Page 131 of The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate
The blood goes from my face, from my hands, from somewhere deeper.
Lydia.
Horror fills me. “You’re lying!”
He shakes his head, grinning despite the pain. “She brought us that hybrid woman. She led us to your mate.”
I stare at him, my head reeling. “But…Jacques. He was your—”
“A patsy.” Blood gurgles from his mouth. “She arranged it. He’s already dead. She’s the next leader, the proper leader for us. She will realize all our dreams.”
My mind is spinning.
She’s in the compound. With Sienna.
Vale’s chest stops moving.
I stay where I am, on one knee, hands open in the dirt. The fighting around me continues, my men taking the last of the enhanced wolves down in pairs, blood on every surface I can see. The sound of all of it has turned strange and thin to my ears, far off, behind glass.
The understanding is too large to fit in my body all at once. It comes into me in waves, each one taking another piece of what I thought was solid out from under me.
I lift my head.
The compound is in front of me. The central holding building is at its center, the same building I’ve looked at for six hours from the outcropping, the same building I sent my mate into twenty minutes ago with the woman who has just been revealed to me as the next leader of the Covenant.
The north service door was open. My spy confirmed it.
That means she’s in there. Sienna is in that building.
And Lydia is in there with her.
Twenty years…
The wind off the compound has shifted. The smell of wood smoke is gone. There is only the rancid stench now, sharp and close. I can’t tell if it’s rising from inside the building or from my own throat.
I reach for the bond.
Sienna is there. Alert. Moving. The pulse of her in the link is steady, focused, the strategist face fully on. She doesn’t knowyet. Whatever Lydia has been waiting twenty years to do, she hasn’t done it yet, because I’d feel that through the bond before I felt anything else.
I have minutes. Maybe less. I get to my feet.
Sienna.
Her name is the only thing left in my head that is whole.
Chapter Thirty
Sienna
The howl rolls up the slope and finds me where I’m crouched behind the lip of the outcropping. Long, then short.
Lucas.
My chest pulls tight on the sound. Down in the bowl below us, the perimeter fight has gone from skirmish to roar, claws on metal, men shouting in three directions, the deep growl of wolves who have forgotten they were ever men.
Time to go.
Lydia is already on her feet beside me. Her injured shoulder stays strapped to her body under her dark jacket, the lines of her face set in an expression I’ve never seen on her before.
