Hunted by the Shadow Division

Chapter 13

Ryan POV

I was thirty minutes from home when Rhy exploded.

There is no other word for it. One moment he was present in the background the way he always is, and the next he was everywhere inside me, massive and frantic, his distress so sudden and so total that I stumbled on the footpath and put my hand on a wall to stay upright.

"RHY! What—"

"CASS," he said. Just the one word. Just her name. But the way he said it turned my blood to ice.

I ran.

Not jogging. Not the careful quick-walking of someone who does not want to draw attention. Running, full speed, with Rhy pushing through every muscle I had, and I covered the six blocks to our street in less than two minutes and I did not care about any of the looks I got doing it. A teacher in a good coat running flat out through a residential neighbourhood on a Friday afternoon. People stared. I did not slow down.

Rhy was not speaking. He had gone past words into something older and more urgent — the ancient wolf-frequency of protect protect protect that ran underneath language like a current under water. I felt it in my legs, in my hands, in the way my vision sharpened at the edges so that every face I passed was briefly, precisely catalogued and dismissed. Not a threat. Not a threat. Not a threat.

I turned onto our street.

I smelled her before I reached the house. Cass. Home. The particular wild lavender warmth of her that I had learned so thoroughly over years of mornings and evenings and all the ordinary hours between them that I could have found her in a crowded room blindfolded. She was there. She was inside.

And underneath her scent, threading through it like wire through wool, the chemical cold.

The wrongness.

Right there. In my house.

Rhy hit the front of my control like a wave hitting a cliff and I let him come forward just enough that my hands became claws by the time I hit the front door. I pushed it open without the key, which I would deal with later, and I was inside and in the hallway in one movement.

They were in the living room.

Cass was sitting on the couch with her hands folded in her lap and the expression on her face that I had seen exactly once before, on the night I had finally told her the full story of our parents and she had sat with it quietly for a long time before she spoke.

Across from her, standing with the particular stillness I had seen in the alley, was the girl with the yellow eyes.

She was not what I had expected.

I had expected something weaponised. Something that looked the way the smell felt. Hard and cold and made for harm. I had braced for aggression. I had braced for the particular controlled menace of something that has been trained to be dangerous and knows it.

She was young. Younger than me by several years. She was slight and brown-skinned with close-cropped natural hair and eyes that were not yellow now but a deep amber, and she was looking at me with an expression that I also had not expected.

Not threat. Not calculation.

She looked like someone who had been holding something very heavy for a very long time and had just found out they were allowed to put it down. There was an exhaustion in her that went deeper than the physical. The kind of tired that lives in a person when they have been performing a version of themselves for so long that they have nearly forgotten there was ever another version to perform.

I recognised it. Not from my own experience but from the mirror in the early years after the pack, before the Rogers, before Rhy, before Cass. Before I had anything to be other than afraid.

Rhy went utterly quiet.

The pull came back all at once. Enormous. Relentless. Like a tide coming in against a wall I had built specifically to stop it.

"Ryan," Cass said, and her voice was careful. "Her name is T7. She's not here to hurt anyone."

I looked at Cass. I looked at T7. I looked back at Cass.

"T7?" I said.

The girl's jaw tightened fractionally. "It's what they call me," she said. Her voice was flat and controlled. Trained-sounding. Like someone who had learned to speak from observation rather than from being spoken to with warmth. "I do not have a different name."

Something in my chest did something I did not want it to do.

"She has questions," Cass said. "So do I, honestly. But we may need to have this conversation quickly because—"

The window at the front of the house exploded inward.