinct is screaming at me to run. The figure on the bed is small, thin, hooked up to tubes and wires. Her hair is dark, streaked with gray that was not there three years ago. Her face is gaunt, cheekbones sharp under pale skin.
But I know that face.
I know it the way I know my own heartbeat, my own breath.
"Mom." The word comes out broken.
Declan is beside me, his hand on my shoulder, and he is saying something but I cannot hear him over the roaring in my ears. My mother is alive. My mother is here, in this basement, hooked up to machines like some kind of experiment.
"Sloane." Declan's voice cuts through the noise. "Look at this."
He is holding a clipboard, and his face is ashen. I take it from him with numb fingers and read.
Medical records. Dates and times and dosages. Silver nitrate injections, administered every six hours for three years. Enough to keep a wolf sedated. Enough to keep them from shifting, from healing, from waking up.
Enough to keep them in a coma.
"He has been keeping her alive." My voice sounds distant. "Garrett has been keeping her alive for three years."
"But why?" Declan sets the clipboard down. "What does he gain from—"
My mother's eyes snap open.
They are silver. Not brown, not the warm amber of her wolf. Silver, glowing and wrong, like molten metal poured into her skull.
She lunges at me with a snarl that sounds nothing like human or wolf, and her hands—her hands are tipped with claws that should not exist in human form, black and curved and dripping with something dark—