The Beta's Fire

Chapter 5

Rhys found the second message nailed to the infirmary door with a hunting knife I didn't recognize, the letters burned instead of carved this time, like something had pressed a brand straight into the wood.

WALK TO THE OLD QUARRY ALONE BEFORE MOONRISE OR HE DIES SCREAMING. BRING NOTHING BUT YOURSELF.

I read it twice before my legs would hold me. Rhys caught me before I hit the floor, his arms coming around me hard enough that I felt every tremor running through his own body, the ones he was trying to hide.

"We are not sending you in there alone," he said, low and furious.

"They'll kill him if I don't."

"They'll kill him anyway the moment they have what they want. You know that. I know that. This is a trade they never intend to honor."

"So what, we just leave him?" My voice cracked on the last word, and I hated how young it made me sound, how much it sounded like the fourteen-year-old girl who'd first walked into that training ring desperate to prove she belonged there.

Rhys's expression gentled. He cupped my face in both hands, thumbs sweeping the tears I hadn't noticed falling, and for the first time since I'd known him, the iron control he wore like armor cracked wide open.

"I am not going to lose you the way I almost lost my mother," he said. "You know what happened to her. You know what it did to my father, to Tobin, to me. I have spent nine years learning to be the kind of Alpha who protects everyone, and somewhere in the middle of it I fell in love with the one person who makes me forget every rule I've ever set for myself." His voice roughened. "I am not letting you walk into a quarry alone to die a hero's death for the good of the pack. I would rather burn the whole treaty system to the ground than lose you."

I stared up at him, the boy who had let me pin him and cry with laughter over it nine years ago, now standing in front of me as a man ready to break every principle he'd built himself around.

"Then don't let me go alone," I said. "Come with me. All three of you. Whatever's waiting out there, I would rather face it beside the people I love than survive it by myself."

Something shifted in his eyes at the word love. He kissed me then, hard and certain, no hesitation left in it at all, his hand fisting gently in my braid, and I kissed him back with everything I'd been too afraid to give him for years, every ounce of longing I'd hidden under discipline and duty and the fear that wanting him made me less of a Beta candidate instead of more of one. When we broke apart we were both shaking.

"Okay," he said against my mouth. "Together. All of us."

We found Tobin and Cassian already gearing up in the war room, weapons laid out, faces grim. Lyra was there too, a pack of medical supplies over her shoulder, jaw set.

"Don't even think about telling me to stay behind," she said before anyone could speak. "Your father is my patient. I'm coming."

There was no time to argue, and honestly, I didn't want to. We moved out within the hour, the five of us cutting through the tree line toward the old quarry as the sun dropped low and orange over the ridge. Cassian led, reading signs the rest of us couldn't see, tension coiled in every line of his body. Tobin walked close on my right, Rhys on my left, and for the first time since the alarm bell rang, I let myself believe we might actually get my father back alive.

That belief lasted until we crested the ridge above the quarry and looked down into the pit below.

My father was there, chained between two stone pillars, alive, his head lifting weakly at the sound of our approach. But he was not alone. Standing in front of him, dressed in plain gray like he wanted nothing to distract from his face, was a man I had never met but somehow already knew, from the ash-colored eyes to the calm, almost gentle smile he wore like he was greeting old friends instead of enemies.

"Wren Calder," Malachi Thorne said, his voice carrying easily up the rock walls. "You have no idea how long I have been waiting to finally meet the gift your father was foolish enough to think he could hide from me forever."