Chapter 130

Dane

I watched her face harden and her eyes turn to shards of lilac ice, just as I knew they would.

“I’m going,” she said. “My children will be there.”

That was the problem. Her, and the twins. If things went wrong, and I lost them all… I didn’t know what kind of monster I would become.

Piper shifted at my side. She was also not going. I’d already won that argument, but only because she was too weak from being bedridden for so long.

“I’ll bring them to you,” I said.

Aurora scoffed. Not many people dared scoff at me, but there wasn’t an ounce of hesitation in her. She stepped close and dropped her voice to give us some semblance of privacy.

“They want you, Dane. They want your blood. We’ve had our hands tied behind us and we’re walking into a trap.” Her face turned pained. “I know things between us have been… difficult… but I’m still not going to let you walk into that alone.”

Difficult. She had such a way of understating things. The twins had been taken from me just as I was getting to know them. My blood enemies had had them for weeks. My rival had temporarily taken Aurora from me, and she had come back… changed.

Just when I thought my family was coming together, it was ripped apart. If she thought all of that could be summed up in one single, simple, bland word, she was insane. Difficult. Things hadn’t been difficult. They’d been impossible. Enraging. Shattering. Even those words didn’t do it justice.

But that didn’t matter because I couldn’t show any of that. I was the Alpha, and bad things happened when I lost control. Painful things. A wisp of the memory I’d recovered from the time I’d been kidnapped brushed across my mind. Something deep inside said maybe my need for control came from somewhere outside of myself. But I pushed that thought away.

It didn’t matter if I drowned. Burned. Suffocated. All that mattered was that I lived long enough to get my children back, get the relic, and make sure Blue Ridge was safe. I didn’t matter. What I wanted didn’t matter.

Chapter 130

A lifetime of telling myself that and a lifetime of believing it was all that prevented me from begging Aurora never to leave my side again when she was so clearly trying to put distance between us.

“I have my pack to protect me,” I said. And now that Piper was alive, life didn’t matter as much. If I died, she could step up as Luna of Blue Ridge. She would hate it, but at least I wasn’t leaving them with nothing.

“I believe I have your pack to protect me, too,” Aurora said. “And I have you, and you have me. Besides…” she shot a look over at Evelyn, where she stood alone. “All three of the chosen of the goddess have to be there. The translation was clear about that.”

She was right. It was the one thing I couldn’t get around, no matter how many plans to keep her safe I came up with. But as time went on, I wondered more and more if we could trust her book. It had belonged to her mother, but she didn’t know where her mother had gotten it.

“Alpha,” Archer trotted up to me. My beta had been gone a long time. He had stubble along his jaw and a leaner look to him than before. He glanced from me to Aurora. His eyes flicked to Trajan, who stood like a massive shadow behind her. “It’s time to go. The dark moon is rising.”

I nodded. “Give the order to transform.”

Chapter 130

Aurora

I watched as all around me, wolves shifted. A pang went through me. I wanted to be one of them so badly.

With autumn’s chill in the air and no light from the moon—only glittering stars lit the sky—the night felt wild and full of endless possibilities.

I touched the pearl necklace at my throat. There was nothing in the instructions for this unlocking ceremony that said we had to dress a certain way. Since the others would all be wolves or lycans, they wouldn’t need clothes anyway.

But tonight felt important. Sacred. So I wore a silver dress that reminded me of moonlight but was easy enough to move in that I could walk through the forest without a problem.

Dane shifted all the way into his massive, charcoal-colored wolf. He was huge—almost the size of a pony. He trotted up to me, and I lifted my hand to rest on his back.

Evelyn came up on his other side. She was a leggy pale gold wolf with blue eyes. Her pregnancy was getting further along, and even in this form I could see the swell in her belly.

The strange women who had appeared during the ceremony formed neat rows of two wolves each behind her, as if they were soldiers and she was their commander. According to them, she was. I still didn’t know if that was good or bad.

Dane shifted forward. I assumed he’d given the command to move, because finally, we started forward.

The walk was long. I knew I slowed the wolves, but Dane never faltered from my side, and the others followed him.

At last, after what had to be two or more hours, we arrived. As soon as I saw the standing stone in the middle of the ravine, I knew something was wrong.

“Aurora, what is it?” Dane asked into my mind as only an Alpha could do with a wolfless.

“The stone…” I whispered. The air around it seemed to vibrate and pulse. “I feel like it’s calling me…”

Then everything went black.