Alarm painted the creature’s obsidian features, and she screamed a song both beautiful and hideous.

  The flashlight was heavier than it looked, the handle wet, and it slipped out of Bianca’s grip to clank on the pavers. Bianca hit her knees, grasping for the weapon, fumbling with the switch while the wraith at her side unraveled. Seeking tendrils of malevolence unspooled from her core and reached for us, the fine point of one limb tickling over the spot where my heart beat.

  Defiance, it seemed, was a crime more readily punishable than murder in the onryō’s book.

  “You can do this, Bianca.” Agony speared me as the magic fingers ripped into my chest, blood hot and wet on my skin as my heart gave a terrified thump. “This thing doesn’t stand a chance, not against a mother’s love.”

  Head buzzing, I dropped to my knees, hands clutching the wound.

  “Harlow.” Carter cried out my name from a million miles away.

  “My Jensen loved me.”

  A faint click perked my ears as if the sound was one I had waited on my whole life.

  “He was my first love, my only love.” A swath of light blasted the creature’s masklike face, splintering her expression. “He was so proud to learn I was pregnant that he cried. My big, strong mate, and he cried.”

  “He would have killed you.” The creature ramped up the musical quality of her voice. “That is not love.”

  “It wasn’t him.” Bianca’s devotion to her mate’s memory shined through brighter than the beam. “He would never have hurt me. Charybdis attacked me. Not Jensen. Never him.” A growl pumped through her throat. “The evil you do is your own. This is not me, this is not who I am. Killing those men didn’t bring you back, didn’t give you peace. I’m done hearing your lies.” One palm shaped her stomach, and her snarl did me proud. “You will not taint the one good thing I have left.”

  Every rebuke tugged at the ragged threads of the onryō’s influence. Every ounce of love in Bianca’s speech counteracted the hateful pulse of malignancy that had sought to entrap her. Watching her face down her demons, I would have cheered as she excised the caustic anger that had kept her from mourning Jensen as a beloved mate if I hadn’t lost too much blood to stand.

  Strong arms steadied me before I face-planted into the mud, and Carter’s scent wrapped me up tight, warm and familiar, blurring the lines, dulling the pain until the sweet respite prevented me from lashing out at his use of magic. Trust made the difference, I realized distantly. I knew him now, knew he would never hurt me, never use his magic to harm me, and it galvanized my resolve.

  Good might not always triumph over evil, but we put up one hell of a fight.

  The light worked to immobilize the onryō for the precious seconds Bianca required to slash out with her hand and rip away the creature’s mask, revealing an onyx skull with empty sockets that exploded into a fine powder when exposed to the naked beam.

  Tossing back her head, Bianca howled a note of such purity that tears pricked the backs of my eyes. Joy writ large on her face, she took one staggering step toward me only to drop into the muck a heartbeat later.

  “Help me up.” I clawed at Carter, and he let me use him as a walking stick to reach Bianca. That’s as far as I made it before my legs buckled, and I hit the pavers. “I’ve got this. I’ll stay with her.” No way would this battle have gone unnoticed unless the grounds had been compromised far worse than I had imagined. That meant dividing our resources. “Go for help.”

  “Stay safe,” he ordered me, bolting for the rear entrance to the guest quarters.

  “Hey, you did good out there.” I wiped mud from Bianca’s eyes. “You were so brave. Jensen would be proud.”

  Faint lines bracketed her mouth, and her voice came out thick with pain. “You saved me.” Eyes shuttered against the stabbing contractions rippling across her stomach, she groped blindly until I clasped hands with her. “Charybdis,” she panted. “He didn’t break you. You’re not broken.”

  Her form wavered in front of me as heat trickled down my cheeks. “Bianca…”

  “Say it,” she snarled, eyes of hammered gold glaring at me. “Say he didn’t break you.”

  Razor-sharp nails pricked my hand, a threat issued from the feral wolf under her skin, and my voice came out an octave higher than usual. “He didn’t break me.”

  Nodding, she relaxed her grip. “Remember what we talked about?”

  “You wanting to go home?” I braced on my palm to keep from keeling over beside her. “Home sounds good right about now.”

  A scream ripped from her throat, and then I was being hauled backward and restrained by women and men in uniforms. A medic rushed past, angling toward Bianca. Carter emerged as exterior lights flipped on, giving me my first look at the raw mass of his chest where the onryō had almost claimed her prize. He ordered the guards to free me and scooped me against his chest. I nuzzled his throat and curled into him.

  “You smell nice,” I slurred. “Stay with me while I sleep?”

  “Pinks, don’t shut your eyes—”

  A riptide snapped me up before he finished his sentence, and dragged me out to the calm waters of a blackened sea.

  Chapter 11

  “Ms. Bevans,” a husky masculine voice murmured. “You’ve caused quite a stir this past week.”

  Swimming through the drugs to surface required focus that kept slipping through my fingers. Jagged pangs speared through my chest when I shifted my body toward the speaker, and the fresh pain brought the night rushing back to me in vivid detail. A quick glance down made me cringe. A black edge of neat stitches poked out from under a section of bandage covering the tender skin above my left breast. My pulse skittered as my brain caught up to my surroundings. The med ward. My least favorite place in the facility. “Bianca?”

  “She’s three rooms down. Both she and her child are safe, thanks to you.”

  My tongue shouldn’t have had so much trouble locating my lips to wet them. “Carter?”

  “Mr. Lam is waiting outside for us to finish our conversation.”

  I got my eyes propped open and took my first look at the man sitting across from me in the seat Carter would have claimed had he been allowed to visit me. “Who…?”

  “I’m Josiah Duncan, the director here at Edelweiss.” He offered me his hand, and when I accepted it on reflex, I marveled at the texture of his skin. It was almost as if he had…scales. “Here. Sip this.” He offered me a straw I assumed was hooked to a cup of water as my gaze refused to focus. “I had the nurse cast a charm to stimulate your mind for a few moments. You need more rest, but this discussion has waited long enough.”

  I drank my fill then reclined against the pillows. “Sir?”

  “It appears that Carter has developed an attachment to you, and those sorts of relationships are discouraged here among patients.” The man with rough skin and lethal intelligence in his full-black eyes linked his fingers and then tapped them against his lips. “He’s content at Edelweiss, healthy. He can survive here.” He spoke around his fingers. “I don’t mean to imply it’s any kind of life, but it’s what he needed once, to be shown another path.”

  The nurse’s charm must not be holding, because I was confused as all get-out. “Sir?”

  “I’m sure he explained his position at the institution to you.”

  “Yes,” I admitted without going into detail. What he didn’t know might hurt Carter.

  “I saw potential in him, and I mentored him when another director might have tossed him back to his family after an acceptable grace period.” The crinkling skin around his eyes told me he was aware I was protecting Carter, maybe approved of it. “The boy who first walked through those doors is not the same man you know.”

  “Oookay.”

  “The work he does here is meant to help him transition to a life outside of Edelweiss. I never meant to keep him, probably should have released him years ago.” The nictitating membranes covering his eyes slid away, clearing his gaze before he returned to reptilian stillness. “You exposed a major flaw in his training, one I would like to rectify.”

  The single kiss we had shared blossomed in my mind, and my skin flushed with remembered heat. “What do you mean by rectify?”

  “I want to offer you a promotion,” he said instead of answering.

  “A promotion?” The synapses in my brain misfired. “From inmate to what?”

  “From patient,” he corrected me firmly, “to orderly.”

  “Why?” Surprised laughter bubbled out of me. “I’m not exactly Patient of the Month material.”

  “You saved three lives tonight.” A gleam shone in his eyes. “I read your file. I know you worked with the Earthen Conclave. I’m offering you a chance to work for me.”

  “What kind of work are we talking about?” I recalled what little I had seen of Jeanette and Troya’s duties. “Moving people from point A to point B?”

  “It has also come to my attention that you’ve formed a friendship with Betty Riker.” He gave me a moment to dispute the claim, but I had been seen talking to her, eating with her, by several guards and orderlies. “That connection also has value to me.”

  Duncan was a pro at not answering direct questions it seemed.

  “She likes me,” I admitted. “Not sure why, but she hasn’t asked me for anything. Yet.”

  “Yet,” he agreed. “When she does, I would like you to report back to me with details.”

  “You want me to rat on her?” I huffed out a laugh. “That doesn’t sound like a great idea to me, considering how lax security is in this joint.”

  “Don’t mistake what you don’t see for what isn’t there.” A smug grin tugged at his lips. “Have you ever wondered why you see so few officers in the hall?”

  “I can honestly say I have not.” Until this week, until Carter, I was a law-abiding-citizen kind of girl.

  “I employ a congress of sylphs whose aim it is to patrol with as little interference to patient routine as possible.” Appearing pleased with himself, he sank into his chair. “They have eyes and ears in places most guards can’t access. But—as with Carter—there are those who can sense them and therefore evade our attempts to gather incriminating evidence against them.”

  “Betty is some kind of shifter.” That much, I had figured out on my own. “She can scent the guards?”

  “With unerring accuracy,” he confirmed. “Her network must be ripped out by the roots in order to protect the patients she supplies with drugs, charms and other dangerous contraband.”

  “What about tonight?” I forced my hand down at my side to keep from touching the bandages on my chest. “Where were your air spirits then?”

  “Close enough to extract you and Carter had the creature fully overtaken Bianca. Until she crossed that threshold, I withheld the order.” He unlaced his fingers and rested them on his thighs. “The frequency of the onryō’s voice scrambled the video feeds, damaging some of the cameras in the process. We were running blind the night you found the first victim. Limited backups were in place the following night, which is why we suspect the location of the murder was changed. I kept you under surveillance since the onryō fixated on you. That’s how I learned about your connection to Betty…and your relationship with Carter.”

  “Tell me you didn’t shadow us to the fountain.” I squinted over at him. “Please?”

  “I didn’t shadow you to the fountain.” A smile quirked his lips. “The length of time you can remain submerged, however, is impressive.”

  Groaning, I sank deeper into my pillows, tempted to fist one and slap it over my face.

  “We had no means of tracking the onryō,” he continued on as if he hadn’t mortified me. “The sylphs in my employ are all male, blind and deaf to her while she was hunting, but we realized after the med ward incident that the creature had fixated on you and decided to let things play out.”

  “You used me as bait.” I scoffed. “Nice.”

  “We suspected an onryō or something like her was the culprit. They obey the rule of three. This would have been the creature’s third and final kill before manifesting. The abbreviated timeline is the reason we bent the rules to the breaking point. We expected her true mark would be revealed.” Genuine regret softened the planes of his face. “That it was Bianca was…unfortunate.”

  “You would have killed her,” I realized.

  “Yes, I would have.” No remorse, no pity, a statement of fact. “The creature would have fused her soul with Bianca’s, feeding on her, killing males who fit her profile, until Bianca died from having her life force drained. Then, using that link, it would have resurrected her as an onryō and moved on to another victim.” Cold finality weighted his assessment. “You are the sole reason I gave the order to stand down. You fought for her.” Admiration tempered his gaze. “You fought for both of them.”

  There at the end, I had almost lost her. Almost lost Carter too. “It was too close.”

  “Yet you managed.”

  “By the skin of my teeth, yeah.” The hazy memory tugging at the back of my mind unraveled. “You were the one in the med ward that first night. You were talking to someone—Dr. Cruse?—about me.”

  “Guilty,” he admitted without a hint of guile. “I required a second opinion on your mental stability before pursuing this course of action.”

  Meaning he must have been the voice who championed me. That made me feel an ounce better. Maybe a half ounce. Then again… What’s less than an ounce? A drop? A droplet?

  “Think of all the good you could do here,” he said, segueing back to his original topic in that scattershot way he had of making his point. “That’s all I’m asking.”

  “How much good did Troya do?” I hazarded a guess based on the fact she had assaulted Carter and yet retained her privileges. “You tried this before, with her, right?”

  “I did, and it succeeded to a certain extent.” Faint amusement crinkled his eyes. “She was allowed in the outer ring of the inner circle through acting as a supplier, but Betty views her as muscle, not an intellectual equal.” Those same eyes gleamed. “However, she appears to see you as a fresh information pipeline. We can feed you details pertinent to her interests. Get her hooked. Trust takes time, but she’ll move early if you drop the right details in her ear, and we’ll be watching.”

  “You have evidence Betty is a problem.” Infiltration of her core group would have provided that, Troya’s testimony damning. “Why not move against her?”

  “She’s a hydra, one symptom of a much larger problem.” His linked hands lowered to his lap. “Cut off her head, and three more of her cohorts will slide into her position. That’s not what I want. I want this rot cut out of my institution, and I’m willing to bend the rules to make that happen.”

  “So what’s my cover going to be?” I asked, curious despite myself. “How does Carter fit into that?”

  “I’m giving you a position in laundry, which is ideal for receiving items hidden in soiled clothing and then smuggling out contraband and communications through the clean parcels.” He laughed at my curled lip. “I’m also transferring Carter in to act as your partner. Laundry teams were once coed because of the physicality of the job. I discontinued the practice after catching a couple using the clean sheets as a love nest.” He cut me a warning glance that set my cheeks tingling with heat. “Your new positions will grant you several hours of interaction a day, allowing Carter time to hone his willpower against close daily interaction with a female of interest to him. His covert skills might prove useful to your pursuits as well.”

  I had a few months left on my sentence and nothing to occupy all those days between. Now that Carter had shaken me awake, I couldn’t go back to staring at white walls to pass the days. Not when I had been offered a golden ticket to spend more time with him out in the open rather than sneaking in minutes together when we both should have been sleeping. “Okay, I’ll think about it.”

  “I can give you twenty-four hours,” he decided. “After that, the position Troya has vacated must be filled.”

  “Did I bump her out of her spot?” The ill-tempered woman wasn’t suited to duties involving the care of others, but I could now see why her ruthlessness had appealed to the director. “She’s not a huge fan of mine as it is.”

  “She’s being released early into the care of her herd in two weeks in thanks for her services.”

  Two weeks. I could avoid her for that long. Probably.

  A beep pierced the silence, and the director made his apologies before answering his cell. “Duncan here.”

  Seeing as how I lacked the acute hearing of most of my fellow patients, I had to piece together the one-sided conversation. On this end, that was mostly “I see” and commiserating grunts. Not the best indicator of topic, that. But a single word zoomed the topic into focus.

  Baby.

  Bianca had given birth.

  “How is she?” I blurted, uncaring that he caught me eavesdropping.

  “Fine,” he answered, voice tight. “The baby is fine too. A big, healthy boy.”

  There were undercurrents here I couldn’t navigate. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  “Bianca can’t finish healing here, and this is no place for a child. We’re sending her home, at her request.” A tic started under one eye. “The onryō explained to her about Carter, what he had done and how, why she had sentenced him to death. Bianca has asked him for help.”

  “What kind of help?” The sort that made him an invaluable resource, but in what way?

  The director held my stare. “She wants her memory wiped.”

  All the tidbits I had learned about Carter’s skills snicked together into a devastatingly powerful whole. The man I had chosen to give my trust was the same caliber as the man who had shattered me on a fundamental level. As much as I wanted to retreat back into my shell at the painful realization, I had made my choice.

  Carter was mine.

  “What about the baby?” Bianca had fought too hard for her child to set it adrift.

  “Her mother is a healer. She takes in orphans and strays for short stays until more permanent accommodations can be secured. This time, she’s going to have a change of heart and keep her ward. It’s done often in the western packs. Birth rates are so low among wargs, no one would bat an eye at her for keeping the child.”

 

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