Kael’s POV
The laugh ca from the dark.
Low. Soft. Familiar.
Every muscle in my body locked.
Fenrir surged forward so hard I felt my vision blur. Hackles raised. Teeth bared. Every instinct screaming at once.
*Wait.*
I held him back.
Barely.
I turned toward the treeline. The darkness between the birches was thick—no moonlight this far into the canopy, just shadow layered on shadow. My eyes adjusted. Pushed through the dark.
And found a shape.
A man. Standing still. Not hiding anymore.
He stepped forward.
My breath stopped.
It was Ronan.
He moved out of the shadows and into the thin grey light of the clearing, and he was—wrong. Sothing was wrong. I could see it before I could na it. He looked like Ronan. The sa height. The sa build. The dark hair, the broad shoulders, the face I’d known since we were both teenagers running drills in the back fields.
But he was moving wrong.
There was blood on his shoulder. A dark stain spreading through the fabric of his tactical vest. Not fresh—older. Hours old.
He didn’t seem to be in pain.
Damon was behind . I felt him tense. "Alpha—"
I held up one hand. Quiet.
I took a step forward.
Ronan watched co. His expression was flat. Empty. Like soone had smoothed every line from his face and left nothing behind.
"Where are the others?" I asked.
He didn’t answer right away.
I stopped four feet from him. Close enough to see his eyes clearly now.
"Ronan." My voice ca out careful. Soft. The kind of voice you use when you’re not sure what you’re standing in front of. "Talk to . What happened out here? Where’s your unit?"
He tilted his head.
Like the question was coming from very far away and he was having trouble making sense of it.
"Ronan." Sharper now.
"They’re dead," he said.
The words ca out flat. No grief. No horror. No the-floor-just-dropped-out-from-under- quality that news like that should carry.
Just—stated. Like a fact. *The sky is grey. The grass is wet. They’re dead.*
My stomach went cold.
Behind , Damon made a sound. Low. Controlled. But I could hear what was underneath it.
"All of them?" I asked.
"All of them."
I stared at him.
He stared back.
There was sothing in his eyes that I kept trying to read and kept failing to find. Ronan had been with for over a decade. I knew his face the way I knew Damon’s, the way I knew my mother’s, the way I knew Aria’s. I’d watched him angry, frightened, grieving, exhausted, triumphant. I’d watched him drunk off his ass after we won a border dispute and he’d bet his month’s wages on the outco. I’d watched him kneel beside a fallen soldier and stay there for an hour without moving.
I knew what this man’s emotions looked like.
And this—whatever this was—wasn’t any of them.
"Ronan." I closed the distance. Put my hand on his shoulder.
I looked at his face.
He looked at mine.
And then—sothing happened behind his eyes. Not returning. Not like a man waking up. More like a switch being thrown, a chanism engaging, sothing that had been waiting for a signal clicking into place.
He moved so fast I almost didn’t track it.
His hand ca up and closed around my throat.
Not grabbed. Closed. Like a vice. Like a chanism that was designed for exactly this and nothing else.
I felt my feet leave the ground.
The strength behind it was—
Wrong.
This wasn’t Ronan’s strength. Ronan was strong—veteran soldier, one of the best I’d ever fought beside. But this was sothing else. This was a force that didn’t belong to his body, that was running through him like a current from sowhere outside him, like sothing had borrowed his muscle and bone and was using it without caring what it cost.
My hands went to his wrist. Automatic. The grip-break move I’d drilled ten thousand tis.
Nothing.
His arm didn’t move. His grip didn’t loosen. His expression didn’t change.
He just held there. Feet dangling. My airway crushed under his fingers.
Because Ronan was looking at now.
And his eyes—
His eyes had gone red.
Not the full crimson shift of a wolf in rage, not the gold-bleed of an Alpha going feral. This was different. This was a slow, spreading bloom, starting at the edges of his iris and moving inward, like blood seeping through water, until the pale grey of his natural eye color was completely gone.
All red.
All wrong.
He opened his mouth.
No words ca out.
Just a sound. Low and guttural and inhuman. A sound that vibrated at a frequency that made every wolf in my team take an involuntary step back, that made Fenrir go dead silent in my chest, that hit so ancient animal part of my brain and scread: *wrong. wrong. wrong.*
My hands were still locked on his wrist. Still trying to break the grip.
I couldn’t break it.
I couldn’t break it.
Ronan—the man who’d covered my back in a dozen impossible situations, who’d been at my side since we were barely old enough to carry weapons, who had showed up at the hospital when Aria collapsed and stood in the corridor with his arms crossed and his jaw set and hadn’t left until he knew she was stable—
He was trying to kill .
His fingers tightened.
My vision started to grey at the edges.
Fenrir slamd against the inside of my skull. Furious. Terrified. Trying to force the shift, trying to give the size and the strength to break free—
And then, through the greyness, through the roaring pressure in my ears—
A sll.
Sharp and dicinal and deeply, horribly familiar.
I knew that sll.
I’d been at the hospital when Lucian was brought in. I’d stood over my brother’s bed and watched the healer explain what the compound did—how it worked, how it spread through the nervous system, how it hijacked the wolf’s instincts and turned them into a weapon, how it erased the line between conscious choice and animal drive.
I’d sat in the storage room with my mother and held those two badges and thought about what my father was capable of.
I hadn’t thought about this.
The grip on my throat was Ronan’s hand.
But the thing running through him—
The thing making his eyes red and his strength impossible and his voice inhuman—
It wasn’t Ronan.
*Wolfsbane,* Fenrir said. Barely a whisper.
My blood ran cold.
Ronan had been poisoned.
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