Chapter 265: Chapter 265 – Don’t kill him yet

Two options. That was all Seraphine had.

Jump — the same way Voren had, backwards off the cliff into the dark water below, trusting that the fall wouldn’t kill her and that wherever Voren had gone he was still breathing. Or stay up here and fight her way through however many of them there were.

She looked at the water, then looked at the faces in front of her.

Voren hadn’t come up and until she knew he was alive and whole at the bottom of that fall, she wasn’t leaving this cliff without a fight.

She stayed.

"We’ve been trying to reach you for a while now." The one closest to her spoke first, his voice carrying the particular flatness of someone running through a script they’ve rehearsed.

His eyes moved over her in a way that had nothing to do with attraction and everything to do with threat assessment. "You’re well protected. Made our job difficult."

She didn’t ask their names. The way they were dressed in dark, layered, no pack markings, moving with the loose coordinated ease of people who did this professionally told her everything.

Rogue assassins. Hired, not affiliated. Which meant someone with money had sent them, and she already had a very clear picture of who that someone was.

She reached down and started pulling off her pants.

The reaction was immediate and deeply satisfying. Three of the four behind the leader stopped mid-breath. One of them made a sound, and another one made a different sound. A rapid, hushed conversation broke out among them in whispers that she wasn’t meant to hear but could hear perfectly well.

The leader’s eyes narrowed. He didn’t look away from her face. Points to him for that, at least.

She set the pants aside on a dry stretch of rock, then reached for her jacket. Unhurried. Completely at ease, like she was standing in her own bedroom and these men were furniture.

"I feel like going for a swim," she said, her voice warm and conversational and completely divorced from the situation she was in. She pulled the jacket off one shoulder, then the other. "Care to join me?"

"Do you think this is funny?" The leader’s voice had an edge now, the kind that comes from watching a plan go sideways in real time.

"Mm." She set the jacket down on top of the pants and reached for her blouse. "Do you like what you’re seeing?"

Behind him, two of the four had apparently made a private decision about the direction of this evening and were having difficulty hiding it. Their mission parameters were undergoing significant reconsideration.

The leader turned to them with one sharp look and the whispering stopped. "We do what we were paid to do." He turned back to her, jaw tight. "All of it."

Seraphine smiled.

Only her underwear remained. She left it, though knowing it was about to get ruined either way and she’d accepted that before she started. She rolled her neck once, slowly, and let out a long breath.

And then the cracking started.

It came from deep in her bones, that unmistakable sound, like green wood splitting, like something very large reshaping itself inside a container built for something smaller. The rogues took a step back without meaning to. One of them made a noise that was not quite a word.

The white fur came fast. It moved across her skin in a wave, spreading out from her spine and rolling over her shoulders, down her arms, across her legs, covering everything. Her shape changed. The cliff seemed smaller suddenly. The sound of the waterfall seemed further away.

And then Marsha threw her head back and howled.

It was the kind of sound that doesn’t need explaining. It hit the rocks and the water and the dark tree line and came back different, bigger, and every nerve in every one of those men fired the same message at the same time.

Run.

"That’s... that’s a gifted wolf." The leader’s voice had come apart slightly. He was backing up even as he said it. "A gifted wolf. Abort. Tell the others tell everyone to pull back—"

Too late.

Marsha moved.

She went through them the way wind goes through an open door, fast and completely without effort, like the resistance they offered was more of a suggestion than a fact.

The first one went down before he’d finished shifting. The second managed to get his wolf halfway out before Marsha’s claws made the question irrelevant. The blood on the rocks caught the moonlight and Marsha noticed it the same way a fire notices kindling.

Two of them completed their shifts. Their wolves were big, above average, clearly selected for this kind of work, but it didn’t matter. Marsha was a different category of problem entirely and their wolves understood that on a level that went below thought, an ancient instinct that said this thing is not what you are and meant it.

She was faster, stronger, and she was not particularly interested in making it quick.

The leader hadn’t shifted.

He stood at the edge of the cliff and watched his people fall one by one, and his face in the moonlight, with the waterfall behind him and the white wolf in front of him held something that had no business being there in a situation like this.

Peace.

When it was just him left, Marsha turned.

He looked at her the way people look at things they weren’t sure existed. His eyes moved over every inch of her, the white fur, the size, the eyes that caught the moonlight and held it, and he went down on one knee in the blood-wet rock.

"I thought the white wolf was a legend." His voice was quiet and completely steady. "Something the old ones made up." He looked up at her, and the smile on his face was real. "Even dying at your hands... that’s an honor."

Seraphine pressed from the inside, pushing forward, fighting for the dominance. ’Don’t kill him yet. We need him to talk. We need to know who sent them, just to be certain.’

’We already know,’ Marsha answered, low and final, her claws pulling back, her weight shifting forward.

’We suspect.’ Seraphine pushed harder. There’s a difference. Let me have him. Just for a minute. One question.

Marsha hesitated for half a second, maybe less.

And then another wolf was there.

He came from the side, fast and dark, landing between Marsha and the kneeling man with a heavy impact that shook the rock under them. Marsha’s claws were already moving when she made contact, instinct, no gap between seeing and reacting. 𝑓𝑟ℯ𝘦𝓌𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝑐ℴ𝓂

She felt them sink in into a fur, instead of the rogue who had refused to shift.

And then the voice came through, rough and immediate. ’It’s us.’

Bloodfang.