“Lillian was clever,” Lydia continues. “She would have figured out who I was eventually. And I did have to find a way to get you here. Two birds, one stone.”
Violet lunges, her teeth bared. The operatives slam her back down and clamp a collar on her.
“Take her,” Lydia tells the operative.
They pull Violet to her feet. She thrashes. Her boot finds a man’s shin, and his expletive rebounds off the walls. They haul her down the side corridor.
“I will gut you, Lydia, do you hear me?” I hear my friend yell before her voice fades in the distance.
The corridor is very quiet again, and Lydia turns her attention to me.
I have not moved from the wall. My curse mark is so painful that I’m still struggling to breathe. It’s like fire spreading through my entire body. Warm blood slides down my neck.
Lydia studies me.
This is the woman Lucas trusted above any other, the one he considered his childhood friend, the one he nearly made his luna. The fury that climbs up my throat is so cold, I can’t feel my own teeth.
“You wanted me to go into the forest that night,” I say tightly. “You knew I wouldn’t want to go with you.”
She smiles. “You’re so easy to manipulate, Sienna. Yes, it was me. It wasn’t that hard to change the patrols. You had to die so that the alliance between the two packs would be destroyed. The Covenant couldn’t afford Silvercrest and Moonvale teaming up. Not if we wanted to succeed in our mission.” She shakes her head slowly. “But you’re like a cockroach that just won’t die.”
Two of the operatives close in on me. The other six fan wide.
I move first.
I am not a soldier. I am not a fighter. Years of pack-house drills are ingrained in me, though, and maybe that will be enough. My elbow drives into the throat of the man closest to me. He chokes and falls. Before he has hit the floor, I’m on the second operative. Knee to the inside of his thigh. Heel of my hand under his jaw.
The third grabs me by the hair, and I bite. I get a piece of his hand. He howls. My boot comes up into his stomach. He doubles over. I have one breath of clear corridor in front of me before two more men close in from behind, pinning my arms back hard enough that I feel a tendon strain in my shoulder.
I fight them anyway. My head jerks back and connects with a nose, the wet crunch of it loud in the corridor. Behind me, the man curses into my hair.
“Hold her,” Lydia says.
A sixth operative moves in. He gets a wrist around my throat from behind and applies pressure. Not enough to choke. Enough to make me freeze in place.
My pulse hammers against the inside of his forearm.
Lydia walks over. She comes so close that I can smell her perfume. Light. Floral. It makes me gag.
Her hand lifts and pushes the hair off my forehead with horrifying gentleness. “You have something on your face,” she observes.
She wipes the blood from my jaw with her thumb.
I jerk my head away.
The hand at my throat tightens in warning. I bite my tongue.
“Walk,” Lydia tells the operatives.
They force me down the corridor.
I do not give them an easy time of it. My heels drag. My weight goes backward at the third step, and one of the men holding my arm has to brace against the wall. At the next junction I trip another operative with my foot. He goes to one knee, and his swearing follows me down the hall. Lydia walks behind us at her own slow pace, as if I am an inconvenient thing she has to see safely tucked away.
The cell is at the end of a long stretch of corridor I do not bother to memorize. I will not be using this knowledge. I’m being put in a hole, and I know it. The door is iron coated in silver. Heavy. Riveted. A door built for one specific type of prisoner. The second I’m close enough, the mark at my collarbone becomes hot enough to burn, and my wolf staggers backward inside me.
An iron cell. Designed for shifters.
Lydia steps past me and unlocks the door it herself. The hinges scream as she opens it. Cold air rolls out across my boots, and inside, the dark has no edges to it. I plant my feet on instinct. The men shove me forward anyway.