Page 58 of Collared Mate

There’s a body on the back doorstep. I see it as he opens the door. Then I see who it is.

My brother.

Rick is gagging on blood. His eyes are wild and panicked as the prospect of death becomes very real to him. I stare down at him, shocked and confused. The world is suddenly very far away from me, all stretched out and weird and hollow. There’s a ringing in my ears that makes it hard to hear or understand what’s being said to me.

I am pushed gently, but firmly out of the way as Hades drags him indoors, his blood smearing the old tile of the kitchen that some people would call vintage, and starts trying to work on him. Jacob has his weapon drawn, covering the back door in case someone tries to come in.

Tinker’s making calls. I can hear her talking quickly, but efficiently. She’s rattling off numbers and names, and none of them make sense. Time slows, and stretches out, then gets very fast, and I am not able to track anything.

Next thing I know, Henry rushes in the front door along with a doctor and a small team of nurses. Everybody is doing what they have to do in order to save Rick.

“He’s been shot. And silvered. Can’t shift to heal,” the doctor says. “We need to get him to the ER.”

They get Rick on a sling and they carry him off to a hospital.

I am left staring, my hands covered in his blood. My brother. The last of my bloodline.

They tried to kill him and dump him here.

They wanted me to see him pass.

They know where I am.

* * *

In the following hours, I try to process what has happened, but find myself completely unable to think properly. There’s a ringing in my ears and a hollowness in my head. Henry has given me a hug, but I didn’t feel it.

Now they’re sitting around discussing things, which feels stupid to me. The enemy knows where we are. Henry has deployed more people, but when someone’s capable of just driving a bulletproof vehicle right up to your doorstep to drop your semi-murdered brother off like some takeaway, I don’t think it really matters.

“He was supposed to die. He was supposed to be a message as well, that we can’t hide and we are next,” Henry is saying.

I sit very still, very upright. My shoulders are back. My mother would be proud. She’d prefer to be alive, though, more than proud. I think about everything that my fucking pack has taken from us, how it’s ruined my family, how it’s tried to send me into sexual exile, how my brother is going to take months to recover from this, if he ever completely does.

I get up, and I walk out of the room. I am very composed. My energy is very contained. I think that is why nobody really notices as I leave. I’ve been so quiet. So calm. I’ve faded into the background. And now I’ve departed it.

I am going to kill each and every one of the ranking members of the Swale pack. Every single one of the old men who are in charge for reasons I will never understand, betrayers of my father, the would-be killers of my brother, the ones who arranged for me to be violated by one of their sons and then had him killed too because they’re also in competition with each other… I am going to kill them all.

CHAPTER 9

Henry

“Where’s Fiona?”

She was sitting behind me, but the next time I glance over my shoulder, there is absolutely no sign of her.

It has been a brutal day. Rick is on death’s door and the so-called security I thought we had attained has been shattered. That’s the problem with all this surveillance. We use it, but they use it too. There’s no end to the information that can be gleaned about one another in this dystopia. There’s no hiding. There are no secrets.

“I saw her go out the back,” Tinker says. “She looked like she needed a minute.”

I get up and go to find her. I was worried she had run off, but instead she is standing in the front room with a determined expression on her face and very little behind her eyes.

“What are you doing?”

She turns her head to look at me, and the experience of having that look turned on me will stay with me until the end of my days. The sheer coldness of her demeanor sends shivers down my spine. The human inside her has departed, leaving only the beast.

“I’m going to kill Alan Skor,” she says. “And then I’m going to kill Nathan Field, and then I’m going to kill Montgomery Roy. And then I’m going to kill Barry Stern, and then I’m going to kill…”

I listen to her list the names and I take note to see if there’s any I’ve missed.