“Marc?” I wiped my eyes on the sleeve of my robe, beyond caring that my face no doubt looked like a swollen tomato. “Would you stay?”

He didn’t smile, but he did nod, one hand on the doorknob. “I’ll be right back.” Then he slipped into the hall and closed the door softly behind him.

It took me two tries to autodial my home number, and if it hadn’t been programmed into my phone’s memory, I might not have been able to make the call. I wasn’t thinking clearly. The endorphins from the fight had faded, along with the “spunk” Keller had admired. Now, aside from the brutal postfight aches and pains, I just felt hollow. Numb. Very un-Alpha-like.

But the phone rang, oblivious to my distress.

“Hello?” Michael. My oldest brother. I almost cried in relief. Not that telling him would be easy, but it would be easier than telling my mother. Like a trial run for shredding a loved one’s heart with your bare claws.

“Hey. It’s me.”

“Faythe? Dad said you were under house arrest. Please tell me you didn’t waste your one phone call on me….”

I could practically hear the smile in his voice, and irony didn’t even begin to describe the fact that he was trying to cheer me up. Tragic was more like it.

“Um, I broke out.” My next breath made my throat burn with what had to be said. “Michael…”

“You broke out of house arrest? Faythe, what’s going on up there?” he asked. I sniffled, holding back tears with what felt like the very last of my strength. “What’s wrong?”

“Are you alone?” I sounded nasal, like I needed to blow my nose, but perfectly intelligible. So far, so good.

“Yeah, but the office door is open.”

“Close it.”

He got up without a word. I heard my father’s chair squeal—whose chair would it be now?—and recognized the soft click of the door. “What’s wrong, Faythe. You’re scaring me.”

Why wouldn’t the words come? Had I ever before truly been at a loss of them?

“There was a fight,” I began, and pressed my fist against one eye when tears threatened again. “We had to make a stand, because they were going to try me tomorrow and take my claws. And Malone was going to have Marc and Jace executed. I know he was. We had to fight. Everyone agreed.” Dad agreed.

But what if we were all wrong? If I’d known my father was going to die, I’d have been willing to lose my claws, and with them, my pride, independence, and spirit. But was his life worth Marc’s? And Jace’s?

There was a bigger issue. I knew it. My father knew it. We all knew it. We weren’t just fighting for the immediate victory. We were fighting for the long-term. For what was right.

As difficult as that concept sometimes was to define, Calvin Malone made it easier by constantly taking the low road. By lying, and cheating, and manipulating, and kidnapping, and murdering. Right had become easier to recognize, against the backdrop of Malone’s absolute wrong. So we’d done what was right—and paid a terrible price.

“Faythe, what are you saying?” Michael knew. I could hear it in the flat, dead quality of his voice, a defensive mechanism to keep me from hearing what he was really thinking. What he was feeling. He knew someone had died, and since our father hadn’t called with the news, he probably knew who we’d lost. But he wouldn’t believe it until he’d heard it. Maybe even until he’d seen for himself.

“Malone brought guns. Ten of them. We confiscated nine, but Colin Dean still had his. He…” I took a deep breath, then forced out the single most hateful words I’d ever uttered. “He shot Dad, Michael. Dean shot Daddy in the chest.”

“No.” That dead quality was gone. His voice now overflowed with pain, an echo of my own. “No. Is he…?”

“He died about twenty minutes ago.”

He was crying now, and the sound of my oldest brother’s sobs, broken by short bouts of stubborn stoicism, of strength, was more than I could take.

My own tears flowed silently, and I swiped at them as I spoke. “He said to tell you how proud he is of you. You and Owen. And to tell Mom…” My hand clenched around the phone, and I had to use my other arm to wipe my face, because the first sleeve was soaked. “I have to tell Mom. Can you get her?”

“She’s going to…” He sniffled into the receiver. “Faythe, I don’t know what she’s going to do.”

“Me, neither. Could you get her?”

“Just a minute.” I heard more footsteps, then the door squealed open again. “Mom?” he called, and his nose sounded just as stuffy as mine.

She was there in an instant. “Michael? What’s wrong?” The door closed again, and she came closer to the phone. “Is it Faythe?”

“She’s fine. It’s Dad.”

“What happened? Is he okay?” she demanded, and I could hear panic building in the voice I knew by heart. If my father was my strength, she was his. A steel backbone in satin wrapping.

Instead of answering, Michael must have given her the phone. “Faythe? What happened? Is your father okay?”

I couldn’t stand the tremor in her voice. Couldn’t stand being the reason it was there. I shook my head, though she couldn’t see it. “I’m sorry, Mom. They had guns. There was nothing we could do….”

The phone crashed to the floor, and the impact resonated deep within my brain. But the next sound completely overpowered it. “Nooooo…!”