Page 16 of Savage Prince

I nod, feeling a new weight settle around my shoulders. “I didn’t know that. Obviously. But you’re right. Saving our people comes first. Tell me about them. Is Layla one of them? The girl you told me to reach out to if we didn’t see each other again?”

He nods. “She’s your roommate, a bear shifter. She stuck with us after I was injured, risked her own life and her place at the school to try to help me across the finish line. She ran ahead at the last minute to get help and we never saw her again.”

I frown. “Why? What happened?”

“I fell off the last obstacle. You caught me and flew me to that island right before you…” He clears his throat. “That was yesterday morning. By the afternoon, I knew something was wrong. No one came to look for us and there was no sign of life on the beach by campus. It was like everyone vanished. We had other friends there, too. Alexander and Catherine, a brother and sister who were helping you learn to shift, and Natalie, the staff member who picked us up on the road on the way here and helped keep your father’s assassins from killing us.”

I blow air past my pursed lips. “Wow.”

“Yeah,” Ford says. “It’s a lot.”

“What did I do?” I ask, my stomach churning. “To make my dad hate me so much?”

“Nothing.” He turns to me, reaching out to take my hand in his much bigger one. “You didn’t do anything wrong. You were always a good kid who tried so hard to please him. He just wants your younger half-sister, the one we didn’t even know existed until we came to Lost Moon, on the throne. That’s it. It’s all politics and Hammer being a monster. You’re an innocent victim.”

My jaw clenches. “I don’t like being a victim.”

His gaze warms. “I know. You’d rather be the badass riding in with guns blazing, slaying the bad guys, and saving the day.”

My brows lift. “I know how to shoot?”

“You do. Or you did,” he amends as he starts through the forest again, heading north not too far from the shore. “And you were damned good at it.”

“Hopefully I still am,” I say, keeping pace. “Or I can learn quickly. We’ll need to be armed. And we’ll need backup. I’m guessing Hammer has a lot more men than the few I saw if he took over the whole school in a day.”

“Agreed,” Ford says. “And like I said, I’m pretty sure he had help from the inside. If the brotherhood is working with him, that’s at least fifty big, beefy Alphas who know their way around the place eager to do his dirty work.”

“But we have people on our side, too,” I say, determined to focus on the positive.

Ford makes a coughing sound that isn’t encouraging.

“We do,” I insist. “We have to. We’re on the right side. The universe is aligned with us, not them. I can feel it.”

“You’re right, but that doesn’t mean we have the connections to fight and win against your father,” Ford says. “Not yet anyway. That’s why we came to Lost Moon. We needed a safe place to hide out for a year or two while we gained strength and found allies. We aren’t ready to face Hammer right now. Not even close.”

“But what about Agatha?” I ask. “The woman you said wanted to back me for the throne? Won’t she help us?”

“She might,” Ford says. “But she’s all the way on the other side of the continent. And I’m pretty sure you’ve never actually met her. You just heard she was sympathetic to helping female Alphas gain power.”

I walk faster, refusing to lose hope. I may not know much about the world right now, but I know hope is vital. “Okay, then what about the parents of the students at the school? I’m sure they’re not going to be happy to learn Hammer and a bunch of armed men have taken control of campus. Maybe some of them will help us.”

“Maybe,” Ford says. “But a lot of the students don’t have parents or a pack. That’s why they’re at a school for reject shifters. The most powerful, involved parents are on Hammer’s side. Beck’s dad is a billionaire real estate mogul and Beck fucking worships him. He wouldn’t align himself with a plan like this without his daddy’s permission.”

“Which means he has money for all the guns,” I say.

Ford nods. “Yep. All the guns and all the PR campaigns and bribes to assure the other parents come around to seeing that this change of leadership is for the best.”

I curse beneath my breath. “You think he’ll really be able to do that? Throw money at this until the fact that his son almost killed you and Hammer staged a hostile takeover of an academic institution just goes away? Is the world really that fucked up?”

“I would love to tell you no…”

I wait for him to say something else, but he doesn’t.

The only sound is the soft crunch of our bare feet on the pine needles, the rustle of the wind through the trees, and the shush of the ocean nearby. But all of those things, every voice in nature, assures me that things won’t always be like this.

Nothing stays awful forever. Nature is about balance. No matter how bad things get, balance is always restored—eventually.

But nature has more patience that I have. I can’t find peace in hoping my grandchildren will live in a better world than this one. I want a better world now. For me and Ford and all the people at Lost Moon who came there hoping for a better life.

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