Jana had always been self-assured, and there’d been no difference when I’d first seen her at the clearing. But now, with Berry so close to her, that confidence was gone. She backed up, but collided straight with a tree. Her hands grabbed the bark with a franticness I could discern, gripping it as Berry’s snarls, vibrating in my own chest, turned her cockiness into outright terror.

I couldn’t control Berry, could only see what she was doing, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out that she was going to attack my sister.

And, Kali Sara help me, I had no desire to stop her. No desire to figure out whether or not she should be attacked.

I reached up to rub my eyes where an ache had gathered from the prolonged exposure to Berry’s vision, but when I looked back, I knew I’d lost the link.

Was that for my own good?

Jana was next on Berry’s shit list, so she could…

The light of the moon caught my attention all of a sudden.

It was strong tonight—a full moon. The rays were enough to bask in, to glory in, and I could only hope it charged my men with strength—well, Ethan and Eli. Austin was…

I gulped.

He wasn’t dead.

I just couldn’t talk to him.

Checking in with him gave me no more information as to how he was faring, because I had to assume he’d reply if he was conscious, and if he wasn’t replying because he didn’t want to, then I’d slap him later.

I wanted, so badly, to speak with Eli and Ethan, but I didn’t want to distract them. I had nothing to impart, no news or information to share, so I knew staying out of it would keep them focused, and after what I’d seen, they needed all the focus they could get.

But it was hard.

With every pack brother or sister who lost their life, I felt their death like a gaping maw in my soul, and even feeling my mates’ light wasn’t enough to stabilize me.

Tonight could be the last night we walked on this earth.

It was terrifying and affirming—all at the same time.

I sucked in a breath when my eyes opened, and this time, the moon looked bigger. Stronger. My mouth worked at the sight, because I knew, a second before, it hadn’t been that way. It had been smaller. Full, sure, but this size?

It seemed to pulse as well, and light throbbed around it like solar flares of a lunar variety. It throbbed as if there was a wind around the outline, and the rays of light, for a handful of seconds, lit up the night sky like it was a lightning storm.

I gaped at the sight of it, unsurprised when Knight burst into tears. As I hugged him to me, wondering if this was what Eli had meant when he told me I needed to head into the safe room—and seeing as this felt pretty cataclysmic—I decided to make my way there, only a flash of something caught my eye from the forest line.

When I saw Choi and Lara, I called out to him because I doubted she’d be able to hear, “Choi! Don’t go into the forest! It’s dangerous!”

She twisted around, though, and I knew I’d surprised her. “Sabina? You’re moving!”

Startled by that answer, not only that she’d heard me, but that she was shocked I was moving, I called back, “Of course I am! What’s wrong? What’s going on?”

“More than you can ever understand,” Lara replied, and the cryptic answer wasn’t the best way she could have answered. Not with the clusterfuck my life was devolving into.

“Lara Krasowski! My mates are in that forest. They’re fighting hyenas for you. Don’t you dare come back at me with that kind of BS!”

“They’re not fighting over me,” Lara retorted. “They’re fighting for Jana’s sake.”

My mouth trembled at that. “I’ve seen her. I thought she was dead.”

“Me too,” Lara called back. “She must have faked her death.”

“Why?” I rasped.

“To escape a fate worse than death.”

The new voice snagged my attention, and though it still stunned me that I could see a mile into the distance, hear my sister shouting at me from that length, and feel as though they were just in the yard, I saw Jana and wasn’t even sure whether to laugh or cry.

Laugh, because she was alive and this should have been a reunion.

Or cry, because there she stood, half her body torn to shreds by Berry’s claws and teeth, but she had a gun trained on Lara. A gun with the safety off, and her fingers, most definitely, on the trigger.

Had Berry died? Was that why she was still alive?

The prospect of losing Berry, I realized, was far more painful than Jana’s potential loss.

Grief hit me, square in the gut. “What’s going on?” I screamed, grateful for Knight’s sling as I punched the air at my sides, fury tossing me around like I was a boat on top of a tidal wave.

“I’m taking charge of my future,” Jana screamed back, but her hands were shaking, and I knew she had to not only be in extreme pain, but she was evidently messed up to be holding a gun on our baby sister.

Our family had done a really good job of fucking us up, but this really took the goddamn cake.

“You lower that gun right this second,” I snarled, wishing I was there so I could smack her upside the head. “I can’t believe we’re having a family reunion and it’s at gunpoint.”

Jana shrieked, “Fuck you! Fuck you, Sabina. Fuck everything about you. You think you can tell me what to do? Fuck. You. You think I don’t know you want me dead? You think I don’t know that’s where this is heading?”

“Of course I don’t want you dead!” I roared at her, uncaring that my scream of rage entwined with Knight’s howl.

The kid had a set of pipes on him, but at this moment in time, it was the opposite of useful. Jana jerked, and because she was both in excruciating pain as well as nuts, the last thing I needed was the trigger-happy bitch to twitch that index finger of hers.

Humming under my breath, I muttered, “Knight, baby, please. I get that you’re stressed and Mommy is too, but now isn’t the time.”

Like he’d understood every single word, he stopped squawking. Just like that.

I’d have been amazed and told him he was a clever boy, if Jana hadn’t screamed, “I’ve been waiting for this moment since I was fourteen years old!”

There were just under four years age difference between us, so I knew whatever she’d been waiting for, whatever she’d seen, because her thing was catching glimpses of the future, it had first come to her before Kian and I had run away from home to be together.

The timing felt like my life was coming full circle, and I hollered at her, “You knew I was seeing Kian, didn’t you?”

“Of course, I did,” she snarled. “I warned father about your boyfriend.”

“You always were a snitch,” Lara spat.

I growled under my breath, because Lara was in range of the damn gun. I wasn’t. She could be shot, I couldn’t.

Quickly grabbing the attention away from Lara, I screamed, “Why did you do that? Why did you encourage him to hurt us?”

“So that this day wouldn’t come,” she snapped back. “But I knew it hadn’t worked. I knew it. I still kept seeing the same goddamn vision, and I knew even though Cyrilo believed you were dead, he’d fucked up. That was when I ran away. I had no choice.”