Page 53 of Rivers and Roads

Kor didn’t seem fazed, though, taking another drink before turning his face back toward me. “I get it. Keep your enemies close and all that.”

And he wasn’t entirely off the mark. Lior had always made me nervous, but he’d been too far in the know, and keeping him bound to our Council seemed like the only solution at the time. “I think we might be hearing his name sooner rather than later,” I confessed. “He’s not as young and charismatic as…” I couldn’t bring myself to say his name again—the human who had done this—but I didn’t need to. “I don’t know if they’ll want him as the face, but he’ll be the one pulling the strings on anyone who announces a bid to challenge the humans.”

“There have been a few whispers around Corland—a small fraction of Wolves who think it might not be such a terrible idea to let it happen,” Kor admitted. His voice was tighter than before, and I could hear indecision in his tone. “They’re starting to think it might be better if we focus our energy on winning politically than dismantling the whole system.”

I stared at him a long time before I realized why he sounded the way he did. “You agree.”

“I don’t,” he said quickly. “But I’m not sure I entirely disagree. If we dismantle the system, something uglier will pop up in its place. There will always be a system of rule, and it might be time that a Wolf is in charge.”

Blowing out a heavy breath of air, I stared down at my hand curled around my beer bottle and tried to envision a world where a Wolf held the power. “What’s to stop us from being as bad as they are? What’s to stop us from taking revenge?”

“The right person in charge,” Kor said quietly. “Someone with a bridge between both sides.”

“You mean someone like Misha?” I asked.

He grinned and shook his head. “No. I…honestly, I don’t know what I mean. I’ve been thinking about a lot of shit lately. What the labs were doing, what they wanted to gain…”

“Weapons,” I spat, and Kor went silent. The words scraped along my throat like razors, but he needed to know. “They want to turn us into weapons. I don’t remember everything, but they talked. Alexei talked. He liked the sound of his voice,” I said with a grimace. “His father’s work on Misha wasn’t just to give humans an advantage over us. It was to isolate genes and manipulate them. It was to strip us of our conscience and our will—to turn us into mindless beasts they could use against our own people. I…” My voice cracked, and I cleared my throat. “I was almost one of them. I had forgotten my name, and where I had come from. All I wanted was the taste of blood in my mouth, and I didn’t care whose it was.”

“Zane,” he whispered, and I shook my head in spite of knowing he couldn’t see it.

“I was on the verge of turning completely when Orion found me. I had already maimed other Wolves they had turned.”

“Bryn,” he said softly.

“I think so. I don’t…I’m not entirely sure, but Orion put him out of his misery so I can never ask.” My breath shuddered in my chest, and I ran the heel of my palm over my sternum. “I was their first Alpha, but they’d already had success with Betas. And there was more, but I can’t remember the details. I can’t…” I rubbed at my temples, my eyes tight shut, and I jolted when Kor dropped into the seat next to me and took my wrist in a firm grip.

“We have the information, Zane. Orion got everything they had logged with ComTech, and we’re just waiting on it to finish decoding. We have enough to start,” he told me, and I finally opened my eyes to look at him. “And we’ll know where we need to finish it when we have the rest.”

I breathed out again, then gently extracted my wrist from his fingers. “I can’t imagine not feeling this…this vice around my lungs every time I think about it. Every time I think about him,” I confessed. “I don’t know if I have the strength to do this because it’s going to mean facing him.”

“All I’m asking is that you try. Is that you take the mantle for now. Theo and Francisco are both willing to step in if it’s too much. But like me, your experience can unify our people.” He dragged a finger from one eye to the other. “It leaves them shit-scared because they can’t imagine having to live like this. And part of me is so furious that I have to use my blindness as a fear tactic to get them motivated, but right now, I’ll do whatever I need to in order to keep them hungry for the fight.”

I stared at my hands again. “I’m not ready, but I also know I can’t back out of this. So…okay. You can count on me.”

I felt almost tangible relief pouring off him. “I’m sorry we have to leave you like this.”

“No, I understand. I would have been shoving you out the door if I’d known about it first,” I told him, and he laughed, sitting back in the chair.

“I know you would.” He let out a small sigh, and it was in that moment I could see how world-weary he was. “For the record, I don’t want to do any of this. I’ve been tempted more than once to just grab Misha and find some place in the middle of nowhere while the rest of the world devours itself.”

“For the record,” I echoed, “if you ever decide to make that choice, let me know because Orion and I will gladly follow you.”

“You sure about him?” he asked.

I smiled, feeling something warm and soft soothing the raw, tattered pieces of my soul. “Yeah. I really fucking am.”

Chapter

Twenty-One

ORION

Losing Kor had been a blow I wasn’t expecting to deal with in the midst of all the other shit that had fallen on our shoulders in the last couple of weeks. Part of me was furious about it, which was the reason I found myself standing at the edge of the woods an hour before the sun would peek past the horizon.

I felt Kor before I saw him, and I glanced over my shoulder to find him making the slow trek toward me with his hand out and his feet shuffling. I let out an irritated grunt and started to meet him half-way since the ground was littered with half-unearthed rocks and fallen branches from the trees.

“Where the fuck is your cane?” I asked as his arm touched mine.

---