Chapter 121

“Kill him,” Aurora said, her lilac eyes deadly serious in her pale, beautiful face. “Right now.”

I frowned. My mind was still completely occupied with Piper, and I couldn’t even look at Aurora without a deep, wordless rage rising inside me. Not since Evelyn had sent me that picture. The one of Aurora leaving Holden’s room. He was leaning casually on the doorframe, grinning. She was disheveled but didn’t look like she was in much of a hurry as she walked away.

Was everything she had told me about him a lie? When I had caught him about to assault her…was it an act? I wanted to tear something apart just thinking about it. I was sick to death of being jerked back and forth when it came to her.

“Now isn’t the time,” I said.

Aurora’s eyes widened. “But he has—”

I cut her off. “We’ll talk about it in private, Aurora. In a minute. For now, I need to talk to my sister.”

“Who does he have?” Piper asked in her weak voice, dragging my attention back to her.

I looked down at her. She didn’t seem to have any lasting damage from the blast that had somehow jumped from Aurora’s cousin to my sister. When I stepped into the middle of it, it was like stepping into the heart of a thunderstorm. “There’s…a lot you don’t know.”

I had felt power swirling in me since the ceremony, even if I wasn’t certain what it could do yet. But that…I had never felt power like that. I didn’t like that it had connected my sister to some strange male wolf I barely even knew, from a pack I was allied with but barely trusted. Whatever it was, it couldn’t happen again. Maybe it had shocked her awake this time, but that much raw power under different circumstances would have killed her.

I wanted Piper moved out of this room. I wanted her as far away from Evander DeVere as I could get her, and I wanted it to happen as soon as possible.

As if she could read my mind, Piper turned weakly in my arms to look at the blood-covered man lying in the bed. Her eyes went wide at the sight of him.

“Who’s that?”

“Aurora’s cousin,” I said brusquely.

“Evander?” Piper breathed. I didn’t like the way she said that name. Like she knew him. They didn’t know each other. Though before the shadows had stolen Piper away into a coma, she had been stationed at Aurora’s house, where he was. Maybe they knew each other better than I realized.

I bit back a growl at the thought. Very few wolves in this world, if any, were good enough for my baby sister. The man who’d failed to keep my children out of the hands of the Reeds was not one of them.

Fortunately—or unfortunately—Piper was quickly distracted when she looked to the bed on her other side.

“Dane…” she said in a slow, heavy voice. “Where’s Grandpa Connell?”

My throat tightened at the fear in her voice. When she looked back to me, I met her gaze. Slowly, I shook my head.

“But…he was right here. The last thing I remember was the earthquake and the house shaking, and then there were shadows everywhere and…”

She shuddered and gripped my arm, and I wished that I could shelter her from everything I had to tell her now.

There were a lot of people I wanted to protect. My pack. My children. Evelyn, to an extent. Aurora…goddess damn everything that kept happening to come between us, but I was still desperate to my bones to protect her.

But before Aurora, the pack, the kids, there had been Piper. My baby sister. My shadow for most of my life. They all needed me, but she had needed me first. When our parents died, she’d needed me most. If I could have cut out my own heart to keep her from the pain of our grandfather’s death and the uncertainty of everything we were dealing with, I would have in an instant.

But I couldn’t. So the best thing to do was to get it over with, all at once.

“Grandfather is dead, Piper.” I remembered his face. The moment I realized Aurora’s actions had somehow killed him. I swallowed against that memory. Against the pain that photograph Evelyn had sent had lodged beneath my heart. “He didn’t survive the coma like you did.”

Tears leaked silently down her face. “You look like you’ve been at war, Dane. What else has gone wrong while I was asleep?”

I looked at Aurora and said, “Everything, Piper. Everything.”

She followed my gaze. When she saw Aurora, her grip tightened on me once again. “Oh, goddess. I almost forgot. Dane, there’s something about Aurora you have to know.”