Page 128 of Villainous Fate

Oh no, the baby!

Deacon: Doc, we need you NOW! At Kellen’s.

I’m moving before I can think twice, my feet pushing me out of the pack house, my wolf assuming control and shifting when I clear the door. Turning into the woods and running at full speed until I get to her home on the edge of the territory, I shift back, stopping only long enough to throw on a pair of shorts on the porch before charging into her house without knocking.

“ASHLEY!” I shout, storming the stairs two at a time. “ASHLEY!”

Deacon: You better answer me right fucking now, or I will walk into your bedroom and kill the man sleeping next to you for hurting you.

I send through the mind link as I clear the top step.

Ashley: Don’t…

Her voice is small in my mind, sad even.

At the end of the hallway, the door opens, and Kellen stands there, his face grim. My three-year-old niece is cuddled up in his arms, half asleep.

“The doctor is on his way,” I say, eyes scanning him.

Why isn’t he freaking out?

“You can call him off. She’s fine—physically, anyway,” Kellen says, his voice calm as his eyes drop.

“What does that mean?” I say, needing him to talk faster, and instead of waiting, I walk around him to find my sister sitting in her four-poster king-size bed, sobbing with her whole body.

Deacon: Ash? What’s going on, Piccolo Lupo?

I send softly through a mind-link. Pulling her pain into me through our bond, taking it from her, filling the holes inside me with it as I walk slowly to the end of the bed, my heart rate finally slowing down.

“She didn’t make it. She wouldn’t let them fix her, and they couldn’t… save her,” she says, not making sense, tears flowing unabashedly down her cheeks.

“Who? Who didn’t make it? Who couldn’t they save?” I ask, thinking through our pack members and wondering if I’d missed something in my brief today.

Had we lost someone?

She inhales, gathering herself before her water-rimmed eyes meet mine. Pain floats in them like a storm at sea before she says the one name I thought couldn’t hurt anymore—the only name that ever could.

“Grace… She didn’t… They lost her on the table… too much blood, the cancer had progressed too far,”

“What are you saying?” I ask, not comprehending the words tumbling from her.

“Grace is dead.”

The wall I’d spent years fortifying, brick by brick, layer by layer, shatters under the pressure of a single word. My lungs stop taking in air. My heart stops beating. My world collapses, breaking beneath my feet as my legs give way, and I fall to my knees, my hands hitting the floor just before my forehead.

No.

No.

NO.

NOOOOOOOOO.

She can’t be.

I would have felt it.

I would know if she wasn’t in this world anymore.

---