Page 64 of The Forbidden Wolf

Evan trilled a sound that might have been the word try.

“It would just leave a terrible bite,” I said. “I don’t want her family to see that. I don’t want them to think—”

I stopped. I’d been about to say that I didn’t want shifters getting blamed for something human monsters had done, but it was the fault of shifters. Specifically, my sister. For allowing herself to be photographed in broad daylight, wearing a shiftskin after a savage, bloody wolf battle.

After.

“Sebastian!” I looked up at him. “Were there any photos of the Bronx pack marching on the Plaza, or just their retreat?”

“Just the retreat,” he said tersely. “Elyse, we really—”

“I know.” I grabbed Evan’s hairy arm. “Come on. We’re going to avenge her.”

His blue eyes darkened, and he wrinkled his slightly elongated nose in a vicious snarl. Then he bent over and nuzzled his furry cheek against hers. Suddenly, the hair on his back bristled, and he jumped to his feet with surprising agility for such a newbie. He looked frantically around the car and released another worried Wookie sound.

“Jayla’s safe.” I put my hands on his heaving chest. “We’ll find her later. I promise. But we’ve got to go.”

Sebastian unceremoniously hauled the dead female away from the emergency exit and wrenched it open. The thunderous clatter of the steel wheels on the metal tracks effectively ended the conversation. I pushed Evan in that direction, and he bounded easily over the pile of dead bodies and then again over the precarious gap between the cars.

I started to follow, ignoring the sloshing of my guts at the sight of the track rushing below us, but Sebastian caught my elbow. He cast a dark look on my clavicle where, beneath spatters and streaks of blood, the four little freckles had gotten darker.

“I’m not one to say I told you so,” Sebastian said. “But do you think that might be the Mark of Chann?”

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chase scenes were boring. They’d always been my least favorite part of any movie I’d ever sat through because like… okay?? They’re running? They’re huffing? They’re puffing? The scenery’s flying by, and oh no, they fell, and oh good, they got back up, and so on and so on and so on, just wake me up when it’s over, you know?

The only one I’d ever really enjoyed was the chase up the Cliffs of Insanity in The Princess Bride because it was genuinely tense but also hilarious, which made it far more palatable than, say, that ridiculous last-minute chase through the bowels of the sinking Titanic, which got wedged in even though there had just been a chase through the bowels of the Titanic an hour earlier, because only James Cameron could look at a sinking ship without enough lifeboats and go, “Hmm, not dramatic enough, we’re gonna need another chase sequence, but this time with a gun.”

Those were the kind of thoughts that ran through my head as we ran through the bowels of Manhattan to get back to the Plaza. After we’d jumped off the back of the train we were on, I’d been a bit concerned about the next train headed our way, or the possibility of running into police officers who’d guessed our next move, but Sebastian wasn’t the sort of Alpha Heir who didn’t know his way around his borough’s seedy underbelly. He guided us swiftly through a network of utility corridors and secret shifter tunnels that led right to the service elevators in the Plaza’s basement.

By the time we arrived, Evan’s pseudo-shift had faded, and his ability to swear had returned, along with his knack for boxing up trauma and stuffing it into the closet he’d long ago vacated. He never even asked what happened after he took a bat to the brain; he just jumped right into the future, telling us all about his spontaneously hatched plans for storming the Alma Mater Animalis studio and getting a starring role in Season Three. And to paraphrase the jealous woman in a certain infamous scene from When Harry met Sally, I would’ve liked to have some of whatever he was having right about now.

Finally, once we’d stepped safely into the elevator, Sebastian turned to Evan, who was now wearing Sebastian’s shirt and pants, and said, “No one can know about this.”

Evan laughed. “Everyone’s going to know about this. Have you met the Internet?”

“It will make the news, yes, but there aren’t any cameras on the trains. No one will know exactly what happened, so my father and our Beta will work together to get ahead of the story.” Sebastian raked a hand through his hair. “Hopefully they can spin it in our favor.”

“But it was in our favor!” I said. “We were protecting humans!”

Sebastian gave me a look. “We may have overcompensated.”

I looked away, tugging his tuxedo jacket tight around my shoulders as if the chill running down my spine had anything to do with the temperature. So what if we did? They were coming from a rally to protest our existence and attacked us unprovoked. And as much as I wanted to blame Kiana for the Bronx pack’s reckless behavior, I had a terrible feeling she and Father had been running scared, not entirely sure how they’d gotten there. Damian had broken the cardinal rule of Betaship and used his coercion powers on his own Alphas. I was sure of it. But for what purpose?

“I was talking about you though,” Sebastian said to Evan. “No one can know what you are. Not yet.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know the drill.” He waved a dismissive hand. “My dad thinks I’ve been building houses in Honduras for the last five years on a missions trip.”

“He means your wolf,” I said. “No one can know you’re a wolf yet.”

Sebastian shook his head. “No, I mean no one can know he hasn’t always been a wolf. You need to tell everyone he’s a defector from the Bronx.”

“What?” I gaped at him. “They’ll never believe that. He doesn’t know the first thing about being one of us!”

“We tell them he was hit with a bat in the fight, and his injury healed but his memory is… spotty for now.”

“An amnesiac?” Evan tapped his chin. “I can play it. But why?”

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