COLE

I am one of the good guys, I have done a couple of evil things I am not proud of, like lied to my friends about my family. Slept with my friend’s fiancee.

But I am one of the good guys. I know it.

I checked her pulse again at the next bend in the road.

Two fingers to the side of her throat, eyes flicking between her and the dark stretch of road ahead, and there it was, faint but steady under my hand. Alive. I pulled my fingers back and gripped the wheel and told myself to stop doing it every few minutes, and then I did it again at the following turn anyway because some part of me didn’t trust the last time.

Lila had left her down there to die. That was the truth of it, however she wanted to play it up afterward. Nia was badly dehydrated, she’d passed out before I got the last chain off her, and her body was a map of bruises, her arms, her ribs, the curve of one shoulder gone purple. Not her face though. They’d been careful about the face. You only kept the face clean when you were planning to put someone back out into the world and didn’t want people asking questions.

I drove with one hand and worked the problem with the other half of my head.

What I was going to tell her. How I was going to make her agree to any of it. How a woman like Nia, who had never bent for a single person in her life, who would rather break than fold, was supposed to be talked into spying for the very person who had just left her chained in the dark.

It was almost three when I pulled into Gravemoon.

The pack should have been restless. People don’t really sleep here, not properly, there’s always someone moving through a hall or out walking the grounds, a sentinel changing shift, a light burning somewhere. But the whole place was dead quiet when I carried her in, every window dark, every corridor empty and still. The mating ceremony must have wrung all of them out. For once the silence worked in my favour, and I didn’t waste the time it bought me being grateful for it.

I got her up to my room without passing a single soul and laid her down on the bed and let out a long breath through my teeth.

Now I needed the story straight. Get her to hold the story. Then get down to the prison and see my sister before the night ran out.

Because by now Freya would be in a cell. That was the whole shape of the plan, the thing she’d wanted from the start, and it still turned something over in my stomach every time I let myself look at it directly. After everything Alpha Corvin had done to her, every scar that man had put on her, every year he’d cost her, she still wanted him. She would walk back into that fire on purpose and call it home. He was going to be the death of her one day and she would thank him on the way down, and there was not one thing I had ever been able to say to move her off it.

I looked at Nia lying there in the low light, her chest rising and falling, her face slack with exhaustion.

"Poor Nia." I crouched down beside the bed. "You’re in all of this because of me. Why would you love me enough to throw yourself at it like this."

She hadn’t known what she was walking into. Nobody did. Nobody knew the real Lila underneath the version she let the world see, the soft polished version Rowan thought he was going to marry. Love made people reckless and stupid, and Nia had walked straight into the worst of it with her chin up and her eyes open because she’d been looking for me.

And if Freya became Luna, I became blood of the Alpha line. Then Lila would finally understand exactly how much more I was worth to her than Rowan had ever been. That was the part I kept coming back to. That was the part that kept my hands steady.

Nia stirred and made a low sound of discomfort against the pillow.

I moved to the edge of the bed and bent close to her. "Don’t try to move. You need to rest."

"Cole?" Her voice came out cracked and small, barely there. "Is that you?"

"Yeah. It’s me." I kept my voice down, gentle. "You’re safe now."

She tried to push herself up and her arms folded under her weight. She set her jaw and tried again, stubborn even now, and I slid a hand behind her back and worked the pillow up the headboard so she had something to lean into.

"You should rest," I told her, easing her back against it. "I know you’ve been through hell."

She dragged in a breath. "Cole. It was Lila." Her fingers twisted into the blanket. "It was Lila."

I said nothing.

She watched my face in the dim light, and I saw the exact moment it reached her, the way her eyes shifted as the pieces slid into place behind them.

"Of course you knew." Her voice dropped low. "That’s how you found me. That’s how you knew where to look."

"Nia, I didn’t know until this evening." I held her eyes so she’d take it as truth, because that part was true and I needed her to have at least one true thing. "I came for you the second I found out. I swear it on my life."

"She’s evil, Cole." Her breath caught and snagged. "She — she does —" The word came apart in her throat and she stopped, pressing her lips together hard, and then she looked up at me and said my name again like she was reaching for something solid in a room that had started tilting. "Cole."

"Nia." I laid a hand over hers where it gripped the blanket. "Please don’t try to untangle all of this tonight. Just sleep. We’ll talk in the morning when you’re stronger."

"Did you know about her orgies?"

I didn’t answer.

And I watched her read the answer in the silence, in the half-second too long I took before I could find anything to say.

Her free hand came up and pressed flat over her mouth.

"Oh my God." It came out muffled behind her fingers. "How could you know about that and never tell Rowan. He’s about to — and she’s —" Her eyes went wide and glassy and snapped back to my face. "Wait. Wait, wait, wait. Don’t tell me you were part of it."

"Nia, please." I kept my voice level and low. "Don’t ask me things I can’t answer."

"Fuck." She stared at me like she was seeing the whole shape of me for the first time and didn’t recognise it. "How far gone are you, Cole." Her chest moved too fast under the blanket. "Why do you do all this? Rowan is your friend. Your friend. You let him court that devil and you stood there and said nothing the whole time."

"You don’t understand."

"I understand fine." Her voice climbed, scraped raw at the edges. "She’s got every one of you so twisted up you can’t think in a straight line anymore. But not me. Not anymore." She pushed a hand against the headboard and strained to sit forward. "Now that I’ve seen it, now that I have proof, we go straight to Ryker, and we tell him every single —"

I caught her by the shoulders before she could finish it.

"You can’t."

She went still under my hands, her eyes locked onto mine, her breath held.

"I can’t." The words came out flat and edged. "Or you won’t let me."

"Nia." I held her there, careful of the bruises, my grip light. "The only reason Lila told me where you were, the only reason you aren’t still chained in that room right now, is because she —"

I stopped.

Her eyes searched mine, waiting, not blinking.

"She’d already decided to kill you," I told her. "It was done in her head. I talked her out of it. I negotiated for you. I got you out of there."

"At what cost." Her voice barely cleared her lips. "Nothing with that woman is ever free. At what cost, Cole."

I let go of her shoulders and sat back on the edge of the bed.

"You can’t tell anyone what you saw down there," I said. "And you have to become her ally."

She blinked at me, the words refusing to arrange themselves into sense for a moment. Then they landed, and her whole face changed.

"Hell no." She shook her head and winced as it pulled at something in her neck. "What the fuck do you mean, her ally."

"She wants you to spy on Amaris."