THE ALPHA WHO REJECTED HIS FATE

Chapter Eight

Nyx POV

The beam across the door was old oak, thick as my thigh, and it had held for the better part of an hour against everything that had thrown itself at that door. I had my shoulder against it and my knife in my other hand and I still felt the exact moment it stopped being enough.

The wood didn't crack. It groaned, low and long, like something enormous had leaned its full weight against the other side and meant to keep leaning until the beam simply gave up being wood.

"Nyx." Wren's voice, tight behind me. "What is that?"

"That," I said, "is more of them than we have wolves to stop."

I heard Zane's voice outside, sharp and furious, cutting through the roar of bodies colliding, and beneath it, worse, I heard the sound of a second beam-length of door being struck from a different angle entirely. They weren't just pushing at the front anymore. They were testing the whole building, looking for the seam that would give.

I turned. Seraphine was propped against the wall with her daughter held tight to her chest, sweat-damp hair stuck to her face, eyes wide and clear and terrifyingly calm in the way I had learned meant she had already accepted whatever was about to happen and was simply deciding what to do about it before it arrived.

"You need to move her," I said to Wren. "Now. Away from the door."

"Move her where?" Wren's voice cracked on the word. "There's nowhere in this room that isn't near a wall."

She wasn't wrong. The healing quarters had one door and no window wide enough for a grown wolf to fit through, which had always been the point, a room built to be defended rather than escaped from. Tonight, that same design had turned into a trap with all of us folded neatly inside it.

Another impact hit the door. The beam shifted, just slightly, just enough that a thin line of firelight showed at the frame where there hadn't been one before.

"Nyx." Seraphine's voice, quiet, steady, entirely too calm. "How many?"

"Enough," I said, because I wasn't going to lie to her, and I wasn't going to make her carry the real number either.

She looked down at her daughter's face, still furious, still screaming, entirely unaware of how much depended on the next few minutes, and something moved across Seraphine's expression that I had never seen on her before. Not fear. Something colder and more finished than fear, the look of someone doing math they didn't want to do and arriving at an answer anyway.

"Give me the knife you gave me earlier," she said.

"You just gave birth an hour ago."

"Give me the knife, Nyx."

I gave her the knife.

A fist came through a gap near the top hinge, testing, feeling weakness rather than trying to force it yet, and I drove my blade into the back of it before it could withdraw. The scream that followed was short and ugly and satisfying in a way I didn't have room to feel guilty about. For a moment, the pressure on the door eased, and I let myself believe, stupidly, that it might hold a while longer after all.

It didn't.

The beam took a third hit, harder than the first two together, and this time the wood did crack, a long dry splitting sound that ran the length of the door like something tearing. Firelight poured through the widening gap, and with it, smoke thick enough that Wren doubled over coughing, one arm still braced protectively in front of Seraphine and the baby.

"They're through the outer line," I said, more to myself than to anyone else, because I could hear it now in the shifting quality of the noise outside, the fighting had moved, had gotten closer, which meant whatever had been holding at the door before was no longer holding at all.

I thought of Zane's face when he'd told me to bar this door and guard it with my life if it came to that. I thought that it had, in fact, come to that, faster than either of us had let ourselves believe it would.

The beam gave.

Not all at once. It cracked through at an angle, one end dropping free of the brackets that had held it, and for one suspended second the door hung ajar on nothing but its hinges and whatever was left of the wolves fighting on the other side of it.

I put myself between that gap and Seraphine before I had finished deciding to.

A hand came through the widening space first, clawed, wrong-scented, reaching for the edge of the door to force it the rest of the way open. I brought my knife down across it before it could find purchase, and the hand withdrew with a sound I chose not to think about, but I already knew, with the flat certainty of someone who has run out of better options, that one knife and one exhausted body were not going to be enough to hold this room if even three of them came through together.

Behind me, Seraphine shifted, drawing her knees beneath her despite everything Wren had told her about not moving yet, positioning her daughter more securely against her chest with one arm while the knife I'd given her sat ready in the other hand.

"Nyx," she said, and her voice had gone somewhere I had never heard it go before, low and absolutely without hesitation. "If they come through, you protect Wren. I'll protect her."

"You can barely stand."

"I don't need to stand. I need one clean second, and I'll take it."

I didn't have time to argue with her, because the door gave a final, splintering lurch, and through the gap I saw not one rogue but three, shoulder to shoulder, already moving, already through the threshold and into the room with us, and the last thing I registered clearly before instinct took over entirely was Wren screaming Zane's name into the smoke as though he could still hear her over everything the fire had already taken.