Marco and I scrambled out of the pond. No time for clothes. No time to even try to dry off. Droplets trickled down my back and over my chest as we raced along the path toward the door. Any heat that had still been in me fled. All I felt was a chill piercing straight through the middle of my chest.

Another shot rang out, one that sounded as if it was coming from inside the mansion now. My muscles clenched. Memories flickered by in the back of my head. The clean pale halls of the dragon shifter home, splattered with blood. A sister, a father, another, sprawled on the floor. The click of a rifle being reloaded.

A coppery flavor rose in the back of my mouth. No. I wasn’t going to witness another slaughter. The rogues wouldn’t take my alphas from me. They wouldn’t take any one of the kin here.

But the thud of my heart and the shots still reverberating in my ears told me they most likely already had. And to barge onto the estate in the middle of the day, guns blazing, they must have had help.

Not from Julius. We’d left him locked in that holding room.

I glanced at Marco as we reached the door. “There’s another traitor among your kin,” I said. “That must be why Julius was being so dodgy. He really didn’t know that much. He was someone else’s puppet.”

Marco jerked open the door. “So it seems,” he said, his voice tight. “Which just means someone else here needs to feel my fangs in their jugular before the hour is over.”

If he could get close enough before he took a bullet. My lungs clenched. I grabbed his arm. “We’ll hurry, but we can’t go rushing right in there. They have weapons. We don’t. We’ll have to be smart.”

Marco shot me a sharp smile. “I know how to fight smart, princess. Don’t you worry about me. Didn’t you see me last night?”

He took my hand, squeezing it tight, and we ran together down the hall. Voices clamored and a scream echoed from up ahead. My nerves twitched to shift, to rain a furious fire down over everyone who threatened my kin, but I didn’t dare give in yet. I needed to save every bit of that energy for the actual fight.

Marco didn’t have the same concerns, though. He gave my fingers another squeeze and then let go. A second later, he was leaping forward in jaguar form. Within a few bounds, he’d completely outpaced me.

I couldn’t let him run into the fray alone. I pushed my legs harder, drawing on all the dragon strength I held even in my human body.

We turned a corner, and the main foyer with its expansive staircase came into view up ahead. A body was slumped at the base of the stairs. Three others ran past the hallway, their faces white with panic. A lion bounded forward and jerked to the side as one of the guns boomed. Blood boomed on his tawny shoulder.

“There’s no point in fighting!” a vibrant voice called out. Something about it struck me with a twang of recognition. “We’ve got no quarrel with the regular kin. Bring forward the alphas and the dragon shifter, and the rest of you can go about your business as usual.”

Another voice reached my ears from farther away: Nate’s rich baritone. “Away into your rooms, feline kin,” he was hollering. “Lock your doors. This is for us to deal with.”

Were the other alphas already there too? My pulse stuttered. I threw myself forward even faster, the muscles in my legs burning. Marco dashed on ahead of me, his paws thumping against the heavy pile of the rug.

The lion charged again, even with its limp. The air crackled with gunfire. There was a thump out of my view, but I could imagine all too well what had happened: the great cat slumping and sinking back into his human form. Blood pooling under his slack body.

Another memory flashed through my mind, so sharp and stark I lost my sense of the hall around me. I was five, clutching my wolf father’s arm. Sobbing so hard my stomach lurched. Hands tacky with blood. That click of the rifle. Then my mother’s fingers snatching my arm and wrenching me to my feet.

Away. Away.

I stumbled, and suddenly the foyer was right there in front of me. The body I’d imagined lay just a short distance from my feet—Coreen’s husband, his eyes unblinking. I jerked myself back against the wall.

Chaos reigned all around the staircase. The feline shifters hadn’t listened to Nate’s call, at least not most of them. Even in a crisis they apparently weren’t willing to listen to a bear. Panthers and tigers, lions and lynxes, snarled and lunged at animal foes of all sorts beneath and on either side of the steps. Several other bodies were slumped in its shadow. I couldn’t tell which were our people and which rogues. There seemed to be a hundred enemies battling us.

My alphas were in the middle of the fray, Nate’s bear and West’s wolf looking as though they were trying to urge the other shifters down the central hall while fending off the rogues, Aaron’s eagle swooping around the stairs to tackle a weasel about to leap at the others from above.

Alice was there too—in human form, pushing Kylie behind her in one corner. My pulse hiccupped. I didn’t know how they’d ended up in the room, but they were trapped now unless they ran through the fighting. My best friend braced her back against the wall, her arms hugged tight around herself. Her wide eyes were fixed on figures at the other end of the foyer.

Across the thick runner by the mansion’s double doors, the rogues still in human form were standing. Two held pistols and three others rifles. They’d gathered more weapons than the other groups had carried for previous attacks. My gut twisted at the sight—and then twisted tighter when I spotted a familiar face in their midst as they marched forward.

I’d counted wrong. There were three pistols, but the guy holding the third wasn’t a rogue. It was Phillipe, the patchy haired snow leopard shifter who’d made such a show of praising Marco last night.

As if he’d felt my gaze on him, his eyes darted to the side and found me. The woman beside him raised her rifle to take a shot at Aaron, clipping him in the wing. Phillipe smiled thinly and motioned to the others.

“There’s our dragon shifter,” he said, his jovial voice turned cruel. “Take her down.”

Three of the guns snapped toward me. I threw myself back toward an open doorway down the hall. At the same moment, Marco hurtled forward.

The jaguar slammed into the nearest rogue, knocking her over just as she fired. The guy next to him flinched, his shot going wild. Phillipe swore and pointed his pistol at Marco.

“No!” I reeled forward again, pushing off the floor as I did. The shift ripped through me faster than it ever had before. My muscles screamed, and my skin stung. A stabbing pain shot through my bones. But I was there, with a draconic roar, plowing straight into Phillipe before he could pull the trigger.

Aaron dove at one of the other armed rogues. Nate came charging through the battleground to join us, West wheeling to follow. The rogue Marco had tackled slammed her gun against the side of his head and managed to roll out from under him. He caught her wrist with his jaws. With a yank and a cracking sound, she gasped. The pistol clattered to the floor.

Phillipe had toppled when I’d hit him. He shifted as he sprang away. I melted his gun with a blast of dragon fire and swung around to pursue him. Where was Kylie? I had to make sure she stayed okay. I had to try to keep everyone here okay.

The snow leopard crossed Nate’s path, and the grizzly battered him to the side. All around us the battle raged on. One of the remaining human rogues fired a few more shots, one of them smacking Nate in the hip. Blood sprayed across the polished floorboards. Fur flew and animal voices shrieked. I could hardly tell which of the living bodies were my kin and which the rogues now.

In that glance, a hard certainty formed inside me. I didn’t care if Nate’s kin or Marco’s had doubted my ability to lead them. I didn’t care what the rogues might have offered them as an alternative. This was what the rogues brought. Violence, pain, mayhem. This was what they’d always brought.

Maybe I didn’t know how good a leader I’d be, but I sure as hell could do better by my kin than this.

With the strength of that resolve coiled tight in my belly, I blasted the rogue who’d shot Nate with a spurt of flame. He screeched and crumpled. The rogue whose wrist Marco had snapped was struggling to grip her gun with her weaker hand. I charred her to cinders before she could get a handle on it.

West had charged at one of the guys who held a rifle. The wolf snapped at the rogue’s legs while the guy tried to swivel far enough away to aim. He’d already gotten in one shot—a streak of starker red slashed through the ruddy silver fur on West’s back where a bullet had clipped him, only just missing his spine.

Rage flashed behind my eyes. I couldn’t fry the rogue without frying my mate at the same time. But I had teeth and claws too.

I bashed the guy’s head with a swipe of my foreleg. In an instant, West was on him, his teeth at the rogue’s throat. He kicked the rifle aside. I shot a bolt of white hot flame down on it, turning it into a bubbling mass of metal.

A sliver of a thought passed through my head: Mom would have made short work of the rogues that had attacked her family sixteen years ago, if she’d been able to fight like this. If she hadn’t had three daughters who couldn’t fully shift to try to protect.

The people we loved, the ones who were weaker than us—they made us vulnerable.

Panic washed over me. Kylie! I leapt over the staircase, searching for her. Searching for the snow leopard who’d managed to scramble through the fray.

I found both of them. Phillipe was facing off against Alice, still in her human form, but no less dangerous for it. He lunged at her, and she rammed her elbow into the side of his skull. The blow sent him staggering to the side. Kylie yelped. She groped toward a painting hanging just beside her. Heaving it off its hook, she hurled it at their attacker.

The corner of the heavy frame smacked Phillipe square in the head. I breathed a gust of fire toward the snow leopard, but he leapt out of the way at the last second. His cry of pain told me I’d at least singed him. He bolted away under the staircase.

With a roar, I barreled into the chaos of the fight. My talons picked off a jackal here, a rogue bear there, and another intruder, and another. The feline kin not too injured to keep fighting closed in around the dwindling number of remaining rogues. Which was a good thing, because the strain of the extended shift was catching up with me, with an even deeper pain than usual. Because I’d called my dragon form over me so quickly?

I’d have to ask Aaron about that, I thought vaguely as I tossed one last rogue against the wall. My muscles were contracting, no matter how hard I tried to hang on. I collapsed onto the floor. My human hands slammed into the floor, my human knees knocking the polished hardwood.

Sucking in a breath, I shoved myself to my feet. My gaze caught on a hunched form under the stairs.

Phillipe. The snow leopard sat curled in on himself. His left foreleg and most of that shoulder was burned black. His teeth were bared as he panted through the pain. Only the faintest shiver of sympathy touched me.

All of the blood spilled here was because of him. Why? So he didn’t have to listen to someone else telling him what to do? Because he thought he’d get some kind of glory among the rogues?

It didn’t fucking matter. The only thing that mattered was that he never did it again.

I strode over to him, slowing as I got closer. Phillipe snarled, but he clearly wasn’t capable of putting up much of an actual fight.

One of the other feline shifters, a cougar, came up beside me. “Drag him out,” I said to her. “Out where everyone can see.”

The snow leopard growled, but he couldn’t do more than squirm and wince as the cougar took him by the scruff of his neck. The larger cat dragged him out to where the noon sun streamed through the thrown open doors. I stalked after them. My jaw clenched.

The cougar let go of Phillipe and backed up a step. I loomed over the snow leopard, meeting his yellow-green gaze with a glare. From around the room, dozens of feline eyes fixed on me. And one pair of human eyes. Kylie gaped at me, her face still pale.

The thought of what she must think of me now sent a pang through my chest. But I couldn’t let those worries distract me. What I did here mattered a hell of a lot.

So I’d better do it good.

“Phillipe,” I said, pitching my voice loud. “You were kin, and you betrayed all the others you should have called kin. You brought all this destruction down on your alpha’s estate, your shifter community.” I swept my arm to indicate the entire foyer. “But I will give you a chance. Because I am not here to destroy if I can help it. So much of shifter kind has been broken by the rogues and kin like you. Will you help us rebuild it now? Or do you only care about wrecking things?”

Phillipe clung on to his feline form, his eyes narrowing. The muscles in his haunches bunched. I braced myself, feeling his intention. If that was how he wanted to end this, let them see him make the choice himself.

He threw himself off the floor with one final surge of strength, his jaws yawning as if to eat me whole.

My hand tingled as I drew a partial shift into my fingers. With the snow leopard’s sour breath in my face, I slashed my dragon talons across his neck, severing his throat.