This time I was the one who had retreated to the forest—and away from the rest of the pack—to think, and Ink was the one who found me. He’d Shifted back to human form, and I could feel him taking in everything: the way I was standing, the tilt of my head.
“You look like you want to hit something,” he observed mildly. “A wall. Possibly a tree. Something hard.”
“Lucas is going to kill himself.” I didn’t sugarcoat it, but my voice didn’t exactly reflect the black hole of emotion churning in my gut, either. “If I can’t work something out, if we don’t protect him from this family and from Othello, he’s going to die.”
If Ink found what I was saying at all surprising, he certainly didn’t show it, and the only thing I felt through his end of the bond was a brief surge of dislike for Lucas, dist
