Raphael saw Roman, registered his hand on my back, and focused on him like a shark.
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m sitting and talking to a pretty girl.” The volhv regarded him with a slightly mocking air. “We were having a lovely time until you showed up.”
“That’s nice. How about you go somewhere else,” Raphael told him.
“I’m really tired of you telling me what to do,” Roman said.
They’d bickered the entire way back from the fight with the draugr. My arm hurt too much to pay attention, but apparently during the battle on the hill, someone had run the wrong way and the two of them had managed to collide, which disrupted Roman’s binding. They blamed each other. The fact that Raphael and I had barely gotten back together and he wasn’t inclined to tolerate men in my vicinity wasn’t helping either.
“Go. Away,” Raphael said.
The volhv leaned back, his arms behind his head. “How about you go fuck yourself.”
Nice repartee. Not.
Raphael smiled. “Big talk for a man in a dress.”
“It’s not a dress. It’s robes, which are my work clothes. You know, work? The thing real men do?”
Uh-oh.
“Real men, huh?” Raphael was still smiling, and the hint of insanity in his eyes made him look slightly unhinged.
“What was your job again?” Roman frowned, pretending to think. “Ah yes. Don’t you stand there and look pretty to impress female visitors? You’re really good at that. No real skill involved. Not much of a retirement for that kind of thing, though. Doesn’t help to keep a wife and kids fed either. Unless you find a rich old lady and hope she puts you in her will…”
He did not just say that.
Raphael froze, momentarily stricken speechless.
“How old would the old lady have to be?” Ascanio asked. “Old like forty?”
“Go back to Aunt B and stay with her,” Raphael said. His voice was eerily calm. Uh-oh.
“Yes, Alpha.” Ascanio spun on his heel and took off.
Raphael had removed him from immediate danger.
“What are you two doing?” I asked them. “Don’t we have a bigger fish to fry?”
“Stay out of it,” Raphael told me. “This is between him and me.”
I knew that look. It was his “I will do this or die trying” look.
“I have to concur,” Roman said. “This is an A-B conversation.”
Two idiots. “Fine,” I said. “Knock yourselves out.”
Raphael focused on Roman with the unwavering concentration of a predator sighting his prey. “Right now. Let’s go.”
Roman grinned. “Sure.”
Raphael stretched, rolling his head left to right.
Roman stood, picked up his staff, and spun it like a Shaolin monk bent on a rampage. Raphael squared his shoulders.
Men. Enough said.
Roman leaned forward. Wind swirled around his feet. The black volhv shot forward, as if his black boots had wings. Raphael stepped out of the way, letting Roman pass him, spun, jumped up, and kicked Roman between the shoulder blades.
The wizard flew into the wall, but didn’t hit it, because an invisible cushion of air stopped his fall. He dropped down to his feet and turned. “Hmm.”
Raphael had a frighteningly grim look on his face.
Roman’s lips moved. A cocoon of black threads slid from the ground in twisted streams, wrapping themselves around him, not quite touching.
Raphael lunged, shockingly fast.
The black threads snapped, binding around Raphael’s wrist. Roman leaned back and drove a crushing sidekick into the top of Raphael’s hip. It sounded like a sledgehammer pounding into a stud. I’d seen it before. It was a sambo kick, part of a personal defense martial art the Russians practiced. Ow. Ow, ow, ow.
Raphael grabbed the black threads and pulled. Roman strained, pulling back.
A small boy ran through the stone arch and headed for the two of them. I jumped off the bench, ran, and caught him.
“Hi!” he said.
I lifted him off the ground. My rebroken arm screamed a little and I shifted his weight to the other. “Hi.”
“They’re fighting!” the boy told me, pointing at the two men.
“Yes, they are. Where are your parents?”
A couple ran through the arch, a tall man and a dark-haired woman in her late thirties, followed by a teenage girl.“Dylan!” The woman reached for the boy. “I’m so, so sorry. We just wanted to pay our respects to the alpha. We were told he would be here. We didn’t mean to interrupt. We’re trying to get admitted into Clan Bouda…”
I looked at her face, and recognition punched me in the gut.
Michelle.
Michelle Carver, who put a nail through my hand when I was five, because she thought it was funny to hear me scream. Michelle Carver, who pelted me with bricks, after Candy broke my legs. All I could do was crawl and Michelle chased me and threw bricks and rocks at my head. Michelle, who cheered while the bitch alpha beat my mother to a bloody pulp. Michelle “Hit her again, Candy!”
I had killed every last one of them. Every last one, except her. She had gone missing a couple of years before I came back and wiped that sadistic clan of bouda bitches off the face of the planet. I had tried to find her, but she had done a good job of covering her tracks.
Raphael let go of the threads. “Andrea?”
I was holding Michelle Carver’s child in my hands.
I let go of the boy. He slid to the ground.
“Andrea?” All blood drained from Michelle’s face. “Andrea Nash?”
She backed away from me.
Raphael started toward me.
“Do you know what she is?” A hysterical note vibrated in Michelle’s voice. “She’s beastkin.”
The world suddenly became very simple. I moved. Her mate tried to stand in my way. I backhanded him, and he went flying. I grabbed Michelle by her throat and drove her into the wall, pinning her in place. My arm had fur, and my hand had claws, and Michelle’s blood squirting under her skin through her jugular tickled my fingers.
“Tell me again what I am.” I smashed the back of her head into the brick. “Tell me again.”
Michelle croaked in my grip. She made no move to shift. She had no warrior form. She was never the strongest. No, she just liked to yip on the sidelines, picking on someone weaker out of fear. It changed nothing.
“This woman did something bad to you?” Roman asked.
“This woman tortured me and my mother.”
Roman shrugged. “If you want to do her, do it quick. I’ll go watch the entrance for you.”
He was gone. All that was left was me and Michelle’s pale, soft throat. The world was red. So, so red, and every time I exhaled, it was growing angrier and redder.
Raphael’s hand rested on my shoulder. He stroked me, firm fingers caressing my fur. “You have the right. It would feel good.”
It would feel great. He had no fucking idea how great it would be. I wanted to tell him that I finally caught her. I had told Raphael about her before. I wanted to tell him now how much I wanted to rip her apart, but all that came out was a snarl.
“I know you.” Raphael put his arms around me, his mouth close to my ear, his voice soothing. “If you kill her in front of her children, it will haunt you for the rest of your life. Let go, babe. Let her go.”
No! No, she didn’t get to get away with this. No! Everybody else had paid, she would pay, too.
My injured arm hurt. The pain was so raw, so fresh.
She would pay. This weak, cruel waste of a human being. This piece of shit that tormented my childhood. She was the reason I’d woken up holding the fucking butcher knife. She was the reason Doolittle had had to take a saw to my arm. She would pay!
“Let her go, honey. Let her go, Andi. For your own sake. For me. For us.” Raphael kissed my fur just below my ear. “Let her go.”
I wanted to sink into the red. I wanted to see her blood on my hands. But his voice held me back.
“Stand down,” he said. “Her children are watching. Stand down, honey.”
I heard a tiny high-pitched sound, wailing at my side, and I realized it was the little boy bawling in hysterical fear. His sister sobbed.
“You are better than this, Andi. Do the right thing. Walk away.”
As I forced my fingers open, all the pain of my memories and all my frustration tore out of me in a sharp short scream. I spun and walked away, to the other wall, as far away from her as I could.
“She’s beastkin,” Michelle breathed out. “She’s—”
“She’s the clan beta and my mate,” Raphael said.
Michelle staggered back as if he had hit her.
Raphael’s eyes were two burning pools of blood-red fire. “Your application to the clan is denied. Gather your family and leave. If you’re in my territory by sundown, I’ll hunt you down and drag you before the clans to be tried for torture, abuse of a child, and whatever other charges our lawyers will level against you. You will be found guilty, you will suffer, and you will be executed. Your children will become the wards of the Pack and they’ll loathe your name by the time they grow up.”
Michelle picked up the prone body of her husband. Her daughter grabbed the boy and they ran out.
Raphael walked to me and wrapped his arms around me.
My anger broke out in tortured sobs. Tears wet my eyes. “I had her.”
“I know.”
“In my hands.”
“I love you,” he whispered. “I love you, I’m proud of you. It was the right thing.”
“No!” I couldn’t stop crying. I wasn’t sad, I just couldn’t contain it. “She should be dead. That would be the right thing.”
“For her, but not for you. It would eat you alive. It’s not who you are.”
I crumpled down on the ground and cried. I’d learned not to cry back then, because the more I cried, the more excited they would get, but I could cry now. Nobody would stop me, and so I sat there and let it all pour out, while Raphael held me and whispered calm, loving nonsense into my ears.