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“I’m in,” Jack said, arms crossed as he stared at the seer, his gaze flat right up until we heard the first sniffle.

Kerin’s daughter hid low in her chair, sitting between two women who weren’t her mother.

She watched the guys with a look that no child should be capable of—pure unadulterated horror.

And while that ripped my heart out and stomped it, what was worse was that no one looked surprised at this.

The nearest woman, the one who’d apparently killed her kid, put an arm around the little girl, drawing her closer, muttering soft shushing sounds and wiping away her tears.

“We get them out,” Hawk said.

“What?” Aaron said, “This mission is getting?—”

“We get them out, all of the women. In heat or whatever, none of them are staying here. Not the others in the outer limits, not the ones in the kitchen, not the ones here.” He fixed the lot of us with a steely gaze. “Don’t give a shit how hard it is, all of them.”

“We may not make it out ourselves if we do this,” Finn said.

“Then we get Jules out as well. These fucks are going to rampage through the city tomorrow?”

“At the Great Rite?” Kerin asked with a curl of her lip, the other women gasping in response to this.

“They’re going to destroy everything they can—buildings, crops, houses, people, bonds, love.

It all feeds the dread lord below. He is death, he is destruction.

” Her eyes shone red for a moment, and I felt a burning need to take a million steps away from her in case her head started rotating as she spewed up green pea soup.

“All to be rebuilt again, for the next bloody cycle.”

“Out of death comes regrowth,” Brandon and I said.

“Fuck, you got any other weapons in that stash of yours?” Aaron said. “We need schematics, maps, numbers of men, ratios of Volken to non-Volken…”

“You won’t get it,” Sylvan said with a shake of his head.

“Right, right, suicide mission it is then.” He looked up at me and said, “I agree, then. Jules goes tonight with as many of the outer limits women and children we can manage under the cover of night.”

“No,” I said, my heart twisting at the thought of what he said.

“Yes, love.” Aaron said the words, but I saw it in the gaze of all of my pack. They met my gaze without flinching, standing together against me.

“No, no, you can’t make me. You can’t make me do anything.”

“I saw our child,” Hawk said. “In that vision. You could be pregnant now. We’ve all been at it for long enough. This is the way it is, why the Great Wolf provides more men than women. We’re dispensable, we protect our mates so they can carry on.”

“Asher said I wouldn’t get pregnant if I didn’t want to.”

This was just met by a unified silence. Was I? I’d opened everything I had to them, everything. Did that include my womb? I looked down at my body, finding it difficult to believe it could be changing right now. Cells multiplying, growing, creating…

From death comes regrowth.

The Great Wolf’s words rang within me like a bell.

No.

From death comes regrowth.

NO.

“No,” I repeated.

“Jules,” Finn growled, the pressure building.

I stood in my borrowed pinafore and felt the weight of everyone’s stares on me. The Great Wolf’s words throbbed inside me, and Finn’s gaze felt like it had actual weight to it, but I held my ground.

“I’m not a womb, not a receptacle for some kind of legacy you see carrying on after you’ve nobly thrown yourself on your sword.

I’m your mate, we’re a pack, and we do this together.

You don’t dictate to me, and I don’t do that to you.

Whatever happens, whether the gods are with us or whatever, we do it together.

” I paused for a second. My eyes ached, the effort of keeping them open, of blinking away the tears that welled there had a cost. I wouldn’t brush them away, wouldn’t cede an inch.

Because I couldn’t, that’s what they didn’t seem to understand.

What was life without them? We’d only just forged this bond, found our way towards each other.

I could no more turn my back on that than I could have monkeys fly out the arse of every single Volken.

“I can’t continue on without you guys. We’re in this together. ”

I don’t know who touched me first, everything having gone blurry in a haze of tears, but it didn’t matter.

I felt the energy spike each time one of them made contact, until it vibrated inside me like a newly plucked guitar string.

People liked to use a lot of deficit language when talking about love, like it filled a hole or a missing piece in you, but that’s not what this felt like.

I felt like I was more than me, or Finn or Brandon, I was pack.

We were pack. We were an entity in ourselves, more than the sum of our parts, and we glowed.

I heard the cries of the women, the chairs being knocked over as they scrambled to get away from us, and then they paused. When I opened my eyes, I saw we filled the room with light. Kiralee wriggled out of her mother’s grip and stepped forward.

“Sun!” she said.

“No, darling,” Arelia said, and her eyes strayed to Sylvan’s, who looked upon us, upon her wide eyed. “A pack. That’s what I want for you, my love, a pack.”

This was ill advised. The Volken guard could’ve walked in at any moment, and we’d done nothing about feeding the rest of the women and their kids, but I clung to my mates, needing that good, clean feeling with all I’d seen lately.

I felt like I shook off what I’d seen of the Volken like dirty clothes and stepped free of it all, the most seductive yet vulnerable of experiences.

The sound of a key in the lock had all of us turning, pulling apart abruptly, and I dropped to the ground to pick up the mess Kerin had scattered. The door swung open to admit five Volken men, one toting a clipboard.

“I’m interrupting your meals?” Lian said as he approached. “My apologies.”

Everyone stood and dropped down into a deep bow, only my Tirian instincts saving me from being the only one standing there, staring.

“You may rise,” Lian said, and we straightened though kept our eyes trained on the floor. “And what has happened here?”

Lian’s tone was mild, yet everyone’s eyes went to the mess I was piling into a bag I found on the bottom of the trolley.

“The girls got a little boisterous, father,” Arelia said. “There’s been a little jockeying for position.”

“Has there indeed?” Lian scanned the lot of them, as if looking for subtle signs of the truth of the matter. “Well, scuffles will happen at this time of the year. Now, Hyran, the census.”

He waved over the Volken with the clipboard, and the man strode forward, then stopped just behind his master.

“The last count had your daughters at twelve, with eight children, m’lord,” Hyran said.

“Let’s update that, then, shall we? There are thirteen of you at childbearing age, Arelia?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And Jeananne and Lyrica’s sons were sent to the barracks?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So, we have…” I watched the men with Lian move around the suite, identifying each child. “Ten children. All girls?”

“Sia’s baby is a boy,” Arelia said, which provoked a quick hiss from the woman in question. Her face fell as soon as she realised what she’d done, but Lian just surveyed the lot of them with an imperious eyebrow, then forged on.

“And Angelica’s?”

The woman in question stepped forward, hugging her baby to her chest.

“A girl, m’lord.”

“Check it,” Lian said, waving a man forward.

Angelica stiffened as the Volken came closer, her arms tightening around the child, but when he held his hands out, she placed the baby into them.

He unswaddled the child with little care, something that had the mother shifting uncomfortably as her hands lifted, then were forced back.

The Volken nodded to Lian, and the man beside him with the clipboard noted this down.

Angelica grabbed the baby back as soon as she was allowed, cooing soothing sounds as her tiny limbs began to flail, and then set her on a nearby couch and wrapped her back up tight in her blanket.

“Well, well, twelve daughters and ten granddaughters. The Great Wolf has indeed blessed me. But you must be hungry. The little ones certainly look so.” Lian was going for affable, but the women neither smiled nor relaxed.

“Let's sit down, have a meal as a family.” He turned to us and said, “You may serve now.”

We worked quickly to replace the plates that had been swept off by Kerin. When we’d finished, I saw the women had brought more chairs in from other rooms for the men to sit on. I grabbed extra dishes, assuming they would want to eat as well.

“For me?” Lian said as I went to hand him a plate.

“No, no, the breakfast you served me has me quite full.” His eyes ran over me as I froze, arm still outstretched.

“Anything for the rest of you?” he asked over his shoulder to the men clustered there.

They all refused politely as they took seats on nearby couches, as if not wanting to insert themselves into the family tableau.

Such as it was. I hadn’t seen such a stiffly polite gathering since Mum and Dad tried to have both the Donovan’s and the Bronson’s over for a combined Christmas celebration.

“Will there be anything else, my ladies?” I said, bobbing a curtsey. I wasn’t sure what proper protocol was down here, but figured obsequious was a good default setting.

“My ladies?” Lian guffawed, and his men joined in belatedly. “Well, my loves? Anything else that tickles your fancy?”

The women all turned to regard us, even the young girls.

Keep your fucking mouth shut , I screamed inside my head, over and over.

“No, father,” Arelia said politely. “I believe we have all that we need.”

We bowed to the table before walking out, wheeling the other carts to the next room, and the next.

By the time we returned to Arelia’s room to collect the crockery, Lian had gone.

We sat down at their dining table, the women doing the same with the extra chairs, and Aaron said, “Tell us about what happens to the women during the Great Rite.”