hts later, while half t

aunted every nightmare she'd had since she was seven years old, and for one disoriented, terri

haze, sharp and close, and the mom

Get u

ed into her room with his shirt half fastened and his

"East wing too, started almost at th

rvi

m here." He grabbed her wrist, pulling her toward the hallway. "I need you out of

and Wren's whole body screamed at her to run the way she'd run once before, blind and

whole house down. He's trying to flush us out into the open,

ened. "You think

entire house ablaze," Wren said. "I think he wants us running out the front

urgency written into every line of his body. "West gate's clear. I can g

ght about the trap, the west gate is exactly where he'd expect an Alpha to r

Kian said, "we walk straig

"I've spent fifteen years training to move through exactly

old him to protect her and something else, newer, that had started to

," he

onto the kitchen garden rather than the open front lawn, and it was there, crouched behind the low stone wall with the burning house at their backs, that

nd Kian followed her gaz

moving, watching the burning house with a patience that ha

t the fire," Emory said grimly.

oke-hazed dark, Wren recognized the unhurried, deliberate way the head tilted, cataloguing

" she wh

he burning house in what might have been a signal, or a farewell, or something far worse, and the flames along the east w

an said, horror dawning in h

already moving. "Now, before that fire reaches the w

again until they'd cleared the last of the household out into the open lawn, coughing and disoriented but alive, every sing

oldering ash, carved into the trunk of the old oak at the garden's edge, letters burned clean thro

ve stayed dea

somewhere underneath every other sound in the world, and felt something in her chest that had been quietly, fearfully hopi

p," she said. "Not unt

hers in the dark

isn't you," he said.