Page 3 of Wild Wolf

We closed in around him and Gabriel looked up at the sky, frowning darkly.

“What is it?” I asked the Seer as he rustled the feathers of his obsidian wings.

“The FIB will raid the Oscura stronghold and surrounding vineyards in two days. The family lawyers have already been at work providing alibies for us – they even have eighty eyewitnesses who spent the night in Dante’s company to prove it couldn’t have been him who rescued you.”

“You let Carson take on your appearance?” I asked my cousin, knowing already that it had to have been him.

“Yes. Though I will admit that I’m concerned about what he will have done to my reputation while I was supposedly at that party,” Dante said.

The look of amusement on Gabriel’s face confirmed that ‘Dante’ had gotten up to all sorts of reputation-altering nonsense, but I couldn’t summon the interest in that to ask about it further.

“Time to go then,” I said firmly.

We all moved close enough to be transported by the stardust, but Cain held his ground, folding his arms across his broad chest.

“I’m not going to a den of heathens in the heart of the criminal underground,” he snarled.

I shrugged, past the point of caring about his wavering moral compass. “It’s that or hang out here in the middle of the Baruvian Jungle, stronzo. Take your pick.”

Gabriel lifted a fistful of stardust above us, and I growled in a low tone as Ethan and Sin pressed in close either side of me before he tossed it over our heads.

A blur of motion announced Cain darting into the group a heartbeat before the stars snatched us into their grasp and we were whipped away into the embrace of the glimmering celestial bodies.

The whispers of the stars themselves hissed sharply in my ears as we were hurled through their embrace, the world whipping by around us in a vortex of sparkling light before they spat us out violently.

My feet hit the ground with a solid thump as we were released from the hold of the universe and deposited at the top of a steep hill where the Oscura vineyards stretched out away from us and the scent of home wrapped me in its embrace.

It was beautiful here, like an island set away from all the bad in the world where the sun shone down brighter on everyone who could lay claim to any piece of this stunning slice of land. In the distance, orange light was just beginning to crest the horizon, the sweeping landscape of hills and vineyards rolling away from us in every direction. It felt as though no other place existed in the world but this.

A sob clutched my chest as I inhaled deeply, the lack of my mate driving into me even deeper as I found myself back here without him. Everything about this was wrong.

The Wolves descended, a tide of Oscuras racing from the house, the vineyards, the woodland beyond and I was swept up onto the wide porch which ran along the front of the beautiful white villa where I had spent the best years of my childhood.

Cries went up, raised voices calling my name, then their excitement turned to confusion as they hunted for Roary. Dante’s deep voice rang out to silence the questions, a dark promise of explanation falling from his lips as he beckoned the swarm of Wolves to follow him into the house.

My pack dragged the convicts inside too, my Aunt Bianca cooing about the state of them, promising hot baths, fresh clothes and a hearty meal. I felt her eyes on me but I didn’t turn to look at her as Dante guided her away too, unable to face her penetrating gaze which always saw so much and understood so clearly.

Even Cain and Hastings were hustled into the house, all of them heading into the depths of the one place in this world where I had ever truly belonged.

I didn’t follow them.

I moved to the edge of the porch and took hold of a metal flagpole which had been driven into a huge flowerpot there, a crudely painted Wolf fluttering on the white flag above my head as I looked out towards the horizon which had just brightened with the blazing orange of dawn.

Minutes crawled by as I watched the dawn rise and let myself feel the jagged truth of what had happened, my heart reaching out in a desperate cry for my Lion, my soul wanting to tear itself in two just so that some part of it could find its way back to him.

I clenched my jaw, my fingers biting into the metal pole which I was fairly certain had become the only thing holding me upright anymore.

This failure ran deep within me, this pain a river that washed through my blood and left nothing but a burning, pointless longing in its wake.

I had failed. In all of this, there had only ever been one goal which truly mattered to me. One thing I had dedicated myself to for ten years, one utterly uncompromising reality which I had to achieve and yet… I had failed.

It paralysed me this pain. It tore at everything good that I clung to in myself and ripped away at the tattered soul remaining beneath the bravado and bullshit I dressed myself in so easily. I couldn’t live with this reality. I couldn’t sleep or eat or fucking breathe until I had rewritten this fate, but I had nowhere to turn this frantic energy, no way of doing what I knew had to be done. There were no clues to my salvation and I knew that he was suffering with every moment I delayed. I had failed him. And nothing I did now or could do in the future would ever be able to rectify the terrible truth of that.

But as I stood there staring at the dawn which should have been such a beautiful sight with him right there watching it beside me, I swore that I would get him back. By the power of the moon, I would go to the ends of the world and beyond to return Roary Night to my side.

My skin began to glimmer with the power of the moon as it bound my fate to that promise, an echo of the one I had made ten long years ago, and I tipped my head back as it imbued me, releasing a long, sorrowful howl to the sky and swearing on all that I was that I would fix this, or give my life trying.

CHAPTER TWO

---