Chapter 21

Chapter

Twenty-One

ORION

L osing Kor had been a blow I wasn't expecting to deal with in the midst of all the other shit that had fallen on our shoulders in the last couple of weeks. Part of me was furious about it, which was the reason I found myself standing at the edge of the woods an hour before the sun would peek past the horizon.

I felt Kor before I saw him, and I glanced over my shoulder to find him making the slow trek toward me with his hand out and his feet shuffling. I let out an irritated grunt and started to meet him half-way since the ground was littered with half-unearthed rocks and fallen branches from the trees.

"Where the fuck is your cane?" I asked as his arm touched mine.

He shrugged. "I don't normally take it with me when I shift. I tried a couple times and kept losing it. Not worth the pain in the ass waiting for Misha to find it."

I rolled my eyes as I led him back to the spot I had been standing. "Why are you planning on shifting right now?"

He raised a brow at me like I should know the answer. "Because you're standing out here by yourself angsting, and I know the best way to get your head out of your ass is to let your wolf free for a bit."

I laughed softly, and normally he was right, but in that moment, I wanted to keep my voice. "Would you take a walk with me instead?"

His face showed his surprise almost as heavy as I felt it in the pack bond, but he wasn't about to deny me. "Don't let me embarrass myself."

"I won't," I told him. Every now and again he prompted me to joke about his blindness—and I might one day, but not yet. What the humans had done was still too fresh, and now watching Zane struggle through his own recovery, I wasn't sure I'd ever be able to take it lightly.

Kor found the back of my arm, then I led him to the cleared path Zane and I had been taking down to the creek. He said nothing for a while as I moved him around the occasional dip in the forest floor, but I could feel the tension building. "I hear water."

"There's a creek ahead," I told him. I could see it now, a few hundred feet away, and it was flowing a little heavier than it had been in the last few days. "The night after we got here, I found Zane fishing with his claws."

That startled a laugh out of Kor, and it carried with us until we reached the clearing. I led him to a small collection of boulders, and he felt out a flat space before settling down. "How big is it?"

"Six feet wide. Deeper right now than it has been, but it only went up to his thighs when he jumped in," I told him. I stared up at the sky, then I leaned back on the rock next to him and folded my arms. "He was starting to come back to himself at that point." And I was going into heat—the moment that changed everything. "That all kind of feels like a dream now."

Kor waited to see if I was finished, and when he noticed I was, he let out a soft breath. "You know I don't want to do this, right? The last fucking thing in the world I want to do is leave."

"I know," I told him. I wasn't strong enough to voice how I was feeling, so I let it slip through the bond and after a second, his lips quirked into a sad smile.

"I'm not rejecting you."

I hated how pathetic I felt, but I couldn't help it. Kor and I had never been separated—not by choice. "But you don't want me with you."

"I do," he said. "If it wasn't for Zane, I'd have packed a bag for your sorry ass."

I winced, but it was a logic leap I should have taken. "He'd probably be fine without me."

"Would you say that about Misha?" he countered.

I scoffed. "That's not the fuckin' same, Kor, and you know it. You two are bonded."

"And you two will be. I give it three hours in Corland before you've got a bite. And don't," he said when I opened my mouth to argue, "try and deny it. You should have bonded in your heat."

"I shouldn't have had a fucking heat in the first place," I growled. I was still reeling from the fact that in spite of my eyes going back to blue, something inside me still felt…altered. "It's not totally gone."

"I know," he confessed, and I stiffened at how obvious I was. "It's your scent. It's…different. I don't know how to describe it. I thought maybe it was your feelings for Zane, but it's more than that."

Passing a hand down my face, I shifted higher up onto the rock and drew my leg up toward my chest, resting my arm around it. "I feel different, and I think…it might be permanent. I won't regret that fucking serum because it meant we got Zane back, but fat lot of good it did when that information didn't help anyone else."

"It helped everyone else," Kor said, his voice almost a low growl. "This is just the beginning. They can't keep those Wolves forever, and if they're really altering them into weapons, they won't be able to use them and deny their involvement at the same time."

"And if they try?" I asked.

"Rescue plans are in place," Kor said. "I'm not going into hiding so I can sit on my ass like some passive fuck and let other people do work for me. I'm going to be working underground."

Once again, I felt the keen loss of him, even with him sitting close enough that I could hear his heartbeat. "I hate this. I fucking hate this so much. We were supposed to have peace."

"I know, and it kills me that I can't promise it'll work. We could end up worse than where we started. But it's worth the risk," he said. "Tell me you understand that."

"I do." Because of course I did. I had never been a Wolf with delusions about what life would be like when war ended. I was willing to fight until my dying breath, but I had never been able to envision a world in which we won.

"Zane needs you, and you need him," Kor said. "You will always be my pack, Orion. You will always be my brother. But he's supposed to be your mate, and you deserve to be loved the way he loves you."

My heart ached, and my arms felt empty suddenly with Zane so far away. But it wasn't going to be forever. Hell, it was hardly going to be more than a few minutes. "You know I think I love him just as much?"

Kor threw his head back, his laugh booming across the clearing. "It don't take working eyes to see that shit, Orion."

I elbowed him gently, and he got me right back, almost knocking me off the rock. We tussled a little more, then settled against each other, and I wondered how the hell I was supposed to function not knowing where he was. "What do we do?"

"We fight," Kor answered, bowing his head. "We don't lose sight of our end game. We don't let them gain power over us again."

"I overhead what you said. About some of the Wolves thinking maybe winning a victory against the humans is a good thing." I dragged my tongue over my bottom lip and just let myself feel the swirling indecision in my gut. "And I felt it in you."

He let out a bone-deep sigh and turned his face upward. "If the situation was different—if I could trust a single Wolf in the government right now to do this for the good of our people, I might sit back and let it happen. But they don't have our best interests in mind. They don't care who wins, as long as they don't lose what little power they've managed to gain. And I have no doubt the humans have promised them endless resources to live a comfortable life while they throw us all back into cages."

I extended my claws in frustration, then curled my hands into fists and let them cut into my palms. The pain was distracting, grounding, even as it healed over. "I can't live like that again."

"None of us are willing to," Kor said. "And that's why we fight. I don't have a clear picture about what victory will look like. Hell, I don't know if I'll live long enough to see it. But it has to end somewhere."

I could picture it though. I could picture decades of freedom—of rule by someone who let us simply exist. I wanted it so bad, it tasted like copper in my mouth, and I swallowed against it. "I'm ready to go, I think."

He turned his face toward me, then reached up and curled his hand around the back of my neck. I took his scent, as much of it as he could give me, knowing it would be the last time my Alpha and I would be in the same room for some time. I leaned in first, and he followed, and our foreheads knocked together.

Kor and I had been circling each other for most of our lives. I loved him more than I loved myself most days, but it was different now. Now, my heart—my very being—was wrapped around Zane, and Kor had been pulled to the other side by his human Omega.

It felt natural, if not slightly terrifying, but knowing there would always be a place for each other—that the bond would only break when one of us died—gave me the strength to embrace what was to come.

"We should get back," he said after a beat.

The beginning of the end. I nodded against his forehead, then pulled away and waited for him to take my arm. We said nothing as we made our way to the cabin, and as the scents of our beloveds drifted around us the closer we got to the house, the more it became real.

It hurt. But I was ready.

Parting ways was easier than I anticipated, only because of the weight on our shoulders and the knowledge that we didn't know what was waiting for us beyond the border. The journey to Canada had been an easy one for the small group, but even Kor had to admit he didn't know if they were being watched.

Still, knowing that Kor and Misha were taking steps to stay safe while shit hit the fan all over the globe helped me breathe a little easier when I climbed into the car beside Zane. He took it upon himself to drive the first leg, and I appreciated it, feeling too wrung out to concentrate properly.

Aisling followed close behind with the Betas, and we had a handful of stops planned, but nothing overnight. It was easier to trade off and get back to Corland, keeping ourselves a moving target.

I settled back as the scenery whipped by in a blur of greens and blues, and I let Zane keep his hand on my knee like he needed to reassure himself in all ways that I was there.

"Did he ask you to go with him?"

Those were the first words either of us had spoken in nearly an hour, and I startled in my seat a bit, turning to look at him. "Who? Kor?"

Zane clenched his jaw and nodded. "I assumed he would. You're his Second."

I was, yes, but I was surprised to hear Zane thought Kor would tear me away from him. I glanced up at the sign saying the border crossing was coming up in a few miles, and I let out a short breath. "I would have said no if he had. But he didn't."

He made a slightly surprised noise as he began to slow down for the small queue of traffic. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, but I knew we were all on high alert considering what was going on in our country, and that we had no way of hiding the fact that we were Wolves.

"I can't help but wonder what the hell he's up to." He blew out a puff of air and shrugged. "Do you think his human will be able to offer any help at all?"

"I think he just might. A few weeks after I let myself get to know Misha," I said, letting an old memory rise to the surface, "he was telling me about his job. His former job," I corrected, because I knew there was little room for an ancient historian in war. "He had been working on this…I don't know, a project, I guess. He was researching the history of Wolves in human society."

"I remember Kor saying something like that," Zane said with a slight frown.

I shifted a little in my seat, trying to ignore the anxiety creeping up my spine as we got closer. "He said historians had been debating about the appearance of Wolves, because there were no documented cases until sometime around the first century."

Zane glanced over at me, a smile playing at his lips. "Oh?"

I smiled back. "He said a lot of scholars claim that the lack of evidence means that it was either a recent genetic mutation—or the really messed up people believed that a group of humans, you know…"

"Fucked a bunch of Wolves?" Zane offered with a smirk.

I rolled my eyes. "Yeah, apparently so. Misha doesn't think that. He thinks that we've always been here. He thinks that somewhere around the time humans as we know them now evolved, so did Wolves. I thought that had to be bullshit."

Zane hummed, but he had no time to say anything. One of the agents was waving us over, and my breath caught in my chest until I saw the face of the man who had let us over the first time. He met my gaze with an unreadable expression, and he leaned toward the window and held out his hand for the passports.

Was it a trick? Was it a set-up? Had he just given us that reprieve before he turned us over to Misha's brother?

"I hope you had a pleasant stay," he murmured, stamping the forms and handing them back. His gaze flickered behind our car, then back to me. "They're with you?"

I nodded carefully.

"Have a pleasant journey, sirs."

I didn't breathe properly until we were through, and until I saw Aisling's car pulling up fast on our tail. It seemed too good to be true, but I was willing to accept it for the gift it was. After all, it wasn't likely luck like that would continue.

"Why did you think it had to be bullshit?" Zane asked, dragging me out of my thoughts.

I turned to him. "What?"

"You said you thought Misha's theory had to be bullshit. Why?"

"Oh," I said on a breath, then leaned back and looked out the window at the journey home. "Well, I mean…our eyes, right? It's not like we blend in. We can hide our shift and our strength. We can flow within their society seamlessly. But we can't hide our eyes. We can't even cover them with contacts, and they obviously didn't have those back then."

"Mm," he said with a nod. "I assume he had an answer to that?"

"He thinks our eyes are a genetic mutation in order to set us apart. Like the deep-sea fish that develop those…fuck, I'm not smart enough to remember all those big words," I told him with a self-deprecating laugh. "You know, how they glow in the dark?"

"Bioluminescent," he said with a small smile.

"Oh, fuck you, Mr. College Degree," I snapped, and felt warm all over at the sound of his laugh. "Anyway, yeah that. He says he doesn't know why it happened—but there's enough evidence in history to show when people started noticing. He also thinks there's probably Wolves out there who are living amongst humans—who can pass as humans. Eyes and all."

Zane blinked, then he glanced over at me for almost too long before turning his gaze back to the road. "Is that what you think Kor and Misha are doing? Looking for those Wolves?"

"I don't know," I breathed out. "I think Misha told me that story all those months ago for a reason. And I haven't been able to stop thinking about what Kor's plans are, and why he had to go away instead of go underground here. He told me he couldn't trust anyone in our government to lead humans and Wolves alike. But…what if he could find someone who had interest on both sides?"

Zane dragged his teeth over his lip, then nodded. "I think it makes sense. And I think it's information we might want to keep to ourselves. Because if Misha's right, and we can convince those people to help…"

"We can put someone up against the humans who has our interests in mind," I finished for him. "We just have to pray they're willing to fight for our cause."

"I think we have a lot of praying to do," he murmured softly, and I could only agree with him.