I worry I’m dreaming all this up.

“Hey,” I say again when she whimpers, shaking her head and rocking forward and back, as she squeezes her eyes shut.

“I can’t handle spaces this small. I panic. I always panic. You can’t be here if I panic,” she says almost like she’s checked out, slamming up again.

The steady splatter of liquid slapping the surface above us tells me the cement has started pouring, and Vance still has a while before he’ll even start looking.

“Violet, I need you to calm down,” I tell her as she makes another pained cry and slams up and into the casket.

This time, I feel us jostle, and I hear the metal groan.

I tense under her when she slams back again. “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. You can’t be here,” she says in a more panicked tone, her pupils so small I can barely see them, even though they should be dilated to the fullest in the dark.

She rocks hard again, groaning in frustration. “I can do this,” she says, though it sounds more like she’s saying it to herself.

“Violet, I really think I need you to calm down. Tell me what you are. Tell me what’s happening right now. Talk to me. Just focus on—”

Her head pops back over mine, and she grabs the metal clamps holding down my wrists. Awkwardly, she starts pulling hard, and in the next instant, I hear the metal groaning next to both sides of my face as her heartbeat starts to steadily slow down even more, pattering lower, and humming quieter.

“Violet,” I say again as the metal snaps and my arms fly forward.

I grab both sides of her face the second I’m free, even as my elbows slap the silver panels of the coffin, sizzling over the vast space. “Focus on me.”

I’ll figure out how the fucking hell she broke them that easily later.

“Don’t move,” she says in that same shaky tone. “Don’t move. And don’t speak. Don’t let me see you,” she whispers like she’s pleading with me as her heartbeat continues to drop.

She pulls all sorts of little vials out, putting them in one of my hands and closing my fingers around it. “Don’t let me see you,” she repeats. “Throw all of that at me if I do, and then run.”

She yanks out of my grip, and works her body around to be facing the other way. I watch, too dumbfounded to process what’s going on, as her heart continues to click down like it’s a timer.

I hear the last three beats spaced farther and farther apart as she slams into the top over and over, her back staying to me.

When no fourth beat plays, I hold my breath and go perfectly still, because she pushes up so hard that I hear things breaking above us. Cement suddenly crumbles in in partially settled pieces, and then a splatter of liquid rains down behind it, spilling into the casket like rough, cold slush.

I hear a small, short, broken cry of effort as Violet pushes up harder, and the whole casket lid buckles as it flies off at her end. The force propels it so hard that it bends it back and stabs into the ground beside us, just barely staying over my face.

More cement pours in, and I realize she’s also freed my ankles from their restraints at some point.

She’s already gone. One second she’s there, and the next she’s not.

With a lot of maneuvering, I pull myself up, hearing the sounds of someone screaming just as the cement stops pouring, and something massive and heavy groans as it slams into something else.

I think that was the cement truck…

A series of cracks ring in sequence before a loud crash creates background noise for the shouts, screams, and whirring motions above.

“What the fucking—” The shouted words are cut off, and an incoherent roar of shouts start right after that.

I hear more screaming, the bloodcurdling kind, before something wet splatters in the distance. A whisper of air whirs, as those same telling bloodcurdling screams erupt from one place to another, the last screams coming so fast that it’s impossible for them all to be dying at once.

The cement laps at my waist as I hold myself against the wall of the hole, remembering her warning.

The desperation in her tone as she told me not to move. Not to let her see me. The panic and fear in her eyes as her pupils turned to pinpricks…

The stopping of her heart just before she lost all control...

I hold the breath that tries to release, as a cold, sickening chill of realization hits. The thought of suffocating hallucinations cross my mind again, as the screams patter on, because there’s absolutely no way I’m right.

It only lasts a matter of a few minutes before all the screams cut out. The loud crashing of things above me continues, and the silent killer leaves only a whirring of wind in her impossibly fast wake.

It isn’t until it’s gone utterly silent that I risk releasing my breath.

That’s when I hear the soft sobbing from above, and I close my eyes, shaking my head slowly, exhaling much harder than I did when I learned she was a Portocale.

Without giving myself time to process, I jump up, grab the edge, and heave myself over it.

I end up hovering over the edge when I simply freeze, staring at everything around me in stunned silence.

“Why were there so many?” I hear Violet whispering, but I don’t move my head.

I can’t.

There’s too much I can’t look away from.

Wolves in fur and wolves in flesh…they’re all torn apart. On estimation, I’d say there are at least twenty…all ripped apart with sheer brute force.

Blood is splattered on every single surface, painting the barn’s insides red.

Everything is painted red.

A perfectly detached eyeball rolls to a stop just in front of me, as if to punctuate the entire scene.

“There were just so many, and I couldn’t. I can’t,” Violet is stammering in her shaky voice, straining out the last words through another sob.

Slowly, I heave myself the rest of the way up, quickly pulling my cement-covered shirt over my head and dropping it aside.

“Why were we in the ground? Why is my throat slit? Are the omegas okay?” she prattles on, sounding scattered and not really present.

Two severed heads lie at my feet as I strip out of my jeans. My gaze moves up to where two separate, mangled bodies dangle from the rafters above.

My line of view shifts to find several other bodies or body parts up there, bumping the body count up closer to the number I caught at a quick glimpse when I first woke.

“I didn’t mean to. They were burying me. Why were they burying us?” Violet goes on through her broken whimpers, and my eyes finally land on her.

She’s sitting and staring at her bloody fingertips as she rubs them together, her body trembling as she sits with her knees pulled to her chest.

She’s drenched in blood and cement. It looks like she’s taken a swim in one of Arion’s fountains and fell into a construction site at the same time.

Her eyes are vacant and barely dilated, as her heartbeat slowly but steadily climbs.

“Shhh,” I say softly as I go to scoop her up.

Her arms limply come around my neck, as though she’s functioning on autopilot.

“No one’s supposed to know,” she rambles on, her head shaking as her pupils stall their growth. “Mom said more people would hunt me. But there are monsters everywhere. Not just me.”

“Not just you,” I tell her as I kiss the top of her head, trying to wrap my own head around the amount of damage she’s done, while mentally assessing each wolf’s face.

I see three absent in total I need to find before anyone breathes a word about this.

I carry Violet to the broken, shattered doors of the barn.

“They shouldn’t have buried me. I didn’t do anything to them,” she goes on, hiccupping around another sob, like she’s fighting to get her breathing under control. “I can’t panic. I shouldn’t panic. They panicked me. It was too late. I can’t turn back once it’s started. It was just too late.”

“Shh,” I say again, exhaling harshly as I put her down.

Her arms fall away from my neck, and she wraps them around her legs, as she starts rocking on the ground.

I look back at the carnage still left behind.

She tore them all apart in under five minutes, and for the first time, I notice the pink ribbon lacing through her neck, the skin there already pulling together in a healing process.

She can’t…die.

She can’t panic.

And none of this can be happening.

Worried Arion will be torturing wolves to find her, I start searching dismembered torsos for phones, finally finding one in a shirt pocket that isn’t too badly damaged.

I dial Vance first, and he answers immediately.

“Yes?” he answers with an edge to his tone.

My gaze flicks to Violet as she whispers over and over, “Mom said tell no one. No one. No one.”

Walking away in case he hears her, I say, “It’s me.”

“Emit,” he says on a harsh exhale.

“That’s Emit?” I hear Arion ask with an eerily calm tone. “Tell him I’m going to kill one wolf for every hour Violet is missing, starting with the two who took her, and work my way down to any wolf who smells even the faintest—”

“Violet’s with me,” I tell Vance, even though Arion is the one running his mouth.

“The omegas said she was hurt—”

“She’s fine,” I say as I glance over my shoulder to find Violet staring vacantly out at the woods in front of her, still rocking.

Her pupils are still too small as she rubs her fingers together. “She’s slightly traumatized, but physically fine,” I add tightly.

I hear something akin to a small scuffle, before I Damien’s voice comes over the phone. “Where are you?” he asks very coldly.

I glance around, noting that I’m definitely not in my woods. “That remains to be determined. Put me back on with Vance.”

He curses as Vance’s voice comes back on the line.

“I know you take issue with hurting your wolves, but tonight that changes unless there’s a damn good reason Violet was—”

“A very small portion of my wolves were involved in the mutiny tonight, and Violet was just a token they used. They wanted to restart the wars, and force you to fight within the parameters of the law of heavy exposure.”

“That’s the most half-cocked mutinous plan yet,” Vance growls.

My eyes flick over to Violet, seeing the blood-soaked satin lacing through her neck.

“Yeah. Luckily they fucked up every part of it,” I lie, knowing there’d definitely be hell to pay had she died.

The wars would have started.

Arion doesn’t play nice when things are taken from him.

It’s clear he’s developed a small attachment to Violet.

For the first time, I see the power this little gypsy already has, and an uneasy feeling fills me. Mostly because this gypsy has no clue what she even is, and she’s certainly unaware of the power she’s unintentionally garnered over the three of them.