Margin’s Row was no more. My home was gone. Burned to the ground.
“Nah.” The sound slipped out of me, a mix between a gasp and a moan.
Sasha raised her head, and my vision switched to hers, seeing me and my face stark as the rising snow, the hollowness in my eyes. My hands were outstretched, reaching toward everything that was lost.
“Aika.” Archer swallowed roughly. “Who did this?”
Grady glanced back, and I saw myself through him, saw the tears clinging to my lashes and freezing there. He stopped the sleigh, ducked underneath the harness he pulled it with, and limped heavily to my side.
I stood and stepped off the sleigh, my limbs frozen and seeming unattached to my body. “Grady, it wasn’t like this when you came here was it?” The words left me in a rush and jumbled over themselves, and then I sucked in a loud breath in anticipation of the answer I already knew.
He shook his furry head, his vision of me bouncing back and forth.
Oh god. I screwed my eyes shut and pointed at my cabin. “My baba was shot there. Outside. Please.”
It made no sense what I was asking. If Baba were still there, he was most definitely dead.
But Grady limped off anyway, seeming to understand my need to know for sure.
“Who did this?” Archer rasped. “Was it the bald man?”
Maybe. Maybe Lager had come back after he’d tried to sell Jade and Lee to destroy the rest of my baba’s business. Or to loot it first and then destroy it so that if I ever came back, I wouldn’t be able to compete with him.
Grady loped back then and shook his head. My baba wasn’t here. But he’d been shot, so where had he gone? Did Lager take him too?
Crushing defeat swept down upon me, and I stumbled to my hands and knees in the snow. I had nothing. Everything I’d had was taken away from me. My home, my horse, my means to survive, my family. Gone.
I screamed, the sound a relentless cleaving through the silence, and slammed my hands against the powdery snow. I screamed again and again. That sense of loss, the emptiness where all these things had been pressed in under my ribs and wrapped around my heart. And then? It erupted in flame. Still, I screamed until my throat felt ravaged, until I started to choke on my own rage searing through my veins.
I would get it all back. All of it. And I would get the Crimson Forest back to my wolves, too, even if I had to burn everything down around it.
When I finally stopped, Sasha was whimpering inconsolably. Archer’s hand was clasped so tightly in mine that it almost hurt, and Grady had wrapped his tail around my shoulders.
My wolves. Our war. But to win, we couldn’t stay here so I could mourn. After all, I still had the poison Grady had lifted from Faust’s wife in my pocket, the weight of it a savage assurance, and Grady had a map of the Crimson Forest with writing all over it.
I hauled myself to my feet just as a distant howl sounded from the direction of Margin.
Grady immediately shifted into his human form and turned to Archer, Sasha, and me, his shoulders heaving under his coat and his gray eyes rounded. “That was Timothy.”
Their alpha.
Maybe everything hadn’t been lost.
Look for Winter’s Bite, The Crimson Winter Reverse Harem Book 2, coming April 13, 2020! I’ll do my best to get it to you sooner though!
About the Author
Lindsey R. Loucks is a former school librarian living in rural Kansas. When she's not discussing books with anyone who will listen, she's dreaming up her own stories. Eventually her brain gives out, and she'll play hide and seek with her cat, put herself in a chocolate-induced coma, or watch scary movies alone in the dark to re-energize.
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Winter's Edge (The Crimson Winter Reverse Harem Series Book 1) Page 16