The churning feeling in Lowell’s gut had been increasing since they entered the building. It was growing out of control now. Odessa was right. It had to be werewolf blood they smelled. That was the only explanation for the sense of repulsion they were experiencing. Under normal circumstances, blood would be one of his favorite scents.

“What is at the end of this corridor?”

“The recreation room. Then the corridor joins the main block, the one we entered first.” She placed her hand in his and he glanced down at it. It was a simple gesture, but coming from Odessa it held a world of meaning. His heart gave an unexpected leap, one he didn’t have time to stop and examine.

They continued the few feet along the corridor until they reached the open door of the recreation room. Odessa gave a cry and turned her head into Lowell’s shoulder. The source of the smell was immediately obvious. The room was like a scene from a nightmare. It was piled high with dead bodies. Blood splashed the walls and pooled on the floor. A brief glance told Lowell all he needed to know. These men had all been killed in the same way. They had been attacked by wolves.

Odessa was trembling all over and he held her close against him, trying to do the impossible. To soothe her. At the same time his mind was racing. He needed to find out what had happened here, but his first thought was for her safety. If the intention was to cause damage to the Siberians, Odessa, their leader, was at risk. This attack was recent. Whoever did it could still be close by.

“Let’s keep moving.”

She didn’t seem to be aware of what he was saying, so he placed an arm around her waist and propelled her along with him. After a few yards, the corridor joined the wider one at a point just past the fallen ceiling. Lowell paused, looking around. There was no sign of any movement, but his sharp ears caught a faint sound. He waited and it came again. It was a soft, anguished groan, coming from his right.

“What is along here?” He pressed his lips to Odessa’s ear, whispering the question.

“Isaak’s office.” She kept her own voice low, not so deep in shock that she didn’t understand the need for caution.

Keeping close to the wall, he led her toward the source of the noise. When they reached the open office door, Lowell motioned for Odessa to stay back, before taking a quick glance around the door frame. Isaak was lying on the floor in a pool of blood. There was no one else around, and Lowell risked stepping into the room.

As soon as Isaak saw him, his lips curled back in a snarl. “Have you come back to finish the job?”

Odessa followed Lowell into the office, dropping to her knees beside her beta. His injuries were horrible. As well as deep bite marks to his throat, there were claw marks on his face and arms. The front of his shirt was slashed and stained red.

“Who did this?” Odessa’s voice shook with sadness and anger.

Isaak kept his eyes fixed on Lowell. “If you harm her—” He broke off, a spasm of pain twisting his features.

“He is here to help,” Odessa said.

Isaak attempted to laugh, but it turned into a desperate wheezing sound. “Help? Have you seen what those bastards did to our pack?”

She sat back on her heels. “We saw the recreation room. Tell us who did it, Isaak.”

He raised a shaking hand, one finger pointing determinedly at Lowell. “He did it. Him and his fucking brotherhood.”

“No.” Odessa shook her head. “Lowell has been with me for the last thirty-six hours.”

“Cameras.” Isaak seemed to be fading fast, but he managed to croak out the word.

“Will they still work? Surely the system will have been damaged by the fire.”

Lowell went to the desktop computer and checked the display on the screen. It seemed the closed-circuit television had stopped recording just before the fire. When Odessa joined him and pressed the rewind button, they watched together in shock as seven figures appeared on the screen. Six others and Lowell himself approached the building. The members of the Brotherhood of the Midnight Sun were all there. Lowell, Wilder, Samson, Madden, Sebastian, Vigo, and Jenny. Even though the images were black and white, they were unmistakable with their white-blond hair and their muscular physique. Apart from Jenny, of course, who was lean and lithe in comparison to her male colleagues.

They were laughing and joking as they broke down the door. Once inside, they shifted, dropping into a familiar attacking crouch and working together to systematically slaughter the Siberians.

Lowell looked at the time on the recording. “This was happening as we were driving from Yakutsk. Apart from the fact that I was with you, you know I spoke to Samson when we were in Moscow. He was in Alaska. I’m sure his cell phone records can prove that. There was no way he could have got here in that time. Whoever did this, it must be the same person who faked you dumping chemicals in the Arctic and faked me planting a bomb at Santin Creative.”

Odessa’s eyes were huge and terrified. “They want us at war with each other again. They are not going to stop until that happens, are they?”

“Not unless we make them.”

“How will we do that?” She returned to kneel next to Isaak, holding his hand as she tried to find a way to ease his pain.

“There’s only one way I can think of, and it involves bringing some friends of mine along to help.”

* * *

Isaak lived for another half an hour. In the end, his death was a relief from the terrible pain he was suffering. When Odessa lowered his body to the floor of his office, she felt as if someone had taken a knife to her world and was slowly and painfully shredding it apart. Her limbs were numb and her brain refused to function properly.

“You want me to come back to Alaska with you and meet the members of the Brotherhood of the Midnight Sun? The Arctic werewolves who killed my father?”

Lowell was seated on the edge of Isaak’s desk and he took hold of her hands, drawing her to him. “Yes.”

“I can’t. It would be a betrayal of all I am.” Her lips felt stiff and, when she spoke, the words sounded stilted and expressionless. As if I don’t care instead of caring so much I don’t know what to do with my feelings.

“If we don’t work together on this, someone is going to destroy both our packs.” Lowell’s voice was gentle. “There will be no going back from that.”

She gave a shaky laugh. “Look around you. It may be too late. It may have already happened here.”

“Once word of this massacre gets out, other Siberians will want revenge. It won’t matter what you do, Odessa. There will be factions who will take things into their own hands.”

She shivered. “How will they know?” She pointed at the monitor on Isaak’s desk. “No one except us has seen that film.”

Lowell ducked his head so he could look her in the eye. “Do you really believe that?”

She bit her lip, remaining silent for long moments. He was right. That video wasn’t intended for those closed-circuit monitors. It had been made for a wider audience. The feeling of horror inside her kept on growing. She shook her head. “No.”

Lowell was right, of course. A copy of that manufactured footage of the brotherhood slaughtering the Siberian fighters would already be on its way to whoever would be most incensed by it . . . if it hadn’t already arrived. The person, or people, behind this would use those images to cause the maximum destruction. That footage was too valuable to remain hidden. The brutal war between the Arctics and the Siberians had never ended, but there had been a lull since Santin’s death. It was about to explode with renewed violence.

“Do you trust me?”

A few days ago Lowell’s question would have sounded crazy. Trust? From a Siberian to an Arctic? It was liking asking her to grind the gears of her whole belief system into reverse. She had been brought up to hate Lowell’s kind and all he stood for. It had been fed into her with her mother’s milk. The hatred between their packs went back to the dawn of time when the great god Odin put the sun and moon into chariots to fly back and forth across the sky. Because the sun and moon didn’t always do their job properly, the length of the days and nights weren’t regular. To solve the problem, Odin cast a spell on the giant twin werewolves named Skoll and Hati. Odin gave Skoll the task of chasing the sun across the sky, while Hati’s was to chase the moon. Siberians were the descendants of Skoll, while Arctics were descended from Hati. Siberians hoped that one day their god, Skoll, would catch the sun and cause perpetual night. Arctics, on the other hand, prayed to their own mighty deity, Hati, to catch the moon and bring about perpetual day.

The past didn’t matter. Odessa did trust Lowell. The way he had come into her life had been unexpected and memorable and, at the time, she had believed he was a force for harm. She had even tried to convince herself she hated him. But her feelings toward him wouldn’t allow distrust or old hostilities to rule her. She had been drawn to this man from the first instant she saw him. And her heart and mind had followed. She would have faith in her instincts. Lowell had already claimed her body with spectacular results. She would offer him her trust and her friendship.

Nothing more? It was a sly, little voice at the back of her mind. Ruthlessly she silenced it. Trust was enough. What more could the Siberian leader offer a member of the Brotherhood of the Midnight Sun?

“Yes, I trust you.”

Although there was no outward change in his demeanor, she sensed the tension in him begin to unwind. “Then let me do this. Let me call them.”

Odessa nodded. Lowell was offering a solution. It wasn’t one she liked, but she had nothing else. “I get an equal say in this. Your brotherhood doesn’t take over. My people died.”

“Of course.”

“Before we leave here, we have to do something about the bodies.” She drew a shuddering breath. “I can’t just walk away and leave them like this.”

Lowell drew her into his arms, his hands smoothing along her spine until her trembling stilled. “We can’t bury them. Even if we could spend enough time here to dig that many graves, the ground is frozen and iron hard.” He slid his fingers under her chin, tilting her face up to his so that she was looking up at him. “You are descended from the Norse gods, Odessa. The most fitting way to send your warriors to their rest is to build a funeral pyre and burn them.”

The image of what he was suggesting rose in her mind. Of going back into that room and moving those bodies, of the blood and the gore. Of placing Isaak on a pyre. Of setting light to them. Of the stench and smoke . . .

She was the Siberian leader. This was the legacy her father had left her. When all her fighters lay dead and the future of her pack was under threat, there were no easy decisions.

She squared her shoulders. “Let’s do it.”

* * *

The last thirty-six hours had a surreal quality to them. Like walking through a dreamscape with a nightmare edge. They had retraced their steps for much of the journey. Shifting back into wolf form, they had run side by side back to their vehicle, donned their warm clothing and driven to Yakutsk. From there they had boarded a flight to Moscow and checked into the same hotel. Lowell had secured early morning flights to Anchorage and now they were finally stepping out of a cab in front of his Fairbanks home.

They had found out that none of Odessa’s employees had died in the bomb attack, but she had been unable to contact Alexei and Serena to discover more about the damage. Even after all those miles and all those hours, Lowell could still smell the blood and smoke they had left behind them in Siberia. The memory of Odessa’s slender body wracked by tears as he held her while she wept for her murdered fighters would stay with him forever.

Lowell’s home was a gracious, Georgian-style mansion set in the grounds of its own country estate. With two wings extending out to either side and a grand porch with high marble colonnades flanking the vast double doors, it was an imposing structure. Beyond the house itself, the colorful formal gardens led to woods with the sparkling curve of a river wending its way in the distance. It was an idyllic location.

Odessa regarded the beautiful, rambling mansion with wide eyes. “This is your home?”

It was the same reaction he always got. “Yes.”

“How many people live here?”

“Just me.” He carried their bags inside the circular mosaic-tiled hall and, for the first time ever, thought how lonely those words sounded.

“No army of staff to keep it clean?” Odessa turned full circle, taking in the elegant features of her surroundings.

“I hire a team who come in and do that whenever I’m away.” Lowell shrugged at the question in her eyes. “I don’t like other people around me.”

Except you. You around me . . . that’s the best feeling in the world. Thankfully, he stopped short of saying the words out loud.

“I need to shower.” Odessa plucked at the front of her T-shirt with a grimace.

“There’s plenty of time. The others won’t be here for a few hours.”

He led her up the graciously curved staircase to the master suite. He wasn’t asking polite questions or offering options. She was sleeping with him. When they were together, that was the rule from now on. Depositing their bags on the floor, he gestured to the bathroom. “You’ll find everything you need in there.”

Overcoming the temptation to join her with an effort, Lowell made his way back downstairs and fired up his laptop. Diving into the depraved world of the Hellhounds was something he hadn’t done for several weeks, but maybe it was time to check in.

The Hellhounds were the followers of Chastel. Many of them never got further than cheering from the sidelines in these online communities. Some liked to live out their fantasy lives by meeting up and discussing how they would kill a werewolf if they ever met one. A small number went further and, following in the footsteps of their beloved leader, hunted down and killed werewolves.

Werewolf hunting wasn’t easy. It was time consuming and expensive. Werewolves had evolved to the point where they could live in the human world without detection. Most Hellhounds didn’t have the time, ingenuity or resources to get serious about werewolf hunting. But there were a few who were dangerous.

Before his death, Chastel had been active on these forums, offering huge sums of money to any Hellhounds who could provide proof of a werewolf kill. There was nothing he liked more than provoking a blood-induced frenzy among his followers. There had been too many occasions of murders caused by a suspicion that a friend, neighbor, or colleague of an overzealous Hellhound “might be” a werewolf. Very occasionally, they struck lucky and actually did kill a genuine werewolf.

Since Chastel’s death twelve months ago, this forum had gone quiet. Not silent. It had been subdued rather than extinct. Watchful. Just as Lowell had been watching, so had the Hellhounds. For what, he wasn’t sure.

Chastel himself hadn’t been content with killing werewolves one at a time. His ambition had been far greater. Chastel’s ultimate goal was to wipe out all werewolves. He had made an attempt to destroy the entire Arctic species by using Samson’s partner, Valetta—now his wife—against them. Valetta, a unique being known as a Shadow Born werewolf, had special powers that Chastel believed he could harness and use against the Arctics. The bounty hunter’s plan had backfired and, during a confrontation, Samson had killed Chastel.

Lowell scrolled through the messages on the forum. It had certainly been getting busier over recent weeks. Things seemed to be heating up in the murky world of online werewolf hunting. There were some distasteful threads and he grimaced as he bypassed them. The Hellhounds liked to get creative in the detail of how they would kill werewolves. Although Lowell monitored this forum, he didn’t interact. The temptation to interject an occasional reminder about silver bullets, burning, and beheading was tempting, but he let it pass. The further the Hellhounds strayed from reality, the safer the werewolf community would be.

His eyes were drawn to a new thread, one that had been started just over a week ago. It was entitled “Ice Queen” and it drew his attention because there was a picture of Odessa heading up the thread. A feeling of dread began to agitate his stomach. As he read through the posts, shock gripped him. The thread had been started for the sole purpose of describing ways in which this group of Hellhounds intended to kill Odessa. There were hundreds of posts, by many different authors. As he glanced through the depraved fantasies, his blood began to boil. It was obvious that these sick bastards knew who Odessa was. There were photographs of her in human form, identifying her as the leader of the Siberian werewolves. Her human cover had been blown. In addition, there were gleeful references to how “the master” would let them toy with her before she died.

The master. That was what the Hellhounds had called Chastel. But Chastel was dead. Lowell frowned over the reference. Did the Hellhounds have a new master?

Lowell moved on and began to scroll through the other posts. When he finally logged out and closed his laptop, his mood was considerably lower. Although he hadn’t picked up on anything specific, there was a definite air of celebration among the Hellhounds. For the first time since Chastel’s death, they were upbeat and looking forward to something. It couldn’t be a coincidence that their mood change had coincided with the attempts to set the Arctics and Siberians at each other’s throats again.

Lowell massaged his temples. Attempts? Whoever had done this knew exactly what they were doing. The flame had been well and truly lit, and he had no idea how to put out the fire. Only one thing was certain . . . Odessa was in danger. No matter what else happened, Lowell had no intention of letting anything happen to her.