It was hard to catch his scent, what with the chaos unfolding around me. There were still a few guards putting up a fight, despite the tide having turned in our favor – I guessed that they were loyal to this man to the end, for some reason, to the point where they would dismiss the words of his son as nothing more than attempts to twist them to his point of thinking. Maybe they’d been part of the inner circle. Other monsters who had known about this stuff all along and didn’t care much who it happened to or what was going on. Maybe they were threatened with the same punishment as betrayers and would rather die there battling in the compound than face what they had condoned for so long.

I lifted my head to check on Luke, Ethan, and Anton, and found them fighting fiercely over by the first prison, taking on at least four guards who seemed to have centered their attentions on them. But they all had that wild-eyed look about them that told me that they were going to be fine, despite the blood matted around their ruffs. Most of it clearly wasn’t theirs, thank god.

Finally, I latched on to a familiar scent near one of the prison blocks. It was faint, but there, and I chased it down, following it across a deserted part of the compound and up towards the door to a tall tower. I scurried up the steps and, sure enough, the smell got stronger, filling my senses, flooding my brain, until I came to a halt outside a small wooden door with a tiny barred window. I shifted back, not caring for my nakedness, and stood on tiptoes to look through the pane.

“Rafe!” I called, my voice strangled and desperate. His back was to me and he was leaner than the last time I’d seen him, but it looked like it just might be-

“Arianna?”

He turned over, and the breath left me in a whoosh. I scrambled with the door, but found it locked.

He scrambled to his feet. “Arianna, I can’t believe-”

“Hold that thought.” I darted up a few more steps and searched frantically for the keys, fingers trembling as I found them hanging on a hook nearby. I grabbed for them and brought them back down to the door. I found the largest one and pushed it into the rusty lock and, to my great relief, the door swung open.

“Oh my God,” I gasped as I practically fell over the threshold towards him. “You’re alive.”

“Yeah, mostly.”

He wrapped his arms around me. I couldn’t believe how good it felt to be back in his arms like this, after all that had happened. His bare skin against mine, our bodies entwined, the man I loved back with me where he belonged. I swore right then and there that I would never let any of the brothers be separated from me again.

I pulled away from him and, in the light, got a better look at his face. I clapped my hand over my mouth when I saw what they had done to him.

“Your eye!” I exclaimed, reaching out to touch the side of his face, but he turned away from me and lowered his gaze to the ground.

“I know,” he muttered. His right eye was missing, nothing by scar tissue where it had once been. I felt a lump in my throat. “They planned to give me x-ray vision.”

“I’m so sorry,” I breathed. “We should have come sooner. We tried, Rafe, we did-”

“I never doubted that. And all that matters is that you’re here now,” he replied. “Where are the others? Anton, Luke, Ethan? Are they safe”

“They’re down below.” I pointed back down the tower. “They were fighting what’s left of the guards down there. Rafe, I think this place is done for. I showed the pack what their alpha was doing, with the experimentation and all of it, and they just…so many of them turned.”

“Thank God,” Rafe growled. “If they hadn’t done it, I would have burned this place to the ground myself.”

“Come on, we need to get you out of here.” I took his hand, but before I could say anything else, he had pulled me against him once more.

“Sorry, I just need one more second.” He buried his face into my neck and breathed in deeply. “I never thought I’d see you again, Arianna.”

“I missed you so much,” I breathed. In that moment, the fighting down below seemed to dim into nothing – no, the only thing that mattered was this man in my arms, the way he felt against me, how much I’d missed him. I felt as though some piece of me that had been out of place for days had slotted back in, just like that, and he turned his head and I lifted mine, and before I knew it we were kissing. Kissing like our lives depended on it.

And if we didn’t stop, they just might.

I pulled away, gazing at him to reassure myself once again that he was real.

“Come on. Let’s go.”

We rushed out and peered out one of the small windows in the tower to find that fighting had almost come to an end. The few guards who were still alive seemed to have backed down, crouching deep into their back paws in surrender. I bit my lip and scanned the place for the head of the MacLaren clan – I hadn’t seen him since that confrontation at the gate, and some part of me told me that he had fled in the face of what was going on. It wouldn’t have surprised me – he didn’t much strike me as the type who wanted to step up and take responsibility for his actions.

But I could see that the fight was almost over, and it made my head spin when I realized that this would be the end – the end of the MacLarens, the end of their experiments, the end of even maybe the war that had raged between the Kellums and the MacLarens for as long as I could remember. It was all over at last.

But if it was truly over, then what happened next?