Page 65 of Veil of Shadows

“We’re up here!” one of the kids yelled.

“Miss Alpha!”

“Up here!”

“Hey! Can you hear us!?”

“Shut those kids up,” Delilah snarled.

I growled out with all of the strength I had left. “Make one move toward them and I’ll make sure every single last one of you is slaughtered in cold blood with your heads on a fucking spike in the middle of town so the whole of the human race knows to watch out.”

Delilah’s eye twitched before she grinned wickedly. “You almost had me there, I’ll give you that.”

I felt the silver handcuffs slip deeper into my skin as the smell of burning flesh mingled with the smell of the burning forest. Delilah cackled in the distance. At least, I think she was in the distance. I don’t know, there was so much going on. So much smoke. My eyes burned. I wanted to gnaw my own fucking wrists off with my teeth. The kids were screaming and groupthink was yelling and Bexley was shrieking at the top of her lungs for me.

God, I would’ve given anything to see Bexley one last time.

“You know,” Delilah whispered against the shell of my ear, “if you give her to me, I’ll let you go.”

I reared my head back and stared that bitch down. “Over my dead body, you bitch.”

Her smile was positively devious. “That can be arranged.”

“Dooooooom!” Bexley exclaimed, her voice sounding closer than ever.

Delilah backed away from me. “Right on time, as per usual. Special Agent Anna was always good with that kind of stuff.”

I snarled. “You leave her alone. You leave her out of this!”

She held her arms out, backing toward the flames. “No can do, handsome. She’s way too important to what I’ve got going on.”

Without another word spoken, Delilah disappeared in a quick motion blur.

Bexley jumped through the circle of flames surrounding me and the kids… completely caked from head to toe in mud.

20

BEXLEY

“I found hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiim!”

Fire never knows what do to with mud, so the second Merida and I ran up on that ring of fire out in the middle of fucking nowhere, I hopped off her back. I slammed down into a muddy puddle and rolled around in it like a fucking dog, listening as those kids in the trees shrieked and cried out for help. I coated myself from head to toe, even going so far as to run that shit through my hair. Then, without another word spoken, I pointed to the treetops where the kids were screaming, and Merida’s wolf nodded its head.

She scaled it to get to the kids at the top.

I leapt through the flames caked in mud and laid eyes on Dom.

He was handcuffed to a tree, shirtless and in nothing but his suit pants. His bare feet looked scratched and scraped. Two of his toes were bleeding. One looked broken. His body was drenched in sweat that ran down his body in beads. He needed hydration. He needed a healer. He needed rest. And even over the roar of the fire, I still heard the children above our heads crying out for help.

I raced to Dom as my heart slammed heavily against my chest.

“You did so good,” I said breathlessly. “You did so well protecting those kids. Come here.”

My hands ran over his sweat-drenched chest. I clocked his neck and his head. I looked for any signs of a concussion before I ran my hands down his clothed legs to make sure he wasn’t bleeding.

“Bexley, you—you can’t be… here,” he choked out.

“Just give me a second,” I said breathlessly as I gasped for air. The fire pulled all of the oxygen out of the air. I heard Merida scrambling out of the tree, and it didn’t take much of a look for me to see that her back was piled with those kids. I watched as she leapt from trunk to trunk, finding a way over the growing wall of fire as she disappeared back through the smoke with the pups.

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