Alex was still talking at me from the other end of the line that had begun to crackle, demanding to know if Bethany was all right in between making threats to castrate and kill me.

“I’ll call you back,” I barked at the phone on the floor, shifting Bethany’s weight so that she was cradled to my chest and supported with one arm, leaving my other hand free as I checked her pulse.

Her heartbeat sounded fine. Her pulse was normal too. I stroked her pale cheek and brushed my lips across her forehead, murmuring, “It’s okay. Everything’s okay. I’m so sorry.” I love you.

An awful pain burned in my throat, then lodged in my chest like a cold, heavy stone as I looked at her. The scent of her distress was so thick in the bathroom. The scent of her fear, too.

I’d done it already. I’d pushed her away. I’d made her hate me. She didn’t trust me: her own true mate. I should’ve known I’d never get this right with her.

She’d reached out to Miles and Alex for help. For help getting away from me.

And I had no one to blame but myself. What the hell had I been doing for the past two days since I’d brought her here? I should’ve been spending all my time with her—making her feel welcome, making her feel loved.

What was wrong with me? How did I always fuck up the relationships that mattered most?

“This is the last line you’ll ever cross with Milena, do you hear me?” Alex’s muffled voice raged from the bathroom floor. “We agreed Bethany was off-limits. What the fuck are you thinking? Put Alcaeus on the line!”

I kicked the phone toward Wyatt, who was pacing outside the doorway—feeling guilty, no doubt—and told him, “End the call, Wyatt.”

“Right.” He nervously bobbed his head and dove to the floor to retrieve the phone that he’d been careless enough to allow Bethy to get a hold of.

“Do not hang up on me, Wyatt,” Alex ordered through the line. “Your entire pack is in danger if Bethany isn’t turned over immediately. If any member of your pack harms Bethy in any way, you will all be held accountable. Am I making myself clear? Now get Alcaeus! I want to speak with an adult.”

“I’m the Alpha of this pack, Alex. You’ll speak to me and no one else.”

“Alpha,” he mocked. “You conniving, power-grabbing shit. I watched you use my sister Lessa to gain a foothold within my pack. I watched you use your own sister to gain entry to the Salvatella pack. Seven months ago, I watched you use a little girl to overthrow Gabe and steal control of his pack. I don’t know what your game is this time—what you hope to get out of Milena by using Bethany—but it’s not going to go in your favor on my watch, I guarantee you that. You will turn Bethany over to me now. And if I find so much as a scratch—”

“I marked her, Alex.” My words came out sounding as cold and heavy as they felt in my heart in that moment—weighted with self-loathing and regret. “More than once. And she’s been infected with werewolf venom. She’s got less than a day before the shift starts.”

The line went dead. I suspected Alex had probably crushed the phone he’d held in his hand.

I teleported Bethy upstairs to my room and put her into bed. Then I went to talk with Mike and Avery. It was time to poison Lauren, the seer.

“I’m sorry,” I told Mike. I meant it. “You know I wouldn’t do this unless I thought we had to.”

He nodded and mumbled that he understood, which only made me feel worse. Mike had been in such a great mood ever since he’d blocked Kai from the seer’s mind late Saturday night. Once he’d fixed it so that Lauren had recovered all of the memories of Kai’s creepy exploits in her head for the last six months, he and Avery had been in the catacombs glued to the hidden surveillance camera feed on Lauren. Watching footage of Lauren repeatedly reject Kai and refuse to see him for the past twenty-four hours had become their new favorite reality TV.

But it had done nothing to help us with Bethy’s mind block thus far. Mike and Avery had made sure Kai knew exactly who was responsible for giving Lauren her memories back and blocking Kai from accessing her mind. And they’d made certain Kai knew what our demands were as they related to Bethy’s emotional shield. But based on the surveillance in place on the Reinoso pack, Kai hadn’t told Alex or Miles about any of it yet. He hadn’t even reached out to Remy.

He was too busy wallowing in his own embarrassment and guilt, and probably telling himself this development was for the best with his coed obsession. Clearly, the danger to Lauren needed to be far greater before Kai would be moved to take any action that might draw Miles’s attention to what he’d really been up to with the seer.

Mike and Avery had already teleported to Washington to carry out plan B when Alex called my phone.

“Congratulations, Raul,” he greeted the moment I picked up, sounding a lot calmer than he’d been twenty minutes ago. “What a victory this is for you. So, what—now I can’t kill you without risking Bethany’s life? That your angle with this? Here’s a newsflash: you were already off-limits!”

I jerked the phone away from my ear as Alex proceeded to shout through the receiver. Not so much calmer after all.

“The moment I laid eyes on your sister, I knew I could never kill you. Swallowed that bitter pill with plenty of good pinot a long ass time ago, I assure you. So you’ve ruined Bethany’s life and mated yourself to a woman you don’t love for no reason.”

“That’s not what this was about, Alex. This had nothing to do with you, and nothing to do with Miles.”

“No?” He laughed. “You mark your sister’s best friend, and it’s got nothing to do with her?”

“This is between me and Bethy. And I do love her, Alex. I’m keeping her.”

“She’s a person, Raul. You can’t just keep her because you want to.”

“Oh, that’s rich.” Fucking hypocrite. “You mean like how you kept my little sister?”

“I didn’t keep Milena, Raul. She chose me.”

“You stole her. You brainwashed her against me.”

“Well, it’s obviously more convenient for you to believe that.”

“Conveniently true.”

“You lost your sister because you lied to her. You betrayed her trust and behaved like an asshole to her. You used her for your own gain and then expected her to be happy about it—like you’d done her a favor.”

“That is not what happened.”

“It’s exactly what happened.”

“You have no right to talk. You held Miles hostage.”

“And you’re holding Bethany hostage—for the second time. Don’t take your bitterness over losing your sister out on Bethany.”

“For the last time, this has nothing to do with my sister, Alex. It’s between me and Bethy.”

Just like every conversation I’d ever had with Alex, this one was going nowhere. So I cut to the chase and told him we’d blocked Lauren Novak’s mind and had just poisoned her with a moderated synthetic nerve agent formulation that would kill the seer within approximately eighteen hours. Not a lie—Avery had tapped my mind moments ago to let me know the deed was done.

I gave Alex the ultimatum that the seer would die unless Bethy’s emotional shield was lifted in the next fourteen hours.

He was silent. Then he started muttering to himself in Portuguese about what an imbecile I was and how much better Bethy deserved.

I didn’t dispute the latter.

“Are you really this much of an idiot? Still? After all this time? I can have Remy grant me access to Bethy’s mind right now, Raul. I’ll control her shift just fine from here if I have to. Thanks for the heads-up on her shifting timetable, by the way. Now I know. I’ll be sure to clear my schedule for tomorrow.” He made an annoyed grunting sound. “Seriously, put Al on the phone already. I’m losing IQ points.”

He was bluffing. “Really? You don’t care if I kill an innocent girl?”

“What’s her life to me compared to Bethany’s? My God, it’s like you didn’t even think this through,” he complained.

“That’s your final answer, Alex? You don’t care if we kill the seer?”

“No. Why should I? Is that it? The only bargaining chip you were able to produce on short notice?” He laughed. “By all means, kill her. You think I’d trade Bethany’s life for Kai’s little college fling?”

“Fling?” I was starting to second-guess whether or not he was bluffing.

“As if I’m having some kind of ‘aw’ moment over Kai finally getting his dick wet after his century-long idiocy-induced bout of celibacy? Kill the girl. Kai will get over it. I’m sure there’ll be others now that he’s finally come to his senses and rediscovered he’s not actually a eunuch.”

“But she’s the seer,” I stressed.

“Sure, as much as I’m a seer and you’re a seer and the woman with a crystal ball reading palms down at the street corner is a seer.”

Wait—did he not know? Downplaying the seer’s importance to me and to Mike was one thing, but had Kai hidden the fact from his own pack that his little coed was more than a fling—that she was potentially the next great seer the werewolf world had been searching for?

Fuck it. I was getting nowhere with Alex, and I had a sense he was determined to keep Miles out of this situation right now. I needed to make certain that word got back to Miles quickly about Bethy’s present situation and about Kai’s “fling”—an alleged seer—being poisoned.

Curtly ending my call with Alex, I told Stephen to get a message directly to Remy and then to Alex’s sister Lessa. I’d spent eight miserable years as a human servant to the Reinoso pack. I knew that the fastest way to escalate anything within their hierarchy was to instigate a fight between Alex and his siblings. With that in motion, I went to check on Bethany.