Chapter 44
title: "Chapter 4" wordCount: 3212
I woke to the smell of antiseptic and my mother's perfume.
The combination hit me like a fist. Chanel No. 5. She'd worn it every day of my childhood, and I'd spent three years trying to forget the scent, the way it clung to her clothes when she hugged me goodnight, the way it lingered in the hallway after she passed. Now it filled my lungs and I couldn't breathe around it.
"Easy." Her hand on my shoulder. Warm. Real. "You are safe here."
Yeah, no. Nothing about this was safe.
The room came into focus slowly. White walls. Medical equipment. An IV in my arm that I didn't remember anyone putting there. Declan on a bed across from me, his chest rising and falling too slowly, bandages wrapped around his torso dark with seepage.
"How long?" My voice came out raw.
"Four hours." My mother sat in a chair beside my bed, and the sight of her face—older, yes, harder around the eyes, but her face, the one I'd seen in my dreams—made my chest tight. "You collapsed. Your body needed rest."
"Declan—"
"Is stable. Thomas is an excellent field medic." She reached for my hand.
I pulled away. The movement was instinct, muscle memory from three years of trusting no one, and the hurt that flashed across her face made something in me crack.
"You were dead." The words came out flat. "I saw the bodies. I identified you. Both of you."
"I know." Her voice broke on the second word. "Baby, I know what you saw, what you have been through—"
"Do not call me that." I sat up, ignoring the way the room spun. "You do not get to call me that. Not after three years. Not after letting me think—"
The door opened. My father walked in, and the sight of him moving, breathing, existing in the same physical space as me made my wolf surge forward so hard I tasted blood.
He stopped just inside the doorway. Smart man. "Sloane."
"No." I ripped the IV out of my arm. Blood welled up, and I didn't care. "No, you do not get to say my name like that. Like you know me. Like you have any right—"
"We had no choice." His voice was exactly as I remembered. Deep. Steady. The voice that had read me bedtime stories and taught me to shift and promised me nothing would ever hurt me. "The Council wanted us dead. If they had known we survived—"
"They would have come for me." The pieces clicked together with sickening clarity. "You let me think you were dead to protect yourselves."
"To protect you." My mother stood, and I saw the tremor in her hands. "If they had known we lived, they would have used you to find us. This way, you were safe. You were—"
"Safe?" The laugh that came out of me was ugly. "I was seventeen. Alone. The Council tried to kill me six times in the first year. I had to learn to fight, to hide, to survive without a pack, without anyone, because you decided I was safer thinking I was an orphan."
The silence that followed was thick enough to choke on.
My father moved closer, and every instinct I had screamed at me to run. "We made a choice. Perhaps it was the wrong one. But we made it because we love you, and we would make it again if it meant keeping you alive."
"That is not love." My nails bit into my palms. "That is control. That is deciding what I can handle without asking me. That is—"
"Exactly what you did to Declan."
The words hit like a slap. I stared at my father, and he stared back, and I saw the challenge in his eyes. The same challenge he'd given me when I was twelve and insisted I could handle advanced combat training, when I was fifteen and wanted to run with the adult pack, when I was sixteen and thought I knew everything.
"That is different."
"Is it?" He gestured to Declan's unconscious form. "You made choices for him. Kept him in the dark about the Council, about the danger he was in, because you decided he was safer not knowing. How is that different from what we did?"
My mother made a soft sound of protest, but my father kept his eyes on me, waiting.
The worst part was that he was right.
Not my circus. The phrase rose up automatically, my escape hatch, but I couldn't make myself say it. Because this was my circus. Had been since the night I'd pulled Declan into my car and driven away from his burning house.
"He is dying because of me." The admission scraped my throat raw. "Because I brought him into this. Because I—"
"He is alive because of you." Thomas appeared in the doorway, wiping blood off his hands with a surgical towel. "The bullet missed his heart by two centimeters. Another hour without treatment and he would have bled out internally. You got him here in time."
"Barely."
"Barely is enough." Thomas moved to Declan's bedside, checking the monitors with practiced efficiency. "He will need surgery to repair the damage, but he will survive. His wolf is strong."
"He is not a wolf." The correction was automatic. "He is human."
Thomas looked at me, and something in his expression made my stomach drop. "That is not the whole truth."
The words came from Declan.
His eyes were open. Barely. His face was gray with pain and blood loss, but he was conscious, and he was looking at me with an expression I could not read.
"What?" My voice came out barely above a whisper.
"I am not human." Each word seemed to cost him. "Not entirely. My mother was a wolf. My father was human. I am—" He stopped, breathing hard. "I am what they call a halfling. Dormant. No shift, no pack bond, but the healing, the strength—it is there. Buried."
The room tilted again. "You lied to me."
"I omitted." His eyes closed. "There is a difference."
"No." I was on my feet, crossing to his bed before I realized I was moving. "No, there is not. You let me think you were human. Vulnerable. You let me—"
"Protect you?" His eyes opened again, and there was something fierce in them despite the pain. "Yes. I let you protect me. Because you needed to protect someone, Sloane. Because you have been alone so long that you forgot what it feels like to have someone need you."
The truth of it hit me like a physical blow.
"That is not fair."
"None of this is fair." His hand moved, reaching for mine, and I let him take it because I was too tired to pull away. "But it is true. You saved me because you needed to save someone. And I let you because I needed to be saved. We are both using each other. The difference is I am honest about it."
"Boys." My mother's voice cut through the tension. "Perhaps this conversation can wait until you are not bleeding through your bandages."
Declan's laugh turned into a cough that brought up blood. Thomas was there immediately, adjusting the IV, checking vitals, and I stepped back because I did not know what else to do.
My father's hand landed on my shoulder. "Walk with me."
It was not a request.
The compound was bigger than I'd realized. We walked through corridors that smelled like concrete and gun oil, past rooms full of supplies, weapons, people I did not recognize who nodded at my father like he was someone important. Like he was a leader.
"How many?" I asked.
"Forty-three." He pushed open a door that led outside, into a courtyard surrounded by high walls. "Wolves who escaped the Council. Humans who knew too much. Halflings like Declan who did not fit into either world. We have been building this place for five years."
"Before the attack."
"We knew it was coming." He stopped at a bench, but did not sit. "The Council had been moving against us for months. Small things at first. Restrictions on pack movement. New laws about human interaction. Then the disappearances started."
"What disappearances?"
"Wolves who questioned the Council. Who spoke out against their policies. They would vanish, and the Council would claim they had gone rogue, been put down for the safety of the pack." His mouth went flat. "We started investigating. Found evidence of experiments. Wolves being held in facilities, tested, their abilities studied and weaponized."
The photograph. The facility. My father's face in the background.
"You were there." The accusation came out sharp. "In the facility. I saw the photograph."
He turned to look at me, and I saw the weight of whatever he was about to say in his eyes. "I was undercover. Pretending to work with them so I could gather evidence, find out where they were holding the missing wolves. Your mother and I, we were trying to expose them, to bring proof to the other packs, to start a resistance."
"But they found out."
"They found out." He sat down heavily. "The night of the attack, we knew they were coming. We had maybe an hour's warning. Enough time to fake our deaths, to get your mother out, but not enough to—"
"To get me." The pieces fell into place with sickening clarity. "You left me there. In the house. With the bodies."
"We thought you were at Sarah's." His voice cracked. "You were supposed to be at Sarah's house for the weekend. We thought you were safe. By the time we realized you had come home early, the Council was already there, and if we had gone back—"
"They would have known you were alive." I sat down beside him because my legs would not hold me anymore. "And they would have killed all of us."
"We have been trying to find you ever since." He reached for my hand, and this time I let him take it. "Every lead, every rumor, every sighting. But you were good at hiding. Better than we taught you."
"I had good teachers." The words came out bitter.
We sat in silence for a long moment, and I tried to reconcile the father I remembered with the man beside me. The one who had let me think I was alone. The one who had built a resistance while I was running for my life.
"The watch." I held up my wrist, where the silver band still sat, counting down to something I did not understand. "What is it?"
His expression went carefully blank. "Where did you get that?"
"The facility. It was in a drawer with my name on it." The countdown read 47:23:16 now. Forty-seven hours until something. "What happens when it reaches zero?"
"I do not know." But his hand went to his left wrist, and I remembered what Declan had said about tells, about the way people touch themselves when they lie.
"You are lying."
"I am protecting you."
"By lying to me?" I stood, pulling my hand away. "How is that different from before? How is any of this different?"
"Because this time you are old enough to understand that some secrets are kept not to control you, but to keep you alive." He stood too, and I saw the alpha in him now, the leader who had built this place, who had kept forty-three people safe while the Council hunted them. "That watch is connected to something the Council built. Something they were testing on wolves in the facility. And if I tell you what it is, if I tell you what it does, you will try to stop it, and they will kill you."
"They are already trying to kill me."
"Not like this." His voice dropped. "Sloane, please. Trust me. Just this once. Let me handle this."
The door to the courtyard burst open. Thomas ran through, his face pale. "She is here. Voss brought her. She is asking for Sloane."
My father went very still. "Who?"
"Sarah." Thomas looked at me, and I saw the apology in his eyes. "Your friend Sarah. She is with the Council. She has been with them the whole time."
The world narrowed to a single point. Sarah. My best friend. The girl I'd grown up with, who'd taught me to braid my hair and sneak out after curfew and lie to my parents about where we were going. Sarah, who I'd thought died in the attack. Sarah, who I'd mourned for three years.
Sarah, who was working for the people trying to kill me.
"Where?" My voice came out cold.
"The front gate. She has a message from Garrett Voss." Thomas hesitated. "She says if you do not come out, they will start killing the humans in town. One every hour until you surrender."
My father grabbed my arm. "You are not going out there."
"Yes." I pulled away, and my wolf rose up, filling me with a certainty that felt like coming home. "I am."
"Sloane—"
"They are killing people because of me. Innocent people. I will not let that happen." I started for the door, and my father moved to block me.
We stood there, alpha to alpha, and I saw the moment he recognized what I had become in the three years we'd been apart. Not his little girl anymore. Not someone he could protect or control or keep safe through secrets and lies.
Someone who had learned to survive alone. Someone who had learned to make the hard choices. Someone who had learned that sometimes the only way to protect the people you love is to walk into the fire yourself.
He stepped aside.
"If you do this," he said quietly, "if you go out there, they will not let you come back."
"I know." I walked past him, through the door, down the corridor toward the front gate where Sarah was waiting with her message and her lies and the Council's ultimatum.
Behind me, I heard my mother's voice, sharp with fear. "Let me go with her."
"No." My father's response was firm. "She has to do this alone. It is the only way she will believe she can."
They were wrong. I did not need to believe I could do this alone.
I needed to stop pretending I had a choice.
Sarah stood outside the gate, flanked by two Council enforcers I did not recognize. She looked exactly as I remembered—blonde hair in a high ponytail, athletic build, the scar on her chin from when we'd crashed her dad's motorcycle when we were fourteen. But her eyes were different. Harder. Colder.
The eyes of someone who had chosen a side.
"Sloane." She smiled, and it was her smile, the one I'd seen a thousand times. "You look like hell."
"You look alive." I stopped ten feet away, close enough to talk, far enough to run if this went bad. "Funny. I thought you were dead."
"I thought you were weak." She tilted her head. "Turns out we were both wrong."
The enforcers shifted, hands moving toward weapons, but Sarah held up a hand. "Easy. We are just talking. Old friends catching up."
"We are not friends."
"No." Her smile widened. "I suppose we are not. Not anymore. Not since you chose to run instead of join us."
"Join you?" The laugh that came out of me was sharp. "You mean join the people who killed my pack? Who have been hunting me for three years? Who are threatening to murder innocent people if I do not surrender?"
"The Council is offering you a choice." Sarah pulled a folded paper from her pocket. "Surrender yourself for testing. Let them study what makes you different, what makes you able to resist their control. Do that, and the humans live. Your parents live. Your little halfling boyfriend lives. Everyone walks away."
"Except me."
"Except you." She held out the paper. "You have one hour to decide. After that, Garrett starts with the sheriff. Then the mayor. Then anyone else he can find who might matter to you. He is very thorough."
I did not take the paper. "Why are you doing this? We were friends. We were—"
"Children." Sarah's expression hardened. "We were children playing at being wolves. Then the Council showed me what real power looks like. What we could become if we stopped pretending to be human. If we stopped hiding what we are."
"They are using you."
"They are elevating me." She stepped closer, and I saw the fervor in her eyes now, the true believer's certainty. "The Council is building something, Sloane. Something that will change everything. No more hiding. No more pretending. We will be what we were always meant to be. Apex predators. And you could be part of it. You could—"
"I would rather die."
"That can be arranged." The voice came from behind Sarah.
Garrett Voss stepped out of a black SUV I had not noticed, and the sight of him—tall, perfectly groomed, smiling like we were old friends meeting for coffee—made my wolf snarl.
"Sloane Carrigan." He walked toward me with the easy confidence of someone who knew he held all the cards. "You have been remarkably difficult to kill. I respect that. Truly. But this ends now. One way or another."
"Then kill me." I spread my arms. "Right here. Right now. Stop threatening innocent people and just do it."
"Where would be the fun in that?" He stopped beside Sarah, and I saw the way she leaned toward him slightly, seeking approval. "No, I think we will do this my way. You surrender. We study you. We learn what makes you special. And then, when we are done, we will decide whether you live or die. But at least this way, the humans survive. Your parents survive. Is that not worth something?"
The watch on my wrist pulsed. 47:15:32. Forty-seven hours until something.
"What happens when the countdown ends?" I asked.
Garrett's smile faltered. Just for a second. Just long enough for me to know I had hit something important.
"I do not know what you mean."
"The watch. The one from the facility. The one that was in a drawer with my name on it." I held up my wrist. "What happens at zero?"
Sarah's her gaze sharpened. She looked at Garrett, and I saw the question in her expression, the first crack in her certainty.
Garrett's smile returned, but it was different now. Sharper. "That is not your concern."
"It is literally on my wrist."
"Then I suggest you surrender before you find out what it does." He pulled out his phone, checked the time. "Fifty-eight minutes. The sheriff is a nice man. Has a wife. Three kids. It would be a shame if—"
The gunshot came from behind me.
Garrett stumbled, blood blooming across his shoulder. The enforcers drew weapons, Sarah shifted, and I turned to see Declan standing in the compound doorway, Thomas's rifle in his hands, his face gray with pain and determination.
"Run," he said.
And then the world exploded into chaos.