But he couldn’t move. Couldn’t hurt her, just as before. And as he hesitated, the very substance of her body seemed to melt from beneath him, shifting, flowing with the rain until smooth, bare skin replaced fur.
Milena. He bared his teeth, helpless to do more, unable even to weep. Milena—
“You are nothing to me. I despise you.” She laughed. “You hoped for children. Well, now you have one. But he isn’t yours. He is half-human—”
“Braden!” someone cried.
Wrong. The voice was wrong, husky and warm.
Cassidy. But that was impossible. He had hunted a wolf and found a woman.
Fingers caught in his fur, but not to push him away. They pulled him closer, until every drop of rain was infused with her scent.
Wrong scent. Wrong voice. Not Milena, fleeing with her lover. It was Cassidy he’d come hunting, Cassidy who’d left him. But Cassidy couldn’t Change.
Cassidy. Milena. They became one in his mind, flaunting treachery, mocking his clemency. His weakness. His unforgivable flaws.
“Braden,” she said again, this woman he had loved. “You don’t have to force me to return. I was coming back. We’re going to have a child. Our child, Braden—”
He tilted his head back and howled. His body Changed, casting off its wolf shape with unnatural frenzy. Rain slicked his hair to his head and cascaded from his skin, unable to cool the inferno in his heart.
“You… lie,” he cried. “Not my child. You’ll… never lie to me again.”
Her fingers spread across his face. “It’s me, Braden. I’ve never lied to you—”
He made himself deaf to her pleas as he was blind to her lovely, deceiving beauty. He would stop her, once and for all. He hated her. He would shatter her mind, as she had destroyed all he lived for.
He focused on the very essence of her spirit, gathered up his power and his will and loosed them like a pack eager for the kill.
It was like leaping headfirst into the sun. Agony such as he had never known slashed through his body, its hellish core centered within his mind. Her counterattack was deadly, and he knew that she was killing him.
He tried to contain that burning and felt it char through every bond he had created. He tried to break it as he would command the mind of a deceitful human. You are mine, he cried. Mine!
But her will was a weapon he had no strength to turn aside. She held him helpless like a gasping fish in a net, and all the while she laughed as her mental blows beat him down.
He was losing. Milena had proven herself his master. He was unworthy of the Cause, too flawed to survive.
So be it. Let her destroy him. Let the sacrifice be his life.
He bared himself to the inferno and let it take him. He tumbled into the crucible. But as he stood on the brink of oblivion the agony ceased, and the light became a brilliance that healed instead of killed.
Cassidy’s brilliance, unmistakable, pure at its very heart.
And he could see. He saw himself, crouched on the ground, his face contorted with pain and hatred. Then he was swept away on a tide of memory, and it was Quentin’s face that filled his mind: Quentin, ever laughing but with a deep and unbearable sadness behind the facade of jovial indifference. Quentin, whose fear was not of his brother but of something within himself. And Braden had been too obsessed to see.
Quentin’s face faded, and Rowena’s took its place. His stately and arrogant sister, who, like her twin, hurt inside.
She hated her werewolf nature, yet a part of her wanted to be convinced that it was not an abomination, but a release. She would have turned to Braden if she could, but he had refused to listen. He had made her into a tool of the Cause and kept her at a distance, like Quentin, because of his own dread of weakness. And so she had turned to Milena.
Isabelle came next, a woman loyal to a girl she’d brought to England, recognizing the earl of Greyburn as a man who cared for nothing and no one but his own desires. A woman who endured humiliation and exposure to help another, a woman of undoubted courage, who saw Braden as he truly was.