Preston? I mean, he didn’t even know that the rest of us would be there when he’d made that decision.”
I hardly remembered that time. I’d been so completely out of it. “I don’t remember you being that thrilled.”
“No, we’d fought all day with Preston. Anton wanted him to come home. He wasn’t going to do that. I was feeling completely off balance being there at all, and Jarret was a shell of himself.” He sighed. “But then you came, my beautiful mate. And I didn’t know it yet, but you were going to make everything better. You have, time and again, taken care of us. Now it’s our time to help you.”
I shook my head. “Are you under the impression you haven’t done that? I mean, I was pretty much comatose for days. And yet, here I am.”
He winced. “That was Jarret and Anton. I didn’t do anything but encourage them to try. And Preston worked this out, where to go. How to do it. That’s all them. Now it’s going to be my turn.”
I squeezed his hands in my own, loving the slight roughness of the callus on his fingers. “Rainer, you don’t need to feel like you…”
That was when I felt them. The Loups. I dropped Rainer’s hands and swung around to see what had happened. My hands burned. Loups surrounded us.
“Well, I see what you mean about him throwing a fit.”
Rainer sighed. The first time we’d seen Loups, we’d all been asleep in our home, lying on mattresses on the living room floor. They’d forced the first shifts on Jarret and Anton, scaring the crap out of the rest of us. We’d all shifted and battled. Rainer had restrained himself from killing two.
Now, he was sighing. Oh, how things had changed.
I put my hands on my hips, even as they burned, ignoring the feeling. I’d gotten better at letting some of the urge to immediately fix wane, and the knowledge of the dead Omegas helped, too. I just had to breathe through the urge
There were ten of them.
That was more than I’d handled all at once before, but I’d cleared entire rooms of the control Ross had over them, so I supposed this wouldn’t be very different.
“Do you suppose that Omegas could be born tomorrow?” I shook my head. “Like we kill Ross today and a hundred of them are born tomorrow? Then I just have to wait eighteen years for some help.”
Rainer actually laughed. “I don’t think there are one hundred werewolves pregnant right now.”
“That’s too bad.”
But it turned out I was really not alone. Growls sounded everywhere, and I swung around to look. Anton. Jarret. Preston. Isaac. Agustin. My mother, which took me a hot second to digest. All of the Lejeunes. Miranda. Her mates. We weren’t just surrounded by Loups. Oh no, they were ready to get into the fray of the whole thing with our makeshift pack.
I put my hands out in front of me in the universal sign for stop before I spoke. “Okay. Thank you. We don’t need to hurt them. The thing Ross doesn’t understand is that he doesn’t control them, not really. I do. No amount of control he has will ever circumvent what they need from me.” I tilted my head. “But if you guys could herd them like sheep, I’d be so grateful. Bring me one at a time.”
Anton moved forward, but my mother beat him to it. I smirked. She was going to have a hard time taking a step back from me when this was over. She pushed her Loup toward me, grabbing on to his leg until he was right in front of me.
I smiled. It was funny. I knew it was she, and yet I’d seen her as a wolf for just seconds once before. But I knew it the way that wolves knew these things. The brown wolf with white spots was my mother. And she was dragging a Loup by the leg.
Chalking that in the column of things I never expected to see was one of the things I’d do today. I stepped forward, placing my hands on the Loup’s arms. His pain hit me, but there was something more. Ross had a strong hold on this Loup. Maybe it was the fact that he was so physically close to this Loup, or maybe he’d pushed his strength more than ever before.
I growled, my wolf coming to my eyes. She wanted to shift. We could do all of this on four