Page 102 of Before the Bond
Even if I wanted to linger there, however, there was no time to spare. The Voss wolves were now on the estate grounds.
I turned to Olivia and started to explain, but she merely nodded with certainty.
"I know," she said.
For a brief second, I thought I saw Jake look at me. I understood. She fully knew the truth now.
I walked forward, but no longer out of fatalism. I had a purpose again. I would protect those I loved no matter the cost.
The wolves gathered by the trees. Some shifted back to human form, but none of them moved. They were watching — all of them — with the stillness of a pack reading a situation and recalculating.
Finally, another figure stepped forward.
I could feel the shift in the air. The weight of it. A few minutes ago, they'd had every reason to be certain about how this ended. Now they were less sure.
Maykhel Voss stepped out of the dark.
He was older than his son by twenty years, but his eyes told a different story. Broad across the shoulders, grey at the temples, and dressed in dark clothes.
Our eyes met as he continued to move forward. He looked at me the way people look at something they've already finished grieving — ready to enact his version of justice.
We stood across from one another. The moonlight harshly beat down on us. Our shadows stretched monsters along the ground.
“Maykhel Voss,” I said.
Maykhel smiled, but it was different from the one Elias had.
Where Elias’s grin was smug, there was no joy behind his father’s.
“Ashwood.” He said it like he was reading from a list. "I wondered how long it would take you to come out."
"You knew I would."
"I knew you'd have to." He tilted his head. "The only question was whether you'd be able to."
He was trying to read me. His eyes moved across my stance, my hands, the distance between me and the estate door. Looking for weakness. Looking for the wolf that stumbled on his own lawn twenty minutes ago.
I gave him nothing.
"You've been patient," I said. "I'll give you that."
"Patience,” he said, “is merely fortitude with timing.”
“You planned this despite it going against wolf code knowing I would be compromised,” I called out.
“Code?”
Maykhel looked at me for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was flat and certain, the voice of a man who had rehearsed this, too, but differently — not the performance of it, but the belief.
"There is no code that can save you,” he said. “Whatever ‘honor’ your pack has will always be tainted with what you did. I merely acted on what I saw."
"You saw a chance to take something from me.” I narrowed my eyes. "And when you failed seven years ago, you sought to take it again, and then everything else that belonged to us.”
“You say this as if it should shame me,” Maykhel said.
“I know there’s no convincing you,” I said. “It’s true. Our kind won’t forget what happened.”
Maykhel’s expression flickered.
