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I found purchase on her tender underbelly. And unlike with Colt, I didn’t let go.

With a mouthful of skin, I clamped down and tore back. The sound breaking from Catrina was otherworldly, a fiendish and gruesome cry embodying the destruction I caused. I tasted blood and didn’t care. Had I been more sound of mind, maybe it would have occurred to me what I was doing, but I just wanted her to stop. I wanted her to see what she had pushed me to do. She wanted to unleash my anger, and she did; this was the worst of what I was capable of, this savagery that she had forced me to turn onto her. I ripped and wrenched her flesh apart until all I could see was red bleeding into the rain, shiny viscera exposed out of clefts of tattered fur.

The voices around me melded together. They screamed at me to stop and I kept ripping. The body beneath me convulsed and gurgled, no longer recognizable to me. I would have rendered my enemy to a bloody pulp if not for the jaws and hands that pulled me away by force. When I was finally thrown back into the mud, I rolled to my feet and saw what I had done.

Catrina’s breathing staggered. Her eyes rolled in the throes of death as her bowels spread into the grass. I had done that to her. My own ex-girlfriend, the girl I thought I loved—she laid dying because I couldn’t stop myself. The entire battle had come to a standstill as everyone beheld the death of Catrina Hexen.

I didn’t know what to think. My eyes dragged back to where I had last seen David, and there he stood across the distance, staring at what had become of his daughter. He erupted in a howl wrought with grief, and soon he was joined by Colt, realizing that his sister had met her grisly end. As David began to revert back to human, I sobered from my rage-induced outburst and transformed too.

He made me do this. Catrina made me do this.

But I only felt revulsion for what our hostility had come to.

Chapter 29: Billie

In an instant, my world ruptured and everything that had been a constant in my life was taken away.

After gathering his clothes left to soak in the rain, David knelt beside an eviscerated Catrina, stunned to see his daughter so suddenly reduced to flesh and guts. As if he hadn’t just threatened to assault me earlier that day, sudden humanity moved his hands to the body of his daughter and quaked his shoulders in disbelief. My own brother, who minutes earlier tried to force the marking ritual on me, who was once my only source of comfort, stood beside him and pleaded that it couldn’t be real. The skirmish came to a pause to allow for one side to grieve, but the worst part was that I knew David wouldn’t have called off his wolves had it been the other way around. All of us were covered in blood, some mortally wounded, but nobody dead—except for Catrina Hexen.

Gavin was back in his wet jeans, clutching his side where the gunshot wound was half-healed from Muriel and still bleeding through his fingers, squinting in his left eye where David slashed him. He rasped beside me, blood that was both his and not his dripping with the rain down his face. His guilt burned away within him, clawing through my sorrow and joining us in stinging heartache for our enemy. He never wanted to go that far. I may have begrudged Catrina, but I never wanted her to die. Coughing, Gavin mustered the strength to stand taller. “Take her and leave,” he said hoarsely.

A delayed response had David placing his hand on his mouth, like he couldn’t bear to let anyone see him fall apart. His eyes dragged up toward Gavin, but the disbelief that once stalled him had deteriorated into wild, burning anger unlike anything I’d ever seen before. “You killed my daughter.”

I felt the way his words punctured Gavin like a knife.

“I’m sorry,” Gavin said in a moment of shame.

David shot to his feet. “You aren’t sorry. She was dead to you the moment you found your fated mate,” he hissed venomously.

What shame Gavin felt was overwritten by anger, his empathy lost. “She was a monster even before you manipulated her into turning Lycan.”

Enraged, David lunged at Gavin, shoving his chest before Lothair and Oslo pushed between them, their differences set aside in the ceasefire. Colt hovered behind them. Despair stayed his feet; he couldn’t even move, could barely lift his eyes from Catrina.

“Perhaps the Lycan ritual wasn’t meant for Catrina,” Lothair said quickly to David, holding the man back.

“My pack needs a leader.”

“You can still be a leader. We’ll give you the power you could never otherwise have.”

Lightning flashed in David’s cold blue eyes. He considered the offering, as if there was some way he could become Lycan without risking his mind in the process. Was that even possible?

That wasn’t what concerned Colt. “But your mate bond with Mom,” he croaked.

Even if he and Rebecca were separated, David should still be at his highest potential now without the need for a Lycan form. He should be at his strongest—but from what we had all seen during the battle, it was clear that David wasn’t as strong or fast or in control of himself as he should have been, despite being marked by his fated mate. He’d been lacking power all this time.

“I have no mate anymore,” he growled. David’s eyes slid to me, threatening me to stay silent about what happened earlier, and with the gravity of a fact he had not shared. “Rebecca is dead.”

All of us held our breaths, though the news burdened our lungs and made our tongues feel heavy. It seemed the only one who already knew this was Lothair, who slowly took his hands off David and let the maddened man support himself, accepting our judgment. Accepting what this would create of him to tell us the truth about his wife, whose fate had at best been a nebulous mystery for fifteen years.

He bared his teeth at us. “I killed her!”