I wanted—needed—to get out of the infirmary. I told Michael I couldn’t just sit here watching Axel sleep all night. I needed to let my wolf out for just a second, but that couldn’t happen.
No one trusted my wolf anymore.
Turned out they didn’t need me anyway. Last night had been quiet. Michael thought that was a coincidence, but being with Tessa taught me that true coincidences were few and far between.
I wanted to be figuring out why last night was quiet because I knew—I knew—it had something to do with Tessa. We couldn’t go from seven months of nightly fights to nothing for three nights in a row.
But I was still stuck here while Claudia and Lucas checked out a few leads.
Michael left to talk to the FBI and told me to keep my mouth shut. To stay put. To wait for Axel to wake up. So, I was pushed out of that, too.
There was nothing for me to do. No distraction from the dread and fear and pain of Tessa being gone.
Nothing except watching over Axel all night long.
He’d spent the night shifting between wolf and human, screaming as he fought the change, but he’d finally stopped writhing in his sleep twenty minutes ago.
Now I was sitting here listening to him breathe, waiting for him to wake up. Just like I’d promised Tessa. At least I was doing that much, but it wasn’t enough.
I wasn’t doing enough.
I pressed my back into the chair to remind myself that I was supposed to stay here next to Axel’s bed. That I wasn’t supposed to leave until he was awake.
The night seemed to go on forever, but it didn’t. The sun was rising. Its red-orange rays peeked through the blinds of the tiny window in the infirmary room.
When Axel woke up, he’d be a werewolf. He was going to live. But now that I knew he was going to make it, I wanted to blame him for whatever was happening to Tessa.
I wanted to rip his throat open.
But I wasn’t going to do that. Not after how hard I’d fought to keep him alive—giving him strength and coaching him through shifting all night.
When he woke up, he had to have some answers for me. He’d been trying to find a way to access magic all summer, and I had a feeling he’d trusted the wrong person. I didn’t know that, but how else did someone end up shot in an abandoned warehouse at three in the morning?
I needed him to wake up.
I needed him to answer my questions. Why was he at the warehouse? How did he get there? Who was he meeting?
I needed him to tell me who had taken his sister, my wife, my mate.
My knuckles popped. Merde. I took a moment to calm myself, wrangling the wolf back into its spot deep inside.
“It’s not his fault.”
I looked up at Michael, who was standing in the doorway.
I wasn’t sure how long Michael had been there, but he was naturally stealthy. He looked like he was in his early thirties, which would only make him less than a decade older than me, but he’d always looked this age to me. He didn’t look a day older than when he’d taken me in after my parents were murdered. His hair still had the same few stray grays in it. I wasn’t sure how old he was exactly, but those few grays meant that he was old. He was possibly the oldest wolf alive.
Michael didn’t usually show his age, but today, standing in that doorway, every year was a weight on his back.
He’d been with us for the last seven months of exhausting nightly battles before Tessa was taken. And then he’d had to hunt me. And after that, he’d had to deal with Tessa’s parents, the cops, the media, and now the FBI.
I’d been locked up—sedated—for the first day. Which meant I slept. Michael hadn’t. He’d been searching for Tessa. Hoping to save me by doing what I hadn’t been able to—find her.
I wanted to thank him for searching for my mate, but I also wanted to scream at him for not finding a single clue that could possibly lead me to her either.
It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. And I sure as shit wasn’t proud of it. But that’s what I was feeling.
I was angry. Beyond angry. I was furious. It filled my soul until I was fighting the inner battle with my wolf again. My arms grew fur and smoothed back to skin. Fur and back again. Wolf and then human.