Page 10

“We should do this more often,” Aidan says, his body folded in half as he ties his shoes. I stare at him, wondering how in the world he has the energy for this—I’m older than him by at least five years, but he shouldn’t have such a jump on me when it comes to recuperating after a training session.

“I think I’m getting old,” I laugh, and Aidan blinks.

“You’re like, barely thirty, right?” he shakes his head, then waves his hand at me. “Maybe you just need to train more.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“Hey,” Aidan says, standing, slinging his duffel over his shoulder. “Let’s go to the diner. I swear the food there is great right after sparring.”

“I’m not a nutritionist,” I say as we push through the doors and into the waning afternoon sunlight. “But pie sounds great post-workout.”

Aidan starts to walk to the left, saying something about the merits of cherry versus blueberry, something about antioxidants, but I can’t hear him.

At once, a sense of panic washes over my body like a bucket of ice water over my head. I drop my bag to the ground and start to run, feeling like I’m in one of those dreams where I’m moving my feet, but my body feels stuck in the same place.

It’s Veva—on the other side of Badlands. And she’s in trouble. I feel the threat like it’s right here, a knife against my neck.

Distantly, I can hear Aidan calling after me, “Emin! Emin—where are you—?”

But I don’t answer him. I just turn the corner, still running, heading for the highway, for the motel on the edge of town. It must be where she is. It’s where that tug is pulling me, telling me to go faster, faster .

When my feet hit the gravel of the motel parking lot, I hear something beside me and turn to see Aidan, having caught up, his own duffel still bouncing against his side.

“What the fuck—” he starts, but stops when our eyes land on the same sight upstairs. Flames, billowing out of one of the motel rooms. Someone on the landing, screaming. My eyes flit over the scene—one, two, three guys. All drenched in Grayhide scent, smelling like they were sent by the alpha.

The motel is shaped like a horseshoe, with the rooms on the outside, and the three landings only accessible by three separate sets of stairs. The room with the fire is on the left, the smoke billowing up and over the lip of the roof.

I should have known better than to let Veva out of my sight.

If they came for her at the market, it only makes sense that they’d come for her again. As I run, my mind swims with questions. First, how the hell did they get into our territory so easily? And second—how did they know where to find Veva?

A pop sounds from the room, likely a TV or light bulb exploding under the heat, and my heart squeezes, head already imagining Veva and Sarina in that room together, trying to get out a tiny bathroom window.

Or, even worse, trying to fight off more Grayhides in the midst of the fire.

Breathing hard, I take the stairs three at a time, launching myself at the man just outside the room.

Aidan engages another, and though we’ve just spent the past two hours training, I feel filled with a bottomless energy, a sort of hyper-charged adrenaline pooling in my fingertips as I bury my elbow in the guy’s stomach, catching him off guard.

The momentum of it sends him back, his ass hitting the railing, and I drive forward, clocking him across the jaw. This time, the motion is enough to send his entire body flailing over, his wail short before he hits the ground with a dull, wet thunk .

Maybe he’s dead—I’m not sure. It’s not the most important thing right now. Turning and holding a forearm up to my face, I step toward the fire. Coughing into the material of my shirt and trying to breathe, I call out, “Veva!”

“Over here!”

I don’t expect her to answer me, and I don’t expect the response to come from behind me. But when I turn, I see her at the edge of the landing across from me, Sarina huddled behind her, their backs to the wall.

Veva is holding her knife in her outstretched, shaking hand. She looks like she can barely keep herself up, and her nose is bleeding, the bright red blood streaking down over her white shirt.

The third and final shifter comes around the corner, having climbed a different set of stairs to get to her, and I watch her eyes set with determination, her knees bending.

“Stay back!” she says. “Stop!”

I recognize him—a barely-healed burn on his cheek, his thick neck shining with sweat in the sun. The same shifter that went after her at the market.

She’s going to try and fight him, despite the fact that her knees are wobbling, her face a nauseating mix of pale and purple, the bruises over her nose and cheeks already looking worse than they did an hour ago.

I could run down the stairs, then back up the other set, but it would take too long. He only has a few steps before he reaches them, and I only have seconds to find out if Veva’s going to be able to wield that knife in her state.

There’s a six-foot distance between where I stand and the two girls. Without thinking, I draw back, suck in a breath of the smoke-smelling air, and run at the rail.

Veva swings her head between me and the shifter advancing on her, and I catch the briefest flash of fear—concern?—in her eyes when she sees what I’m going to do.

“Emin, no—”

But it’s too late. I’ve taken a running jump, thrust my body into the air, flying across the space, arms windmilling, stomach dropping for the brief second I’m hanging with nothing below me.

If this was a movie, the frame might show my body midair, the billowing smoke behind me, the angle tipped to make me look much higher than a single story up.

Somehow, by some divine intervention of fate, I clear the other railing and come to a skittering stop on the landing. The meaty shifter halts, eyes widening, pace stuttering in his advance toward Veva and Sarina.

He was so giddy to get her, I realize. Excited.

“Going after a mother and her child?” I ask, swinging my hand back toward them, fury piling up inside me at the look on this guy’s face—he was so excited to get to Veva, but not so happy to go up against me. “You’re looking for a fight, you fucker? I’ll give it to you.”

He blocks my first hit, and delivers one right back, knocking me in the side of the head hard enough to cause an instant headache.

I stagger back, but when I rally and sweep my leg under his, it knocks him off balance and he falls to the side, his head hitting the iron railing with a metal clang .

I see the blood oozing from the side of his head, know that I could leave him like this—it’s enough to fuck him up, take him out of commission long enough that I could get Veva and Sarina away from here.

But all I can picture is the way he was prowling toward Veva. My woman. That child—the two of them defenseless. How he’d spoken to her at the market, looked at her. His hungry eyes, the cruelty in his smile.

If I let him live, he might just decide to go after some other woman, use his strength to go after an injured target. I let him live at the market, and the second he healed enough to stand, he came out here and tried to get her again.

I can’t have that.

Not stopping my advance toward him, I turn to the side, punch through a thin piece of glass, and pull out a fire extinguisher from its red box. He sees it in my bleeding hands and sits up, bringing his hands up in front of his face.

“Wait—” he starts, and I hate him even more for being a coward.

Distantly, somewhere behind my fury, I hear Veva say, “ Don’t look ,” just before I bring the fire extinguisher down on the fucker’s face.

Three good swings later, and he’s not hurting anyone else, ever again.

I glance to the side, see Veva slumped down against the wall, her daughter in her arms, Sarina’s face buried in her mother’s chest. Good. Veva is right—Sarina didn’t need to see that.

For good measure, I pick the Grayhide shifter up, haul him over the side of the railing, and toss him down to join his friend on the ground, watching with satisfaction as he hits the gravel.

When I look up, Aidan is standing across from me, six feet away, almost in the exact spot I jumped from, a body at his feet.

His mouth hangs open as he looks at me, expression caught somewhere between concern and admiration.

“Emin,” he says, but his face starts to warble in my sight, his voice fading in and out. “...get the feeling you were holding back…?”

He finishes his sentence just as Dorian’s truck swings into the parking lot, several other shifters hot on his tail. Good. We handled these guys, but there could be more coming. I glance at Veva again, and, seeing that she and Sarina are in one piece, feel a wave of exhaustion sweep over me.

I reach back to the wall for support, then everything goes black.