Once again, Declan stood at the edge of the trees, waiting for him.

Nearly ten hours of running with minimal breaks had honed Casey’s fear and anger into something hard as ice. He had intended to be cool, distant, dignified, while he waited for a way to get out of this. He would be an adult, a future mother, and he would show these people that he could handle himself. That was the plan, or as much of one as he’d managed to think of in an entire day spent running.

What he actually did, when he saw Declan just standing there, just waiting for Casey to come to him, was to stop in his tracks and fold his arms across his chest.

The wolves around him snapped at him, but Declan waved a hand and they parted around Casey, running on to their destination and leaving him in the middle of a snowy clearing. The light was failing, and the waning moon wouldn’t rise until nearly midnight. Still, he could see well enough to see Declan hadn’t moved other than to wave.

Casey turned his back, and then winced as he did. His boots were decidedly not meant for running in. His feet had mostly healed at each rest break, but that had meant less and less as the day wore on. And he was tired, and this was such bullshit, and he couldn’t even sit down without getting covered in snow.

Still, he wasn’t going to make a scene. He would be icy. Cold. Grim. Determined. He could do this.

It wasn’t really his style, though. His style was more... yelling and possibly punching. That wasn’t going to help here. So he would stand here until he could walk the rest of the way, and then he would figure out what to do next, and how to do it with a bare minimum of screaming. Or punching.

He heard footsteps crunching toward him and closed his eyes, hiding his face in his hands.

Declan had come and knocked on the door, too. He’d had the whole talk about this in front of Adam when what he really wanted was to get Casey alone. He called Casey by the right name, and the right pronoun, and Casey would swear that hadn’t been a lie. And he was coming to get Casey now, across the last hundred yards, after he’d left Casey to run his feet to bloody shreds for the last ten hours.

It shouldn’t have balanced—it didn’t, not really—but it was just enough weight in the opposite direction that Casey couldn’t quite hate him. He should have, probably. He just couldn’t resist the urge to believe that Declan was his brother, and that that word meant there was someone here who actually cared about him, and not just about... owning him, or whatever the Mactire thought he was doing.

Please, Casey thought, with his face in his hands. Please don’t do something so awful that I can’t believe that anymore.

Declan’s footsteps stopped a few feet away—not close enough to touch, but close enough to speak easily. “Your feet?”

Casey could hear that useless, apologetic smile from this morning in Declan’s voice, and his anger flared again. He dropped his hands and turned. “Yes, my fucking feet, Declan. What the fuck?”

Declan winced. “I didn’t... didn’t think you’d... if you’d just stopped and refused to get up, I would have driven you the rest of the way, I was never that far. It’s not like Sorcha ran it, or the little ones. I forgot how stubborn you can be.”

Casey stared at him, speechless. His hands were in fists, so tight his knuckles ached.

“It’s... everyone does this, Casey,” Declan said. “Everyone tries to run it once before they’re really old enough, or strong enough—growing up, or after being hurt, or whatever. That’s... that’s how it works. We wouldn’t have left you, or...” Declan’s apologetic face tightened into something worse. “We’re not monsters, no matter what you think right now.”

“How comforting,” Casey gritted out, barely remembering to keep his voice low. “Are you jailers? Kidnappers? Because I still do not want to be here, wherever here is. I want to go home. Are you going to drive me there if I sit down in the snow and refuse to go on?”

Declan visibly gritted his teeth, and then said quietly. “No.”

Casey didn’t mean to react at all—it wasn’t like that answer was a surprise—but the bare word jerked a wordless snarl out of him that made Declan’s eyes go wide as he rocked back on his heels.

He put his hands up and added, “Not—not yet, Casey. If you really want to, later, then yes, but... can you give us some time? Get to know us?”

Casey growled a little before he could put together actual words. “What I’ve gotten to know, so far, is exactly why Mama and Da thought me and the boys would be better off growing up anywhere but in this pack, and why they told you to keep it secret that they were going. Because the Mactire wouldn’t let them leave, would he?”

“It was dangerous to go!” Declan snapped, his hands coming down and closing into fists. “Obviously it was dangerous, look what happened! Pack has to stick together, that’s how we stay safe.”

“Yes!” Casey snapped. “That’s why I want to go home to my pack—the Niemis, who took me in when I was lost and needed a home, and killed the hunters who hurt me, and buried my mother and father and brothers instead of leaving them to rot where they fell! That’s the pack I’m sticking with. That’s the pack that gives a shit about me.”

“Casey, we didn’t know,” Declan said. “If I’d known, I swear—”

“You were a child,” Casey snapped, and the truth of it sapped a little of his anger. He blew out a breath and went on in a softer voice. “I’m not blaming you, Dec. But the Mactire, and the rest of the pack—if they cared more about keeping us safe than about keeping us, they could have handled it differently. They could have...”

Casey hesitated, trying to think of exactly how another pack would have prevented his family being found by hunters, and then his thoughts stopped cold.

How had the hunters found them?

“Dec,” Casey said slowly, racking his brain for the details of that conversation in the hotel room. It had been so much, all at once, but Declan had said, hadn’t he? He’d said... “How long was it between when Mama and Da took us and left, and when you told the Mactire and he tracked us down?”

Declan’s shoulders sagged. “I kept the secret for a day and a night, and next morning the Mactire asked me directly and I told what I knew. He left right away to find you, but late that night he came back and told me it was too late. He had your dolly, and your blood was all over it. Things from the others, too.”

Thirty-six hours. Less than that. How on earth could his parents, who must have been well aware of the need for caution, have given themselves away that fast? Werewolves had sometimes slipped and gotten caught before the Revelation, but from all the stories Casey ever heard, that was a matter of being in one place for a long time—long enough for word of some strange behavior or unusual habits to reach the ears of hunters.

How had they given themselves away so fast to hunters who had a use for a little omega child? What were the odds?

But it didn’t make sense, the thing he was thinking. It couldn’t. It was monstrous beyond anything Casey could imagine. No one could do something like this—it was a thousand times worse than what Adam had suspected his father of doing, and that had turned out to be something else entirely. What Casey was thinking couldn’t have really happened. No pack would follow an alpha who could do something like that.

And what use would it have been to the Mactire, anyway?

Well. Aside from vividly confirming that the outside world was as dangerous as he said, and justifying anything he did after that to keep the pack together, for their own good.

Casey pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes, struggling to think it through. “Why—why did Mama and Da want to leave? Did they tell you, when they let you decide?”

Declan stayed silent for too long. Casey lowered his hands and looked, and Declan went on staring at the snow as he said, “I... I don’t want you to get the wrong idea—”

“For me,” Casey cut in, because nothing else would make Declan hesitate like this. He felt sick. “They left because of me.”

Declan didn’t look up. “Mama was supposed to be the Mactire’s mate, when they were younger. In a small pack, there aren’t many options who aren’t too closely related, and it’s mostly decided long before anyone’s old enough to have an opinion about it. But Mama ran off with Da and they stayed away until after she’d felt me move, so no one could argue with them. He wasn’t the Mactire then—I remember the challenge, when he took it from the old Mactire. You were just a baby then. Things were still... looser.”

Control had gotten tighter under this Mactire. Of course it had. He’d lose so much power if his pack realized they could just go live anywhere, that they could join a pack who didn’t do this. Some of them might actually like this life, might choose it—but some wasn’t all, and the Mactire was clearly the kind who would leave ninety-nine loyal pack members to chase down the one who strayed.

“He started asking when you turned five, I think,” Declan said. “Asking Mama and Da to agree, to let him talk to you about it.”

Casey stared. “When I was five.”

Declan did look up at that with an expression of shock that felt impossibly sincere. “Not—he wouldn’t have done anything when you were five. He wouldn’t have forced you.”

Casey thought about what it would have felt like, when he was five or six years old—or thirteen or fourteen, just starting his heats, starting to feel grown and still so much a child—to have the Mactire’s attention turned on him, and know exactly what the Mactire wanted from him.

“He wouldn’t have to, not in a way that looked like force,” Casey said, holding Declan’s gaze. “I just wouldn’t ever have been able to say no to him, from long before I was old enough to know that I should have the choice. Just like he knew every single thing to say to get you believing that I wouldn’t mind this, that it was for my own good and I truly belong here with you.”

Declan recoiled a little, and Casey said, “When did he tell you he knew I was alive?”

Declan stared at him, silently absorbing the implication that Casey wasn’t going to spell out unless he could prove it somehow: the Mactire had known Casey was alive for a long time, probably all along. He had only told Declan when he was ready to send Declan after Casey—when it was useful for him that Declan should know.

Declan shook his head a little and turned away, saying quietly, “Come on, Casey. Get off your feet, heal up. There’s food.”

Casey stood still for a moment, watching Declan walk away, before he decided that it was even worse than watching Declan wait for him and twice as useless.

The tents were set up in the same configuration, but among trees this time. Casey wondered if the way they had been set up in that other field was partially determined by where the trees grew in this camp—or in some other camp, years ago, that they never even visited anymore.

Hidden by the trees, they weren’t covered with snow, which would make them considerably less soundproof. Casey reminded himself to keep his voice down, but Maura wasn’t even there when he limped into the omegas’ tent, so he couldn’t try to get information out of her.

As he sank gratefully onto his cot and started unlacing his boots, it occurred to Casey that Maura might not be nearly as glad to see him leave as he’d thought the day before. Because if the Mactire chose who Maura would mate with, and if Casey was currently the Mactire’s first choice... Casey could guess who his second choice was.

And if Declan had had to choose between the Mactire mating with the sibling Declan hadn’t seen in twenty years or the omega he obviously felt something for...

All the more reason Casey had to convince Maura to get out with him, even if it was more likely to be a matter of taking Casey along when Maura got out of here. Casey’s feet throbbed and itched and burned as he peeled off his damp socks, and he winced at the bloodstains. He wasn’t going to get those marks out, and he’d rubbed a hole in one of the heels, too. Casey set them aside to clean and darn as well as he could once he’d seen to his feet.

His duffle bag and midwife’s kit had both been set neatly by his bed, so at least Declan had done that much without totally fucking him over. Casey snagged his midwife’s kit and scooted back so just his feet dangled over the side of the bed before he opened it.

He was already frowning—the weight of it felt faintly off—and when he looked inside he had to stifle a scream of rage. It still escaped him in a half-choked noise, a sort of high-pitched gurgling growl. Neatly bundled at the top of his kit were a bunch of empty plastic bags where his wolfsbane had been: everything he brought from home, and all the interesting new varietals he’d collected while traveling. Even the little bottles he’d filled with compounded pills were empty.

His heart raced painfully fast, panic coming on as he realized he had absolutely nothing he could take to calm himself if he needed to.

And just like a glass of water that was flat and warm any other time tasted cool and sweet on a stifling hot day, he felt something else, cast into sharp relief by his own spiraling panic. Something steady and calm—a line he could hold on to.

Adam. He knew the flavor of that solidity even before he recognized what he was feeling and how and why. For a moment he just held on, bracing himself and letting his panic blow away while he held still. When it passed it left him exhausted, curled around his decimated kit and staring blankly across the tent at Maura’s bed.

He was calm, though, and able to think. It made the touch of Adam’s feelings less obvious when the contrast faded, but he knew it was there now. He could find it.

They had a bond. A pregnancy bond, it must be, as tiny and new and hard to detect as the barely-begun pregnancy Casey carried. But it was there between them, already beginning to knit them together, and already as necessary to Casey as that little life inside him.

It was also precisely as fragile as that life. Casey could easily miscarry—by taking wolfsbane to calm himself, for instance, if he’d had any around. The pregnancy might slip no matter what he did. It happened as often as not; no one knew that better than a midwife.

But Casey wasn’t the only one who knew he was pregnant. Adam might, if he’d noticed the bond from his end—he’d known it was a possibility for days now. The Mactire knew it, too, from Casey’s refusal to shift; that meant there was a special way he could threaten Casey.

For a second, Casey thought, Not if I do it first.

He could shift right now, and again in the morning, and that might well be enough to shake it loose. Then the Mactire couldn’t threaten him, and Adam wouldn’t worry about what Casey was feeling, and maybe do something stupid because of it.

But Casey would lose that little thread of connection with Adam. He might get it back, once he got out of here and back to Adam; he would have more heats. And they could forge a bond on purpose, seal it with a bite, do everything properly.

All Casey had to do was send them back to square one. All he had to do was get out of here without being able to reach out to Adam and feel him there waiting.

No. This was his, and he would keep it until he couldn’t anymore.

Someone pushed through the tent flap, and Casey jerked to sit upright, hands raised in self-defense.

But it was Maura, who paused just inside to shoot him a wary look. Casey lowered his hands and finally actually looked into his kit for the salve he’d wanted to put on his feet.

“You all right?” Maura asked stiffly, in a way that suggested that it might be her unpleasant but unavoidable duty to do something about it if Casey wasn’t. “Declan said he heard you... make a weird noise.”

Casey scowled over Maura’s shoulder. Declan wasn’t that close, but he was doubtless focused in this direction from wherever he was. “Well, Declan knows fucking why, since he’s the one who brought my stuff.”

Maura stayed where she was, like... well, like she was waiting to find out if Casey was going to take it out on her. Casey suspected she’d give at least as good as she got if he tried it, and for a second he was tempted. It would give them both a chance to get this out of their systems, and Maura might like him better by the time they’d both gotten in their licks.

Casey wasn’t good at being mad at people who didn’t deserve it, though, and of everyone involved Maura deserved his anger the least. Casey shook his head and gestured toward his kit with his elbow as he opened the little jar of salve. “Declan threw out all my wolfsbane, so I’ve got nothing to make medicine with if I need it.”

“But wolfsbane is poison,” Maura replied, sounding honestly baffled and a little shocked.

Casey couldn’t formulate a reply to that. He just stared. He’d realized the Mactire must be keeping the pack ignorant of a lot of things, but how could any pack survive without knowing at least a little about that?

“It’s one of the reasons we move camp so often,” Maura said seriously, coming inside and sitting down gingerly on her bed. “If werewolves stay in one place, the earth turns against us and brings forth poison to drive us off.”

Casey opened and closed his mouth, struggling to find an entry point to this conversation that wasn’t everything you know is wrong. “Is that what your pack’s midwife taught you?”

Maura’s expression closed off, making Casey aware of how open and earnest she’d briefly been. “Nana’s dead. She didn’t teach me anything.”

The window in the bathroom wasn’t supposed to open; Mama broke it, and her arm was all covered in blood when she picked Catie up. Catie was shaking, holding his dolly close to his mouth so he wouldn’t cry.

There was something pounding at the door, louder than Catie’s heart, louder than Mama’s. Mama put her face right against Catie’s, their foreheads pressed together, but her voice still sounded far away.

“You just run, bunny. As soon as you get your feet under you, you run and you keep running until you find people like us. And if they don’t smell good, kind, you run again. You find good people, find a new family. You’ll be all right. Just don’t go back. Run.”

Then Mama pushed Catie out through the window, and the glass left in the window scratched at Catie’s head and arms, but he still had his dolly so he still didn’t cry, not so anyone could hear.

Mama let go, and Catie fell, not just like from Mama’s arms—like from a tree. He hit the ground hard in the dark, unprepared, and the breath was knocked out of him. He lay still, stunned, staring up at the broken-out window, and he heard an awful crash, and then Mama’s voice, loud and angry like it never was even when Catie made the worst messes, even when the boys fought and wrecked their clothes and spilled food on the ground.

Mama shouted, “You tell Conall if he wants me this badly he can come find me in hell! You’re not taking me back to him.”

Then there was another awful sound, and then the pounding of Mama’s heart went silent, leaving Catie’s heart beating all alone.

Catie dropped his dolly and screamed, and he didn’t stop screaming until the hunters got him and shoved something in his mouth to make him stop. He didn’t remember what Mama said about running until much, much later.

Casey jerked upright, shaking, a choked scream caught in his throat. “Adam,” he gasped. “Adam, my mama, remember—my mama, she told me—she said—”

Adam wasn’t there, but at the same time he was; Casey was cold, alone, but he could feel Adam murmuring to him, comforting Casey like he always did after one of these dreams. He couldn’t quite make out the words, but he knew the meaning, and he curled back down into the blankets as Adam soothed him. I’ve got you, I’m here. I’ll remember. It’s okay, I’ve got you. You’re safe now, we’re safe. We’re all safe now.

Casey pressed his empty hands to his mouth so he wouldn’t make a sound, and eventually he slept again and dreamed of nothing but Adam sharing his bed.

Maura was still in the tent when Casey woke up, sitting up and watching him, strangely intent. There was no way Casey could get dressed without her seeing the notebook—and then he realized it was hanging off the bed. He’d moved around in his sleep, nearly pushed it onto the floor.

He caught it and hugged it to his chest. It was still wrapped in plastic, no scent on it but Casey’s, but he pressed his mouth against it anyway, holding in all the frantic excuses and explanations he was tempted to offer.

“What is that?” Maura asked. She sounded tentative, but not so wary of him as she’d been the day before.

Casey figured it was the best opening he was going to get. If he’d been thinking straight he would have had some kind of plan for how to use this to connect with Maura, but as it was, he’d just woken up and he had that vague grimy feeling in his brain that meant he’d dreamed something he didn’t want to remember, and he just blurted out the truth. “It’s Adam’s. My... boyfriend, I guess? Mate, almost. He gave this to me before I left with Declan, because he was worried about me. Worried I wouldn’t come back. So he made me promise to bring this back to him, because it’s important to him—it was his dad’s, and his dad died when he was a kid.”

Maura looked away, but Casey hadn’t lost her entirely. She just couldn’t look at him when he talked about Adam like that. Or about leaving. Or about dead parents, now that Casey thought of it.

That tickled something in his brain, but Casey pushed it aside, focusing on Maura. “Your parents...?”

“When I was a kid,” Maura said, her voice tightly controlled. “And then I wasn’t a kid anymore, because I didn’t have parents. But I have the pack, and the pack keeps me safe. Omegas need packs.”

“Yeah,” Casey said. “Before I met Adam, I hardly ever left my pack’s lands since they adopted me. I—”

Casey was suddenly on his feet, and running out into the snow. It was burning cold against his bare feet, and Maura was shouting after him, running, but that didn’t matter, because—

The howling started a moment later, a pattern Casey recognized as intruder, danger even though he couldn’t have said he remembered a thing about the pack’s howls a moment before. There was snarling and shouting under the howls, and everyone was rushing together into the space in the center of the camp, gathering up children, taking up watchful stances. Someone ran to a truck and started it up.

The Mactire emerged from a tent, walking slow, looking elaborately unconcerned. His gaze fell on Casey and raked over him from head to bare toes, and Casey felt desperately naked even though he was wearing the long-sleeved shirt and flannel pajama pants he’d slept in. The shirt was bright red, the pants red and blue plaid, making Casey once again the most conspicuous person in sight. He pressed Adam’s notebook hard against his ribs and forced himself to look away from the Mactire, toward the sound of fighting as it came nearer.

They came into the camp, two wolves and four men escorting a big male alpha wolf. An intruder who discovered the pack’s camp couldn’t be allowed to carry that knowledge away, but no one would kill him without the Mactire’s approval.

The wolf who had found them hulked above the pack’s wolves, both of them dark-furred like Casey’s own wolf shape. His fur was all in shades of gray, darkening to black at his ears, fading to white at his feet.

“Adam,” Casey said. It was hardly more than a whisper when he meant to shout, but Adam was here.

Just like the last time, Adam shifted when Casey called his name. He stood there, naked in the snow, looking only at Casey, as if the rest of the pack didn’t matter as long as he could get to Casey.

His cheek looked swollen. Casey wondered if they’d hurt him anywhere else; he couldn’t smell any blood.

“Casey,” Adam said, his voice level, ringing in the silence as the pack stared. He was speaking all right; they couldn’t have really hurt him. Yet. “What did you want me to remember last night? I didn’t quite hear you.”

Casey remembered, then, the words he’d said in the night, begging Adam to remember, and he remembered the dream that preceded them. The memory—the thing he’d forgotten first and hardest. He had it back, now. He knew what was at the center of everything that had happened to him, everything he’d had to forget in order to live.

Casey swayed a little and someone caught his arm, the same hard grip as the first time Declan got to him—but Declan was standing by Adam, looking grim. Casey looked over his shoulder at Maura, who was helping him stay on his feet. She had heard what Casey said, not Adam. She had been looking at him strangely this morning.

Casey looked at the Mactire, who was just standing there, cool and calm and smiling, letting this play out. Why shouldn’t he? Adam was naked, alone, surrounded by six of the Mactire’s pack. Casey was still his hostage.

Casey kept his eyes on the Mactire as he answered Adam. “I said I wanted you to remember my mama, because I remembered the last thing she said to me—and the last thing she said to the hunters, before she died.”

The quality of the silence changed, and the mocking smile hardened away from the Mactire’s face, his expression turning cold and cruel.

Casey kept talking. His mama deserved to be heard. “She said, You tell Conall—”

That was all he got out before the Mactire’s face twisted into a mask of rage, and his roar drowned out anything Casey might have said. He knew what Casey was going to say; he knew, as Casey’s mother had known, that he had told the hunters to take her alive, so that the Mactire could heroically rescue her—and make her his mate, once her husband and children were dead.

The Mactire—who no one had dared call by the name Conall since he challenged the old Mactire, when Casey was a baby—lunged toward him. Casey looked past him, his eye drawn by a flash of movement, and the Mactire stopped short and whirled on Adam, who had broken away from his escort to run at the Mactire.

“That’s my bonded mate you’re snarling at,” Adam said, working his jaw like it was sore as he stepped up to the Mactire. “You don’t touch him without going through me.”

The Mactire collected himself a little, the instant of heedless rage banking itself; he seemed to remember the existence of the pack, and the need to at least pretend to follow the rules. Looking around, he called out, “You all heard this alpha challenge me.”

Casey looked around the pack too. They were all standing very still, very quiet. The children were being held close, hidden behind skirts. No one thought the danger was past yet, just because the intruder was one unarmed werewolf.

How many of them had heard what Casey said, and knew what it meant? How many of them had always known, whether they admitted it to themselves or not? An alpha who would do such things to his own pack, who would bargain lives to hunters, wouldn’t have only done it once. How many had disappeared, over the years? Elders, and young ones who reached the age of making trouble...

“I accept your challenge,” the Mactire said grandly, turning back to face Adam, and in the same motion, punched him hard in the side. Adam folded forward around the blow, dark blood flying from his mouth and hitting the Mactire’s face.

But it didn’t smell like blood. It smelled sickly-sweet and weirdly familiar.

The Mactire reared backward, clawing at his own face, first in silence, and then with a horrible bubbling scream. Adam followed him as he staggered backward, his hands getting under the Mactire’s, clamping hard around his throat. Even from ten yards away, Casey could see the expert pressure of Adam’s thumbs against both carotid arteries, cutting off the flow of blood to the brain with perfect anatomical precision.

Adam dropped down to his knees as the Mactire collapsed under him, laying him almost gently in the snow. Casey could almost hear the skin burning under the dark splotch covering the Mactire’s face, and he rubbed the outside of his pinky finger against the opposite palm.

That was the smell. Wolfsbane—the varietal Casey had only ever encountered in a greenhouse on the Hathaway pack’s territory. Casey was the only person the Hathaways had ever known to react like he had, burned on contact. Adam had gambled on that sensitivity being genetic, shared by the whole shallow gene pool of the pack. He’d carried it in his mouth to be sure he could keep it with him long enough to count.

Adam straightened up to stand over the Mactire, collapsed in the snow and looking strangely small. It had all happened so fast; everyone was still frozen, staring. The only sound in the camp was the running engine of the truck that someone had started up, ready to flee.

“That means I win, right?” Adam said. “So Casey and I will be leaving, unless anyone else wants to stop us.”

One woman made a movement, a choked, guttural sound erupting from her, her hand flashing out with fingers curled, but her mate caught her and held her tight, shaking his head hard.

Adam nodded. “If anyone wishes to leave when we do, the Niemis and the Hathaways—Casey’s pack and my father’s—have offered safe haven to anyone who asks it, for as long as it’s needed. If you want to see what life is like in another pack, you’re welcome to stay with them, and free to leave when you like if it’s not for you.”

Maura’s hand tightened hard on Casey’s arm and then abruptly released; Casey wanted to look back, but Adam’s gaze fell on him and Casey couldn’t see anything else.

Adam had come for him. Adam, so determined to give every omega their freedom, to never be a stereotypical chest-pounding alpha, had come for him and fought for him.

Adam abruptly grinned, and Casey was grinning too; Adam took one long stride toward him and Casey was running, jumping. Adam caught him as Casey’s legs wrapped around Adam’s—naked—hips. Casey had one hand on Adam’s cheek, the other arm wrapped tight around his neck, and he leaned in for a kiss only to have Adam turn his face sharply away.

“Fuck,” Adam gasped. “One part of this I didn’t think through. I can’t kiss you. That stuff was in my mouth, I’ll burn you.” He only held Casey tighter as he spoke, the fingers of one hand digging into Casey’s ass, the other hand spanning Casey’s ribs.

Casey groaned and pressed his face in against Adam’s throat instead, breathing in his scent in great heaving breaths. He was here, really here, alive and safe, not at the other end of a tenuous bond. Here.

Adam nuzzled against his temple, sighing a relief that Casey felt fizzing through his own body, and he realized he didn’t know where his emotions left off and Adam’s began. It was going to be a confusing eight months or so, if this kept up, but Casey just found himself laughing a little, in sheer shocked joy.

Adam laughed right along with him, incredulous happiness ricocheting between them. Casey picked his head up, his mouth open to speak, and he saw movement over Adam’s shoulder.

There was a confused fraction of a second where Casey tried to scream—he thought someone screamed, but his own breath was still caught in his throat—and Adam was trying to turn to face the threat and push Casey behind him all at once.

He couldn’t, because Casey was clinging to him, frozen by the sight of the Mactire on his feet and staggering toward them. His face was a burned ruin, one eye burning with rage and the other blinded with the dark smear of wolfsbane still clinging and dripping. His teeth were bared, arms outstretched and caught halfway through shifting, fur and claws overtaking human hands.

Then an arm looped over the Mactire’s shoulders from behind, and a hand caught him by the ruined jaw and jerked his head around. His neck snapped with a wet, sharp sound that echoed through the camp.

Declan let the Mactire’s body drop to the snow, and then bent over him. Casey didn’t realize he’d drawn a knife until he saw the Mactire’s throat open up, blood spilling dark into the snow. The knife was rammed through his throat, as if to pin him to the earth in the spreading puddle of steaming blood.

Declan straightened up. Blood covered both his hands, and his face was nearly as pale as the snow, but his voice was steady. “I will not allow my brothers to be harmed by treachery. I have killed the Mactire, and I am the Mactire, unless any of you will stand against me.”

Declan’s gaze turned in Casey’s direction—and moved past him, to where Maura must still be standing.

“I will do my best for you,” Declan went on, his gaze sweeping across the pack again. “But I won’t lead a pack who doesn’t choose to follow. Any who wish to go with Adam and Casey are free to go, and free to come back later if they wish.”

There was a silence, except for one set of steps turning and walking away. By the time Casey could tear his eyes from Declan to look, Maura was already out of sight.