Chapter 55 DANE

Aurora was quiet for a long time. I didn’t blame her.

I hadn’t lied to her. I was working through this.

I’d fought it for so long. For eight years, I’d believed every single terrible thing about her I could. I had pushed her away, hurt her on purpose.

That whole time, there was always dread that lurked in the back of my mind. My greatest fear was to find out I’d treated someone like a monster when they’d been innocent all along.

When I was younger, I was so sure.

When she’d come back, I’d doubted.

Now, I couldn’t deny it any longer. I had proof that she was right. The Reeds had forced her, framed her.

What that meant for me, for her, for our children…even for Evelyn…I didn’t know.

“Dane,” she said, “It doesn’t matter. You know that, right?”

I glanced at her sharply. “Of course, it matters.”

She shook her head. “No, it doesn’t. And it shouldn’t. Whether or not you believe me…you should stay away. Trust me. It’s better for you. We’re business partners. Everything else is over. Whatever is in the past, it’s done.”

I stalked toward her. “Do you think it’s that simple? What about the children?”

She flinched. “I don’t know.” She shook her head sadly. “I truly don’t know. But come on, Dane. Even if you’d believed me back then, would it have changed anything? Would you have been willing to have children with a woman you believed was a Reed? Would it have stopped you from taking Evelyn as your mistress?”

I had been about to say, yes, it would have changed things. But at her questions, I paused.

She was right.

At the time, I still thought she had Reed blood. And Evelyn? Nothing would ever change the fact that she had saved my life when we were children. That I owed her everything.

There was a low, ominous rumbling from deep below. “What’s that?” I asked.

Aurora was looking around the room with wide eyes. When the vision had taken her earlier, I’d worried. Now she was looking around like she was terrified one was going to take her again.

“I don’t know…I remember…” Then her eyes went wide. “The guardian.”

“What?”

She ran past me out of the room and into the basement, toward the place we’d fallen through the floor.

“Aurora, wait!” I ran after her. She didn’t stop.

I caught up with her, grabbed her wrist, and held her back as she pulled against me. “Trajan!” she called.

Just then, I heard the alarmed howls of two wolves, and Archer’s mind crashed into mine.

Dane! There’s something down here. Something big. We found the pages, and now it’s chasing us!

“Run,” I told Aurora. “Get upstairs. There’s something after…”

Two lycans burst through a gaping hole in the wall and ran for us. It was Trajan and Archer.

“We found them!” Trajan shouted. He lunged for Aurora and grabbed her hand, pushing something into her palm: folded pieces of paper.

“Those are the pages,” he panted. “Now you have to run. Get out. I’ll buy you time.”

“Trajan?” Aurora looked at the folded papers in her hands with huge eyes. “What-?”

Something moved in the darkness. I squinted through the hole the two wolves had just come through.

At first, my brain couldn’t wrap around it. It was too big, like the whole of the darkness moving on its own.

Then it started to push through.

Some sort of giant worm made of shadows.

“Aurora! Get out of here!” Trajan called in his gruff lycan voice. He turned and spun to face the thing, which screamed at him from the hole in the wall.

“No! Stop!” Aurora ran toward them. “You can’t-!”

The shadow creature shot through the hole like water from a fire hose.

It went right for me. It had a stinger out, like the one it used on my grandfather, like the one probably used on Piper.

“No!” Aurora threw herself in front of me.

The stinger sunk into her chest.

Trajan and I both shouted at once. He was on the creature in an instant. Magic jolted through me as I took on my lycan form, and I was right behind him.

But the creature was so fast. Neither of us could stop it from getting to her. It moved like putty or slime, oozing around her legs and trapping her feet, then pulling them out from under her.

“Aurora!” I called.

She reached for me. “Dane! He–AH!”

Her cries for help turned to cries of pain.

All of us tried to get to her, but it blocked us, looping a huge coil around her. The side of its body crashed into us and sent us flying.

I was first to my feet, but all of us lunged. I sank my claws into it, and almost howled at the pain. It was so cold it made me feel like my fingers were frozen down to the bone just to touch it.

“Ahh! Please, help me!” Aurora called again.

The monster dragged her into the dark.