THE ALPHA WHO REJECTED HIS FATE

Chapter Seven

Seraphine POV

She was so small.

That was the first coherent thought I had once the worst of it passed. Once Wren had finished what needed finishing, he pressed a warm, impossibly light weight into the crook of my arm. Dark hair plastered flat against a furious little skull. Eyes screwed shut, mouth open, screaming into a room that was already too loud with everything else.

She was so small, and the world outside this room was on fire, and both of those things were true at the same time, and I did not know how to hold that much at once.

"She's healthy," Wren said, though her hands were still moving, still checking, still working even as she said it. "Strong lungs. Listen to her."

I listened. Beneath the screaming outside, beneath the crack of something heavy giving way somewhere near the eastern wall, I listened to my daughter scream like she intended to be heard over all of it, and something in my chest that had been braced for eight months finally, briefly, let go.

Then the beam above us groaned.

Wren's eyes went to the ceiling. Mine followed. A thin seam of grey smoke had begun threading down through the old timber, not fire yet, not quite, but close enough that Nyx was already on her feet with her knife drawn and her back to the door.

"How bad is it out there?" I asked.

Nyx didn't answer right away, which was its own answer. When she finally spoke, her voice was flatter than I had ever heard.

"Zane's still holding the door. That's all I know."

I looked down at my daughter's furious, scrunched-up face and thought, absurdly, that I had spent eight months deciding she belonged to no one but me, and now she might not get the chance to belong to anyone at all if this roof came down before the fighting outside ended.

"Give her to me properly," I said to Wren, and shifted my grip, because if the ceiling failed, I intended to be the one shielding her when it did.

Kael POV

The scent of smoke was different up close than it had been from the ridge. From the ridge it had simply been wrong, a stain on a sky that should have been clean. Up close, it was thick and specific, resin and thatch and something worse beneath it, and I put it out of my mind because there was no room left in me for anything but forward.

I cut down the first rogue without breaking stride. The second turned to face me properly, and I saw the moment he understood exactly whose scent he'd caught in the wind, the moment his composure went thin and brittle, and then he was on the ground, and I was still moving.

My warriors fanned out behind me, taking the flanks, clearing a path toward the one building in the settlement still standing with wolves fighting to hold its door.

"Alpha." One of my Betas fell in stride beside me, breathing hard. "The healing quarters. That's where they're pushing hardest."

I already knew. My wolf had known before the words left his mouth, straining forward against my ribs with an urgency that had nothing left in it of grief, only direction.

We broke into the open ground before the building on a dead run. What I saw there stopped something in my chest even as my feet kept moving.

Zane Duskmore stood in the doorway alone, blood down one side of his face, a body at his feet and another rogue circling him with the wary respect of an opponent who had already lost two friends trying to get past him. Behind Zane, through the gap of the half-open door, I could see firelight and shadow and the edge of a cot, nothing more, but it was enough to tell me she was in there. She was in there, and the building over her head was breathing smoke through its own ceiling.

"With me," I said, and my voice came out on the register I hadn't used since the night. I said four words I would spend the rest of my life trying to unsay. My warriors surged forward.

Zane's opponent turned at the sound of us coming and made the mistake of choosing to fight rather than run. I didn't slow down to watch what happened to him.

Zane saw me over the rogue's shoulder. Something passed across his face, too fast to read fully, recognition and wariness and something that might have been relief he didn't want to feel, and then he was moving too, cutting down the last of the wolves crowding the doorway with the brutal efficiency of a man who had been doing this for hours and had nothing left to spend but grim, exhausted precision.

For one suspended moment, the space in front of the healing quarters was almost clear. I could see the door. I could see, past Zane's shoulder, the barred shape of something heavy someone had dragged in front of it from the inside, and beyond that, muffled but unmistakable, a sound I had heard once already from the ridge and would have known anywhere.

My daughter, screaming, alive, close enough now that the distance between us was measured in feet instead of eight months.

I took a step toward the door.

That was when the last of the rogue force, the ones we had pushed back from the storehouses, came around the burning corner of the building in a full, desperate wave, twenty strong at least, throwing themselves at the one clear path left between me and that door with the flat, suicidal focus of wolves who had just understood they were losing and had decided to make their failure cost as much as possible on the way down.

Zane shouted something I couldn't hear over the roar of it. My Beta grabbed my arm. And somewhere behind that barred door, over the screaming and the smoke and the sudden crush of bodies closing the gap I had almost crossed, I heard Nyx's voice rise into something that was no longer a warning.

It was a warning that had come too late.