Damon

I felt her before I saw her.

The presence slammed into my senses like a wall of pressure, so immense and suffocating that my legs nearly buckled beneath me. Every wolf around me stiffened simultaneously, ears flattening, bodies dropping lower to the ground in instinctive submission.

This couldn’t be right.

No single wolf carried this much power. Not even Lady Palisa, who stood at the center of our formation with her massive form coiled and alert.

Our Supreme Alpha’s voice cut through the mind link, and the excitement in it made my stomach turn.

"She is coming."

Three words. Delivered with the barely contained glee of a predator who had just heard its prey step into the trap.

I swallowed hard, my mouth suddenly dry.

Why was Lady Palisa not at the very least bothered about this?! I knew she was powerful, and she might as well be more skilled and experienced than Violet, but that raw power did not seem to shake her one bit.

The last time I had seen Violet was at that summit. She had no longer been that weak omega I had rejected and discarded. Even if she was a Lycan, one could still manage in bringing her down together.

But this...

This was something else entirely.

The energy rolling toward us didn’t even feel like the same person. I did not recognise who that was.

And it felt so vast, ancient, and wrong in a way that made every instinct in my body scream at me to run.

The other wolves around me shifted nervously, their eyes darting between the horizon and Lady Palisa. I could feel their unease through the mind link.

As much as I hated to admit it, I was afraid too.

Why had I come here exactly?

What was I doing?

In a startling moment of foolish clarity, I actually sat myself down with this question.

Lady Palisa had made it sound so simple. Track the rightful mate. Corner her. Bring her back. While she was with our supreme alpha, I could then still bring her back under oath as my mate. We were once mates, we would be again.

It was possible.

I had believed Lady Palisa because it was possible. She had made it seem possible.

But standing here now, with that monstrous presence bearing down on us like a storm front, I understood with sickening certainty that I had made a terrible mistake.

The memory of that brutal slap made the side of my face tingle.

My mind raced back to how we had gotten here.

We had found the other wolf first. The one from Fresna. Bei, I think her name was. She had been alone, surrounded by scattered belongings that clearly belonged to two people.

Lady Palisa had questioned her. Where was Violet? Where had she gone? How long had she been away?

Bei had revealed nothing.

Not even when our supreme alpha had circled her, not even when the questions had turned into threats, the wolf from Fresna had remained silent.

I had expected Lady Palisa to try questioning her a lot more when she just struck Bei once. The hard and precise strike sent the woman crumpling to the sand before she could even shift into her wolf form.

I had been so stunned at the sudden kill.

We had searched after that. Scoured the area, sniffed every surface, tracked every faint trail. I could barely catch Violet’s scent. So much time had passed, neither of us could. But somehow Lady Palisa could sense her. We had followed her instructions throughout this search.

Then she had turned her attention to the lake.

She had studied that water we had been avoiding with an intensity that made the fur on the back of my neck rise.

Surely, Violet couldn’t have gone in there?

That wasn’t possible.

Lycan or not, she would have died.

Had she died?!

After a long moment of deliberation, to my shock, Lady Palisa had shoved one of her own wolves into it.

The moment he hit the water, our worst fear came to life.

The water had been even more toxic than it smelled.

He had thrashed in the water, the smell of strangely burning flesh reaching our noses. The sounds that came out of him were something I never wanted to hear again. Within seconds, he stopped moving entirely, a lot of his skin having slouched off his flesh.

Then the rest of him sank underwater.

No one had gone near the lake after that.

Any of the smaller puddles too in fact.

Lady Palisa had then decided to wait, struck with a strong certainty that Violet was somehow still alive.

And before the day had even ended, she was here.

Violet appeared soon enough, sitting on top of a wolf so massive it rivalled Lady Palisa in size.

I had never seen a wolf like that.

’Wait... she has her own wolf?’

Where had that thing come from?

Violet herself looked different than I remembered. But it was her eyes that stopped me cold.

She had gotten so much stronger.

How was this possible?

The summit hadn’t been that long ago.

I did not know or even understand why, but every hair on my body stood on end. My muscles tensed.

She rushed off the wolf’s back and rushed toward her companion’s body. Each step she took made my body tense harder.

I watched her kneel beside the dead wolf. Watched her freeze as she took in the damage. Felt her reach out with her senses, searching for something she would never find.

I watched her break.

The sound that came from her was barely human. A raw, gutted thing that scraped across my nerves. Tears streamed down her face as she knelt there, her whole body shaking with the force of her grief.

Not too long ago, I would have enjoyed this. Seeing Violet on her knees, weeping, destroyed by loss. It would have satisfied something dark and petty inside me.

Now it just made me want to be anywhere else.

We were standing in front of a ticking time bomb.

"Can we take her now?" someone pushed through the mind link, unable to keep the tremor out of their thoughts. "While she’s distracted?"

Palisa’s response was immediate and sharp.

"Wait."

"But she’s—"

"I said wait!" The force behind the command made me flinch. Several of the other wolves whimpered.

I looked at Palisa and something cold slithered down my spine.

She was watching Violet cry.

And she was enjoying it.

Her massive wolf form was perfectly still, her ears pricked forward, her eyes fixed on the grieving woman with an expression I could only describe as savouring. Like she was tasting the despair in the air and finding it delicious.

This was wrong.

Everything about this was wrong.

I had allied myself with a monster and I was only just now understanding what that meant.

The grief pouring off Violet shifted. I felt it happen, felt the energy in the air compress and harden. What had been raw and ragged became dense and focused and terrifyingly controlled.

When she finally looked at us, every wolf in our formation took an involuntary step back.