I wanted to feel something, anything, as I gazed down at the body of my packmate on the medical examiner’s table. All I could muster was a kind of numb stoicism. Katrina was the eighth, and last. A single silver bullet to the back of her head had burned her brain to a crisp and left her beautiful face a ruin. She hadn’t even had the chance to see it coming.
But as a werewolf, and, moreover, her alpha, I didn’t rely on facial recognition. Not only could I smell who she was, even over the stink of death, chemicals, and stainless steel in the morgue, but I knew her, down in my marrow. I’d felt her die, a lightning-stab through every nerve ending and a scorching blaze in my skull that jerked me awake screaming in the wee hours of the morning. She’d gone in for some kind of crisis at the all-night restaurant she managed—and been ambushed.
Brushing a strand of her dark-brown hair behind her ear, I swallowed and closed my eyes, nodding...
