Page 1 of Rivers and Roads

Prologue

ZANE

There may have been a time—in the years before I was in this place of darkness and pain—that I believed I was unbreakable. That the horrors of the First War were the worst things I could have experienced. I had been taken prisoner more than once. I had been beaten, tortured, and left for dead.

But oh how the humans were clever. Oh, how they were ruthless.

There was some sort of vicious irony when I heard one of them whisper, “The last of his humanity is being stripped away.” Because was I losing it? Or was I gaining it? This monstrous beast in front of me that far rivaled my wolf in its cruelty, and its desire to inflict unending pain…

That was human.

That was the only human I had ever known. Would ever know.

I had no concept of time, only a cycle of agony and unconsciousness. I couldn’t shift forward or back—my teeth elongated, my claws engaged—tearing at my own flesh as I tried to free myself, tearing apart other Wolves they put in front of me. Once upon a time, I thought a rescue would come, but I could no longer remember who existed to rescue me.

This was it. I had no name, no face, no purpose but to destroy.

I was a beast.

This was my burden.

Chapter

One

ZANE

Peace was a stranger, a foreign sensation that was a little too close to pain for my own comfort. It felt like a devil on my shoulder, trying to convince all of us that we should drop our guard and then the chaos would set in. I knew what my brother would have to say about it, of course. Danyal hadn’t studied psychology, but he knew enough to see trauma in the Wolves who had returned from the First War.

None of us trusted the world around us, and that had only grown the more we learned what our people were capable of. Once upon a time, we had only feared what the humans could do. Now, even a year after Kor’s return—after we settled into Corland and began to rebuild—we barely trusted the Wolves around us.

Too many nights I woke up with a silent scream lodged in my chest. Too often, I was lost to the nightmares of the battles—in the faces of those I had killed and those I had failed to protect. But on occasion, I was lost in the terrors of what would be if we didn’t stop it. The face of an Alpha Wolf standing over me, foot on my neck, a reminder that power was more appealing than true freedom.

I preferred insomnia to those dreams. More often than not, Danyal found me in our small living room, my gaze locked on the moon which sat heavy in the sky, just outside the window. It felt strange to be in a home too, especially one that had been abandoned to the wilds after the humans had attempted to destroy the city. It had taken clean-up crews nearly six months to make one single quarter of the city habitable.

Danyal and I had chosen this place together for the proximity to where Talia and Cameron had moved. After finally coming home from war, alive and mostly intact, I couldn’t stand the thought of being far from either of my siblings. Even with the city abandoned and nature having taken over, there was no shortage of space to live. I knew several Wolves thought it was ridiculous that I chose to live with my brother when I could finally have peace and quiet, but those were the Wolves who had no idea about the voices that screamed in the silence.

Corland was still struggling to get on its feet too. We weren’t necessarily lacking in bodies who were willing to fill up the empty spaces, but we were lacking in experts that knew how to get a war-torn city back on the grid. We had electricity after five months, running water after seven. My first hot shower after a run with the moon, I wept silently with my head pressed against the tile, my fist in my mouth to muffle my sobs, praying my brother wouldn’t hear my tumble into weakness.

Danyal would only hover—partly due to him being an Omega, but mostly because we were one of the rare few who had blood kin still alive and within reach. My mother had been profoundly lucky to have birthed three children so close together in her lifetime—especially two who were born Alphas. I’d never met a single Wolf growing up with more than one sibling and never two of the same status. We’d been something like freaks at school, but I didn’t care. Especially not when the humans started to strip us down to nothing, and all we had left was each other.

We rebelled before the humans began to take children away from parents, but it was a damn-near thing.I wasn’t sure that fear of losing Danyal and Talia was going away any time soon. Not entirely, no matter how much victory we claimed by the end of this blossoming second war.

My instinct, of course, was to protect my siblings. It always had been, and it had been agony when I left for the front, and they were at home knowing it was likely they would never see me again. Danyal was the first face that greeted me in the Capital when the Equinox Treaty was signed, and even then, I had seen it on his world-weary face. He knew as well as I did that this was not over.

In spite of living with him now, which was a strange feeling because I hadn’t shared a house with him since we were kids, he was rarely there. His brilliant mind was locked in his labs, attempting the final stages of an experiment Kor believed we needed in order to bring our people home. My brother was a geneticist, and he was using Misha—the human turned Omega—as his muse. But the very idea of genetic manipulation used on our own people made me feel sick to my core. I had argued until I was blue in the face, but the Head Alpha was unmoving.

“It’s only step one in this endless fucking battle to regain actual power back from both the Wolves in our government,” he insisted at every objection, “and from the humans we all know are capable of so much worse.”

But fighting fire with fire was something that terrified me down to my bones. We weren’t human, so why use their tactics? Danyal swore it was the only way to get close enough to stop them, and just like Kor, he wouldn’t consider an alternative. “We won’t be able to get ahead of them if we don’t know what they’re doing,” he said. “This isn’t just about using their methods against them, it’s about unraveling them so we can save our people when we get them back.”

I understood, but I just wasn’t sure that’s where his head was at. We were all creatures of war. We existed to fight, to kill, to take down those who would leash us and force us back into cages. And I had no doubt Wolves like Kor would do anything they had to, no matter the cost.

Frustration was mounting, and I was starting to question whether or not we had made the right choice in making Kor our leader. It had seemed like the only choice at the time. Orion had petitioned the Council for his appointment, and at that point, his arguments were solid.

“He’s injured, but he’s strong. You all know how capable he is. You’ve been fighting with him for years, and he hasn’t lost his fire. But more importantly, he’s an Alpha the rest of the Wolves will follow.”

But I was starting to wonder if bonding to a human—even one that had been turned into something else—was affecting his ability to put our people first.

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