she lurched to one side and threw up everything in her stomach.
The incessant chatter of her teeth, the loose way she swayed on her palms, shot alarm through him.
“You’re going into shock.” He caught her and rubbed her back. “We need to get you to Abbott.”
The girl had already been dead when Hadley killed her and cut out her heart, the coven saw to that, but Midas couldn’t blame Hadley for struggling to process what she had done when Krista’s likeness stared at them from where Bishop had set her head on the pavement.
“Abbott will fuss at me.” She sucked in air, great heaving gasps. “I don’t want to be fussed at tonight.”
“I’ll take you home then.” He got his arm around her before her knees buckled. “How about that?”
“I don’t want to bring this home,” she said, her voice empty. “Goddess, I don’t know what I want.”
“I have an idea.” He scooped her up then sat in the empty street. “Let me place a call first.”
“Okay.” She buried her face in his shirt. “Okay.”
Chin on top of her head, he held her while he made arrangements for still more enforcers to meet them and claim the body. It wasn’t Krista, not really, but the witchborn fae wearing her skin was all he had to give her parents.
Gwyllgi required no waterproof tents, insulated sleeping bags, or crackling fires to enjoy a night beneath the stars, but they often mated other species less at home in the forest. For that reason, the pack had an unusual number of permanent campsites on their property for mates and children less suited to exposure to the elements. As of last fall, there were even three isolated one-room cabins designed to fade into the surrounding trees.
A good third of the pack had fought his mom on building the cabins, small as they might be. The permanent campsites were already an eyesore, they argued. The den was meant to be a wilderness oasis, a place to shake a long week of working downtown out of your fur. Not walk manicured trails or choke on pungent mosquito repellent.
Mom decreed the pack had to accommodate all its members, and then she bit anyone who dared oppose her vision.
There was a very good reason why Tisdale Kinase was alpha of the largest gwyllgi pack in the Southeast.
Sharp teeth were only the tip of it.
Tonight, with Hadley’s mental wellbeing hanging on by a thread, he was grateful for the cabins. He carried Hadley into the closest one, woke her for a shower, then heated up chicken soup from a can in the pantry. She was asleep on the bed, bundled up in an oversized towel large enough to dry a wet gwyllgi, before the first bubble broke the surface in the pot on the stove.
Guilt churned in his gut over leaving Midtown before the teens were located, but Mom was always telling him half of being an alpha was learning when to delegate. Ares was his right hand, and the enforcers were highly trained members of elite teams. As much as it twisted him up inside, he had to believe he’d made the right call. Hadley teetered on the breaking point, and it was his duty—no, his privilege—to help her regain her balance.
After pouring the soup into a bowl for himself, he took it outside to eat on the dirt porch so as not to waste it.
“What happened?”
The fact his mother had hunted him down was about as surprising as the sun rising in the east.
“Hadley paid the first installment on our bargain with Natisha.” He stirred the soup but didn’t eat. “She’s in a bad way right now.”
“I’m sorry.” She joined him on the porch, not caring if her neat mint-green pantsuit got dirty. “Do you think she’ll cross the finish line?”
Break a deal with the fae, and the bargain came undone, for starters. But that was only fair. From there, they decided how much was owed to them for the betrayal and how to collect what was due.
Hadley had no choice but to cross the finish line, or Ford would die, and Natisha would get her chance to have what Linus had hinted she wanted in the first place: Hadley.
“She’s stronger than she looks.” He picked the carrots from the bowl and flicked them to the ground. “It will cost her, but she’ll make it.”
“I wish I had never summoned her,” Mom muttered, meaning Natisha. “I should have let it alone.”