They swung open the cage door, cattle prods at full power, humming with electricity. The man lazily lifted his hands in surrender. "Now, now." He said softly. His voice was like velvet. "No need. I'll do as you please." The man in the cage said, his...
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Dime had been barefoot when the call compelled them all to move, but instead of the needling cold against his skin, he felt the searing, stabbing phantom pain that his alpha was feeling. He saw the warm hues of his sister's eyes.
He felt the hate in his heart for her grow, hand in hand with the grief that shamed him.
Kiril had bolted off ahead of him, the white of his fur disappearing in a blur over the horizon. Now, it came back into view, pinned and tangled in the filth and slush of half melted snow beneath his mangey brother. He struggled. Fought with a ferocity that had drained out of Dime mere minutes before as the threat to Vsevolod ceded.
The walls had crumbled, turned to dust and blown away on the winds of the storm. For the first time ever, Dime brushed up against Kiril's mind. It was visceral. It was animalistic. The passions. The lost hopes. The things he felt that could be mistaken for some stunted form of love.
It was disgusting.
Dime had never liked the third brother, stoic and quiet and always seeming to hide something sinister beneath that facade of frigidness. Now that he saw what was beneath, he knew he was right not to. Only someone twisted, so evil beyond belief, could love his murderer sister. Could love the beast she had become.
And now that he lay there, in the throws of mourning, he saw the white wolf for what he really was. A pathetic little creature, so sentimental that he refused what was right and good and just for what was comfortable.
The shame of grief also lived in his chest. He beat it down with every breath of frozen air, pushing away the wrongness of the emotion. Dime was not so weak as to give in to it. To give it valuable ground in his mind and take away from his sense of what was right and what was wrong.
He looked away from Kiril, dismissing him.
Vsevolod was the first up the stairs. Blood trickled from his shoulder where his human form had caught the claws of the beasts below as he shifted and escaped their clutches, darkening the black fabric of his cloak in a way Dime didn't know was possible.
His alpha jerked his wrist, flicking the blade and sending a spray of blood showering down around him in an arc that bled into the snow. His sister's blood. The action made him flinch, but the apathy shielded him from the worst of the fear as he beheld the man he once trusted. The man he was now so uncertain of, thanks to Samuel.
It was Samuel who arrived behind him, panting and breathless in his sweater as the rest of his pack began to flow out of the cellar. Dime watched, a rock against the tide. They all had bloodied knuckles. They all bared teeth in celebration of a bloody battle. The look of satisfied revenge shone in all of their eyes. Revenge for the brothers his sister had killed the first time she slipped into the skin of the burning beast.
When they passed him, some clasping his shoulder or knocking against his chest, smearing him in a mixture of Theo's blood and their own, he stood fast. He met each of their gazes.
