Chapter 19: Comeuppance

"He's going for his mouth!" I shouted. "Ronan, the flask is for your mouth!"

Ronan did not step back.

He stood there with his hands open and his eyes on Dorian's face, and I understood why.

If he moved, Dorian would throw it at Lyra or at me.

He was giving Dorian the only target he wanted.

Dorian lunged with his arm straight out and the open flask in his fist.

Lyra was faster.

She had picked up a length of driftwood from the stones without any of us seeing it, and she swung it with both hands.

It cracked against his forearm, and the flask jumped.

It turned over once in the air and came down on Dorian himself.

Green liquid ran across his bitten hand and up his wrist and splashed his chin.

For half a heartbeat he only stared at it.

Then the wolfsbane found the open bite, and he screamed.

I had never heard Dorian make a sound he had not chosen.

This one tore out of him, high and ragged, and he went down on the stones clawing at his own hand.

His mind was nothing but white pain.

It burns. It burns. It's in me. Somebody. Somebody.

Wynn put a knee in his back and pinned his good arm.

Nobody else moved to help him.

That was when I heard the rest of them coming.

The whole Merrow council had followed us out of the boathouse, the heavy man in front, the elder behind on someone's arm.

Along the breakwater, Ronan's thirty wolves stood silent against the grey sky.

Merrow families were coming down the stones from the road, and so were Kestrel ones, and a crowd had formed on the beach without anyone calling it.

Keep reading free with an account. Start Reborn to Get the Alpha She Rejected from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.