Thorn (Werewolf) ✔

Chapter Thirty-Five

THORN

The pack is silent when I return. With this many people, the voices should be overwhelming, they should be talking over each other and offering support or at least some phase of anger. There is nothing.

Most of them have left the village and have gone their own ways to deal with the events of last night. Lucias is still sitting at Daria's grave, I don't think he's moved from that spot in hours.

A broken leader is the last thing a pack needs when there's a threat of this scale coming back to finish us off. This pack has two.

They look at me for some kind of direction but the only direction that I'm interested in is the background. I sit down on a small log and I watch the child that I saved get picked up and held against his mother's chest.

There might never be a right time to tell them that Cole and his army will be returning but it still feels too raw. Without the herbs from Shadow then it'll be pointless anyway. I don't have the energy for it.

I can't stop thinking about Devon. The fact that I can still obsess over her safety means that the bond is still active and that she's still alive but it could also mean that my feelings are real.

I think they are real. I never imagined that they could be but this time feels different than it did with Maria. Devon could be dead. That pain I felt could have been the bond breaking. There are a whole range of explanations and none of them are good.

"Hey, I made you something." Balan leans over me with a steaming cylinder-shaped mug in her hand. "My speciality herbal drink."

I take it from her. "Thanks."

"Lucias was wrong to blame you," she says. "It wasn't your fault."

"He had every right to blame me. Cole attacked because of a choice that I made."

"The girl?" she whispers.

I stare at her for a moment before casting my eyes over the village. No one's in close enough range to hear. "What about her?"

"I treated her, Thorn. I smelt her DNA. She's the descendant. I saw the way you were with her. Mating with the curse breaker must have broken you."

"If you're going to give me the same lecture that Kira did about not killing her then save your breath."

She smiles. "No. I'm not. She's an innocent in all of this. But if you've mated with her then she already has a place among us."

"You say that like I'm still a part of this pack," I say. "They'd never accept her and I couldn't allow her to live around that kind of resentment. She deserves better."

"Is that why she isn't here? You don't trust us to protect her?"

"I sent her away." I drop my eyes as an unsettling lump forms in my throat. "If I don't give Cole her location then he's coming back in three days to kill everyone."

She leans back, swallowing fearfully. "So we fight. He's just another power-hungry alpha, we've faced worse than him."

"Look at them," I mutter, scowling at the two women that are sobbing together within the trees. "Does it look like they're ready to fight?"

"They'd fight for you. Lucias might be our leader but last night proved that they'll always see you as their alpha. We've just lost our way a little. Don't give up on us."

I wish it could be that simple. I wish I didn't have this ticking bomb in my head telling me that I need to run far from this place and everyone in it. It's not that I don't care about them, I grew up with most of them on my father's estate. I've known Balan and Pal since we were kids, playing football on the windy, English cliffsides. I didn't know then what it meant to be an alpha or even a leader. I just knew that I was always around family that I trusted.