Page 4 of An Unending Claim

His eyes were frigid when he looked at me again. “You’re going to deny you just shot my friend right in front of me?” He winced again, but I was too frustrated to care why.

“I’m not denying anything,” I rebutted angrily. “But you don’t know the context. You’re making assumptions based on your dislike and mistrust of me.”

He opened his mouth, but Sabrina cut him off. “I trust my Alpha. If you don’t, then you should find yourself another pack.”

Hurt flashed in his eyes for a brief moment before it was again replaced by a rage so deep, I knew it couldn’t be solely from what was happening right now. The man clearly lived with pain that was clinging to his soul.

However, at the moment, he was pointing that anger at me and accusing me of murder, so I’d sympathize some other time.

“I trust my Alpha,” he spat. “It’s her I don’t trust.”

“Then your trust doesn’t mean much because our Alpha chose her. He trusts her. Your first instinct to your Alpha female should be to protect her, not blame or accuse. And if you’d spent any time at all with Peyton, you would know that what you saw wasn’t the full story.”

Sabrina’s loyalty shocked me. Not her loyalty to Nathan—that was never in question with this pack—but the loyalty she had to me, that I had somehow earned on my own. It was at once humbling and a little terrifying. Being Alpha female meant waking up every day and making sure I was worthy of the title. It meant people depending on me, looking to me for guidance. Basically being a mother to a whole pack.

It would have been nice to have a little practice with my own baby first.

“Fucking hell,” Lincoln breathed. I glanced over to see him inspecting Geoff’s wolf. “These wounds… and there are four shots.”

“We only heard two,” Sabrina snapped.

“I know. That’s my point. The others are older, too. By perhaps… an hour?” Lincoln looked up at me with a curious gaze, trying to put together the puzzle in his mind.

I was starting to feel dizzy from the blood loss, and exhausted from standing on one foot. I gingerly tried to set my foot down but froze when Ephraim suddenly yelled.

“She’s—” He only managed one word and a single step in my direction before he dropped to his knees on the dirt and debris of the forest floor and hung his head.

The foot I was standing on had fallen asleep, so I put some weight on my injured one. Shards of pain tore through my leg like jagged glass, and I cried out, losing my balance.

Sabrina whipped around and caught my arms just as I began to fall, then gently helped me sit on the ground.

“Did you…?” Lincoln stood and ran a hand through his unruly mop of blond hair. “Was he dying?”

I nodded. “Yes.”

Sabrina crouched down and looked at me, swallowing hard, clearly holding back her grief. “Another ‘hunting accident’?”

“Yes. I didn’t have a choice,” I explained, wishing I could be anywhere else but not regretting my actions. I’d put that poor man out of his misery and saved my own life. I wouldn’t apologize for that.

When a wolf went feral, they became more animal than person. With practiced control, the human could regain control if they waited and allowed the animal to calm down.

But Geoff had gone rogue. Rogue shifters were unstable. They lost all traces of their humanity and became crazed predators that attacked any living thing because their broken minds perceived them as a threat.

There was more than one reason a shifter could turn rogue. In Geoff’s case, he’d been in unimaginable amounts of pain. Someone had deliberately shot him in a way that would make his death slow and painful.

Unlike when a wolf turned feral, the chances of pulling a shifter back after they’d gone rogue were miniscule. If it wasn’t possible, they had to be put down before they maimed or killed everything in their path. So, it had shocked the hell out of me when I’d somehow felt Geoff’s desperation. I’d seen his eyes flash to the surface for just a moment, silently begging me to give him peace before his wolf took over again and he disappeared forever.

Sabrina’s light brown eyes dropped to my mangled foot and ankle. Though it was already healing, it looked horrible, the skin cut and mangled with deep bite marks.

“Shit,” she cursed, running a hand through her short, ash-blonde curls. Carefully, she inspected my wounds, then sighed. “He came after you? Was he too far gone?”

“It was either him or me, and he was already at death’s door.”

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, then opened them again. I was relieved to see no anger directed at me, only sympathy. “I knew it had to be something like that. Damn, Peyton, I’m so sorry.”

I only nodded because the adrenaline was wearing off and the weight of what I’d done was beginning to settle on my chest. Even though I would have done the same thing if put in this exact situation again, no amount of justification would remove the blood on my hands.

Lincoln crouched down again and inspected something or other, then grunted. “At a couple of the murders, we found big enough bullet fragments to recognize that the inside of the shell had an etching. I’m pretty sure these do, too.”

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