Page 15 of A Wolf's Revenge

The northwest corner of the wall had a single patrol guard, his attention pulled inward by the noise growing inside. I came over the wall in under ten seconds, put him down quietly, and dropped into the grounds.

The aconite hit me full the moment my feet touched Conti soil.

It was in the smoke already curling off the perimeter fires, in the spray someone had laid down across the lawns — my wolf pulled toward the change on instinct and slammed into a wall of sickness, the air turning to something my body read as poison. I forced it back down. I had been dosed before, in training; my father believed a son of his should know what his own weapons felt like from the wrong end. I could function through it. Barely. On two legs.

Which meant the Conti pack could not.

I understood the shape of the night then, crouched in the dark at the edge of their grounds. The Conti men were fighting as men — guns, knives, the clumsy desperation of wolves who had reached for the shift and found it locked. A Conti patrol could hold a wall against three times its number when it could turn, and that was the whole reason my father had failed to break them for three years. So he had not come to beat their pack. He had come to make sure there was no pack to beat. He had taken the one advantage they had and burned it out of the air before his first man came over the wall.

I kept my head down and moved for the main house.

The door guard came at me. I put him down, went through the door, and started calling her name.

She was in the dining room. Jeff was with her, crouched beside her, a hand on her shoulder, and when she saw me come through the door, she was across the room in three steps, her arms around my neck, her whole body shaking.

I held her. Under the smoke, the aconite, and the cordite, her scent reached me — the one my wolf had recognized in a school corridor a lifetime ago and had never once let me forget, no matter how many years I spent telling myself it was something I had chosen, instead of something that had chosen me. It cut through the poison. It always had.

I pressed my mouth to the top of her head and held her as tightly as I could with the noise of the attack still coming through the walls.

“Zimife.” She pulled back to look at my face. Her eyes were red, her cheeks tracked with tears, but she was steady underneath it — that bedrock quality she had, the thing that had been there from the first time I met her. “What’s happening? Who is doing this?”

I couldn’t answer that. Not here. Not now.

“I’ll explain everything. But we need to leave right now.”

“I’m not leaving without my family.” Her jaw set. “My grandfather is somewhere in this building. My cousins are upstairs. I won’t?—“

“Kerra.” I put both hands on her face. “The baby. You can’t turn. Even if I could get the rest of it out of the air, you can’t turn.” The words came out lower than I meant them to. “You have to let me carry the part of this you can’t carry yourself.”

Something moved in her expression — not surrender, she was not a woman who surrendered, but a recalibration. Her hand went briefly to the curve of her belly, the old instinct of a she-wolf who knew exactly what she could and could not do for the life inside her. She looked at me for a long moment and I watched her make the decision, watched the cost of it move across her face.

“Get the children out first,” she said. “Upstairs, the east wing. There are four of them, and the youngest can’t hold a shift yet. Get them out, then come back for me.”

“I’m not leaving you?—“

“Zimife.” Her voice was absolutely steady. “Four children. Go.”

I looked at Jeff. He was already moving for the stairs.

“I’ll cover the ground floor,” he said. “Go.”

I was halfway up the first flight when my father’s voice came from behind me.

I turned.

Aleksander Zorander was standing in the entrance hall with two of his men flanking him, his suit jacket still immaculate, his face wearing the expression I had grown up fearing most — not anger, but disappointment’s colder cousin. Assessment. The look of a man revising his estimate of something downward.

He was breathing the same poisoned air I was and standing in it untroubled, which told me he’d dosed himself ahead of time, the way you’d inoculate before walking into a sickroom. He had thought of everything. He always thought of everything.

Jeff was on the floor. Not dead — breathing, one hand pressed to his ribs — but down.

My father’s men had my arms before I registered they’d moved. In clean air, I’d have thrown them across the room. In this air, I was barely stronger than the men holding me, and they knew it.

“She’s pregnant,” I said. My voice came out raw. “She is carrying your grandchild, Father. Whatever else you decide tonight, let her go.”

The surprise registered on his face for exactly two seconds. Then it was gone.

He straightened his jacket. He looked at me the way he had looked at me my entire life — as a function, an instrument, something that had either performed correctly or failed to — and he said, “No child of Conti blood will ever carry the Zorander name. As for the girl—“ He turned toward the door. “She’ll die tonight with the rest of them. The aconite will see to it she dies as a woman, not a wolf. That’s more mercy than her grandfather ever showed me.”