Page 14 of Racing the Storm

But it was no surprise to me that Kasher had managed to find a way to tap into our genetic code and undo who—and what—we were.

“You have to be prepared to take them out. No matter who they are,” she said, and the darkness in her tone said that I wasn’t going to like what I found.

But I was willing. If it meant getting Danyal and bringing him home, I’d do whatever I needed to. “Is that what Kasher did to Zane?”

Nadya looked at me for a long time, her dark eyes steady as they captured my gaze. “Yes. From the little footage I’ve managed to decode, it looks like he used a series of physical torture and injections on him. I’m not sure how much of him survived it.”

My throat went tight. “And no updates…”

“Some,” she said. “He went willingly with Orion, and he’s been functional since they made it to Canada. Non-violent,” she said even softer this time.

I blew out a puff of air. “So, there’s hope.”

“There is,” she said. “But don’t count on it, especially if you come across a Wolf who’s been in Kasher’s care longer than Zane. That was just a few weeks. Some of them have been with him for years.”

I couldn’t stop my claws from dropping, the desire to lunge across the ocean and rip Kasher’s throat out almost overwhelming. It took several moments of catching my breath and trying to convince my heart to calm down before I could speak. “I’ll kill him.”

“I don’t know many who’d stop you, but it might be best if he was taken alive,” she said. “Alive, he’s useful.”

“Dead, and he can’t do this again,” I pointed out.

She nodded. “But he’s already set up his successor, and every day, Alexei’s popularity has been growing. Amongst the Wolves in the city too. Not just the humans.”

I wanted to rage, to scream, to grab them all by their faces and force them to see the atrocities committed by that family—by all of the humans who had been in charge for too damn long. But I doubted it would make a difference.

If they were willing to be shoved into segregation, tortured, murdered, and still find a way to believe that they had our best interest in mind, there would be no making them see reason. We’d just have to overpower them.

But the reality was, Nadya was right. Dead, Kasher couldn’t continue his own work, but he’d already set up a system that was primed and ready to begin another genocide. One that would see us all reduced to beasts. One that would have the humans stealing what power they could from us, and once they had what they wanted, they could dispose of us, and I doubted anyone would care.

Nadya showed me to my room, which was on the other side of the house from hers, and it was set up a lot more comfortably than I had been expecting. “It’s not much,” she said again, and I couldn’t stop my laugh.

“I slept in my truck twice on the way here. This is luxury to me right now.” I dropped my bag on the end of the bed, then turned to her. “I don’t know how to thank you for the work you’ve been doing.”

At that, her lips thinned. “Yes, Mikael, you do. You can do exactly what you’ve been doing and put a stop to all of this. You can free us.”

I swallowed thickly, wanting to tell her that I didn’t have the power. That my strength was limited, and I was nothing but a war-torn mess on the inside. But I realized, so was she. She might not have been on the front lines, but she’d seen power and devastation just like the rest of us.

She’d lost everything to these humans.

The least I could do was make sure no other Wolves would suffer the way we had.

“Has it gotten easier?” she asked as she backed a step out of the room. When I lifted my brow, she let out a small sigh. “Galen.”

I expected to feel a wince of pain, but instead, there was just that slow burn of grief I didn’t think I’d ever lose. “Sometimes. Sometimes it’s just a dull ache.”

“But other times, it’s like you’re bleeding out?” she said—and it sounded like a question, but I knew it wasn’t. “I know I should move on and find someone else. I know he wasn’t the one—whatever that is. It’s what I’d be telling someone in my position.”

“Is that what you’d tell me?” I asked her.

She gave me a knowing look, and I realized I’d spilled to her once or twice about Danyal in our long, late-night phone conversations where it was too easy to tear little pieces of myself and offer them to a faceless stranger who had suffered the loss of a spouse just like I had. And she was the only Wolf who knew.

“Have you spoken to him at all?”

I dragged a hand down my face. “I took the coward’s way out. He thinks I don’t remember him.”

“He deserves better than you.”

The words were vaguely cruel, but I knew she only meant them as the honesty she always gave me every time we talked. “I know. I’m hoping he’ll take pity on a fool like me the moment I reach him.”

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