Chapter one
1199 Words
CHAPTER 1
AMELIA'S POV
The explosion hit the east wing and the whole estate shook beneath my feet like the ground itself had decided it was done holding everything up.
I grabbed the wall to steady myself and kept moving because standing still in the middle of a pack attack was exactly how you ended up dead.
"Fall back!" someone screamed ahead of me. "They're shifting, fall back now!"
Bodies rushed past me going the other direction and I pushed against all of them heading deeper into the smoke because Damien was somewhere inside this and I was not leaving without him.
A hand locked around my arm and yanked me sideways hard enough to spin me around completely.
"Amelia." One of the pack warriors, young and already covered in someone else's blood, his eyes doing that wide unfocused thing that meant he was much closer to panic than he wanted to admit. "You need to get out right now."
"Where is he?"
"This is not the time to—"
"Where is Damien."
He stared at me for a moment like he was deciding something. "Behind the main building but you cannot go out there, the rival pack has three shifted wolves on that side alone and if they catch your scent they will not stop to ask questions."
"Which corner of the building."
"Amelia I am serious, the east side is completely overrun and you going out there alone without shifting is basically the same as—"
"Which corner."
He looked at me the way people look at someone they have already decided they cannot stop. "East corner. But going out there without backup is the worst decision you could make tonight."
I pulled my arm free and went.
The back of the estate was worse than the front by a significant margin.
Two wolves locked together and rolling through the mud with the kind of violence that had no clean ending. Another one down near the garden wall and completely still in a way that meant he had been still for a while. Fire eating through the fence line and throwing heat that hit your face before you got anywhere near the flames and made the air taste like metal and smoke and something underneath both that you did not want to think about.
"Damien!" My voice disappeared into the chaos like it had never existed.
Nothing came back.
I moved along the wall staying as low as I could manage, scanning the ground carefully because that was where people ended up when everything went wrong.
And tonight everything had gone wrong in every possible direction at once.
I found him ten meters from the back entrance, face down and completely still.
"No." I dropped beside him and grabbed his shoulder and turned him over and his face was blood and mud and his lips were the wrong color and his chest was barely moving but it was moving and I grabbed his arm before the fear could finish arriving. "No, get up. Damien get up right now."
His eyes stayed shut.
"Hey." I got my hands on either side of his face. "Look at me. You need to open your eyes and look at me right now."
Nothing.
"I did not fight my way through an entire pack attack to find you lying in the mud." I got my hands under his arms and pulled. Dead weight, every single pound of him. "So you do not get to just lie here. Do you understand me. Get up."
He did not get up.
Fine.
I adjusted my grip and started dragging and my shoes lost contact with the ground immediately and I went down hard on one knee and got back up and kept moving because the sounds behind me were getting closer and closer meant I was running out of time.
"Come on." Hand over hand through the mud, shoulders burning, lungs somewhere between working and deciding not to. "Come on, just a little further, work with me here."
Ten meters and my arms were already shaking in a way that felt permanent.
"You are genuinely so heavy and this is a completely unreasonable amount of weight for one person in a crisis situation." Another meter. "I want you to know that I am noting this for later."
Fifteen meters and something crashed close behind me, too close, and I stopped talking and just moved.
Twenty meters and a figure appeared at the tree line ahead and the relief that started building in my chest arrived so fast it nearly knocked me sideways.
Then I registered who it was and the relief dissolved before it finished forming.
Gabriella stood at the edge of the dark with her arms at her sides and her expression completely composed, watching me drag her stepsister's husband through the mud with the calm of someone who had made her decision about this situation long before tonight started.
"A little help." I pulled Damien another meter, the mud deeper near the tree line now and every step costing me something I was not sure I had left. "Gabriella I need help right now please."
She did not move.
"I am completely serious. Get over here."
"You're doing fine," she said and her voice was so even and so unhurried that for a moment I genuinely could not process it.
I looked at her.
She looked back at me with that composed expression and I opened my mouth to say something worth saying and then something connected with the back of my head and the ground came up with no warning at all.
I hit it face first and the impact went through every part of me at once.
The sounds around me went strange and hollow and very far away.
The locket slid from my neck and landed in the mud directly in front of my face and I tried to reach for it but my arm moved maybe two inches before everything won and my hand stopped and stayed stopped.
"Oh." Gabriella's voice somewhere above me, calm and unhurried and almost warm. "There he is."
Footsteps through the mud. Then voices arriving through the smoke.
"Miss Gabriella, is he alive?"
"He's alive and I got to him just in time." Clear and steady with exactly the right amount of relief woven through it, the voice of someone who had just done something extraordinary and was being appropriately modest about it.
"You pulled him out?"
A pause that landed just long enough to feel completely genuine.
"I wasn't going to leave him out there."
I tried to speak and nothing came out, tried to move and nothing moved, tried to do anything at all and my body had already made its decision without consulting me.
The darkness came in from every edge at once and pulled everything down with it.
The mud was cold against my face and the locket was right there inches from my fingers and I could not reach it and then I could not see it and then I could not see anything at all.
The last thing I heard was Gabriella's voice through the Rain
- Writer
