This should have been up yesterday evening, I know, but I was having a Supernatural marathon with my little sister, who is actually one of the masterminds behind this story so #sorrynotsorry. This chapter (and kinda the whole book) is dedicated to her for deciding we all needed a rogue named Skye in our lives.

"Hold still — I'm nearly done."

I tried my best not to flinch as the woman scrubbed at my forehead. After we'd all got nicely acquainted with the remnants of Ember Pack, one of the women had, albeit grudgingly, offered to tend our injuries. She had done Leo first, who'd been struggling to breathe, then Tally because I'd insisted. Now my skin was clean of blood and the minor cuts were healing.

"Those ribs will be a few more hours," she told me reproachfully, then took her leave. Leo nudged me, and I muttered a thank you. Among rogues the medic would thank me just for sitting still and letting them do their job, but pack customs were different, to say the least.

At some point the day had turned and soon, Lewis told me, we could expect the cell to be lit by the dawn. Until then, we were resigned to sitting in darkness to talk. Leo and I leaned against each other, our backs at the bars, and Tally wasn't far off, trying to grab an hour's rest.

Sleeping hadn't even occurred to Lewis, who sat opposite me with his hands braced on his knees and a restless energy which was the sole provenance of pups. He was asking an endless stream of questions about who we were and where we came from, and it was becoming tricky to avoid them.

"Have you ever raided us?" finally ended my patience.

"Oh, yes," I found myself growling. "The first time, I was fourteen and I helped kill one of your fighters. Keep probing, kid, and you might not like what you hear."

He didn't heed the warning. Quite the opposite, actually. "Four or five years ago, then? I remember that! He was one of my father's friends, the teeth marks on his body were so small, I remember everyone wondering about it... But —"

I swore softly to myself.

"But that raid was one of Rhodric's," Lewis continued excitedly, surer of himself with every word. "You know him?"

"Know him," Leo repeated with a snort. I flicked the link to silence him, because an affiliation with Rhodric Llewellyn was almost always a death sentence.

"What?" asked Lewis. Now he knew he didn't know something, I doubted he would give up, so I changed the subject.

"How do they control you all? You're not chained or anything. They're not armed. What's to stop you fighting back?"

He went quiet for a moment. "Wait a few hours, and you can see for yourself."

Not an answer, but I wasn't in the mood for pushing any more than I was in a mood to be pushed. "Fine. How many of you have they turned?"

"Um. I don't know an exact number, but it's about a third of the fighters. Fifteen?"

"So few?" I twisted around, trying to squint at the individual cells near us, which never went silent. The constant backdrop of snarling and clanging seemed to wear on the prisoners more than imprisonment itself. Many of them sat with their hands covering their ears.

"Not enough cells," Lewis said, shrugging. "They need to keep them confined for days afterwards, by the looks of it."

Conversations like that kept us occupied until the first rays of the morning sun penetrated the darkness, hours later. I was trying to probe for weaknesses, to understand how the ferals operated, and Lewis was trying to be helpful. I even got an estimate on the numbers of ferals — three hundred in the bulk of the army, of which only a score had stayed.

I could see my cellmates now, and there was something very odd about them. The men were all young and built like fighters, while the women were all pretty. It was like an elitist society, wherein no one was older than forty or younger than thirteen.

"Where are the kids?" I found myself asking. "And the elders?"

"They killed our elders," Lewis said flatly. He looked like he would say more, but a glance past me convinced him otherwise. With a feeling of creeping dread, I turned around to look into the other huge cell, the one across from us.

It was full of children. Tweens, kids, toddlers and even a couple of babies in the arms of the older ones. They were filthy, bloodied, and worse of all ... silent. Children had a tendency to cry when they were traumatised (well, flockie children, anyway) but there was none of that, which suggested they were very far past traumatised.

"Why..." I began before stopping myself. The why was obvious. Separate parents from their children and you had the most docile prisoners you could possibly want. We could fight whenever the ferals opened the cell, but it would be the children who paid the price. Shit. This changed things.

I spent the next hour linking with Rhys, plotting and scheming and exchanging information. By the time we finished, we had a coherent plan of sorts. I'd wanted to drug the ferals initially, but it would be too messy to guarantee the children's safety. So we'd chosen a different strategy. And it was even messier, if I was being honest, but messy was my forte.

"So?" Lewis asked eagerly. I hadn't bothered to explain what I was doing, trusting that the linking trance would do the job for me.

I laughed at him. "Have some patience, pup. We have to wait for dark."

"But what's the plan?"

Leo and Tally looked like they might want to know too, so I told all three of them. A minute later, Tally was cussing me out and Lewis had been shocked into silence.

"Skye," Leo began patiently, "don't you think that might be a bit ... diabolical?"

"No I do not," I retorted. We'd done crazier things and survived them. And perhaps I cared less for Ember's pack house than they did... But that aside, it was still the easiest way to kill a score of ferals.

Leo started smiling. I'd get no more arguments out of him. But neither Lewis nor Tally looked happy for the rest of the day. They both admitted to knowing next to nothing about fighting or tactics, but they also weren't convinced, and that would make life harder come nightfall.

And nightfall did come. Slowly, steadily, the sun crept up and down again. We weren't fed in all that time, although there was a water trough in a corner. The children talked to their parents across the corridor, one of the babies started to cry incessantly, and we all did our best to ignore the sounds of our feral cellmates.

Time passed uneventfully. So uneventfully, in fact, that I had to resort to playfighting with Leo. The Ember shifters lined the walls to make room for us, and they seemed to enjoy the show. They enjoyed it less when I started challenging the fighters one by one and putting them on their backs with an assortment of underhand rogue tricks. Only Lewis was exempt, because thrashing the Alpha might not have been good for morale.

Just when it was getting difficult to see my mate's face, the lights flickered on. We all knew what that meant, and the mood in the cell swung from tolerable to downright terrified.

"Are they making more ferals?" I demanded of Lewis, because we could bring the plan forward if it was the case.

He shook his head wearily. "No, no, they do this every evening."

"They – what?"

And then the ferals were in the corridor and we had to shut up. There were only seven of them, with Luke in the lead. I saw my brother amongst them, and my heart stuttered in my chest. He had been fighting — there were new bruises and cuts on his face — but that was probably just the ferals' idea of entertainment. I didn't need to worry. Right?

"On your knees," Luke rumbled. "Now!"

Ember Pack knelt. There was resignation written all over their faces: they'd done this a dozen times. For those slower off the mark, like the pup-Alpha, his braver fighters and us three rogues, Luke's companions filtered into the crowd to throw kicks and punches. Rhys made a beeline for me, guessing I'd refuse out of pure bullheadedness, and he tipped me onto my knees before I could even think of resisting.

I hated this. Rogues did not kneel to anyone, so to do this for a feral flockie like Luke smarted in the worst way. Leo and Tally didn't seem to feel so strongly — they hunkered down beside me without hesitation. When the entire cell was subdued, Luke began a patient recitation.

"Most of you know what I want and what you stand to gain. But for our newcomers, I'll reiterate. We're looking for a man. If you have any information about him, if you know where he is or might be, you buy yourself a one-way ticket out of here. Take a look."

I raised my eyebrows. That was a lot of effort and organisation from supposedly rabid shifters. Maybe they had leaders after all. Maybe they had an actual purpose beyond killing.

I was still considering the likelihood of that when Luke held up a blurry photograph. It had been photocopied and upsized and cropped, but it was still unmistakable. This was the same photograph which the police had shown us, the same one I had seen a thousand times during my childhood.

The photograph of Rhodric Llewellyn, my father, and the man who'd so recently claimed that the ferals existed only to kill him. Maybe he wasn't so wrong, after all. I knew I looked like a startled hare and did my best to mask it.

Rhys managed to hide his surprise, thank the Goddess, but his face was damming all by itself. He ducked his head to hide the hazel eyes and cheekbones and mouth which he'd inherited from his father. I was grateful for his bruised and bloody face now. But my own reaction hadn't gone unnoticed.

Luke stared at me. He turned his head abruptly, his eyes sliding over the photo — where they seemed to snag. I felt a tension leak into my every muscle as he frowned. I needed to distract him from Rhys, to do something. Bruised and bloody or not, there was no mistaking that resemblance, so I threw a coughing fit.

"You," he sneered. "Something to say?"

"No," I mumbled after a heartbeat of frantic thought. Play the flockie female. Meek and scared. Don't give him any reason to doubt.

"No? It's worth your while, bitch. Freedom — just think of it."

I shook my head slightly, trying to look afraid.

Luke's scowl deepened. "Fine. But we'll see if you change your mind tomorrow, when the next cell frees up and your mate is the one who fills it."

With that final, spiteful threat he left the cell, the other ferals on his heels. Leo's hand squeezed mine tighter still, and I squeezed right back, only daring to let go when the darkness came rushing back. They were gone, and I hadn't done anything stupid. Huh. Mates did wonders for self-control.

I let out a sigh of relief, thanking the Moon Goddess heartily until the pup-Alpha rounded on me. "You know that man! Who is he?"

Lewis was glaring at me, but I only started laughing. Safe to admit it now, for sure. Few flockies knew what Rhodric looked like, or he wouldn't have lived this long.

"My dad," I said. "He's my dad."

A moment's pause. He was practically overflowing with questions, poor kid. "Why are they looking for him? Who are—?"

I hit him hard just to shut him up. I'd heard a sound near the prison door, and if it was what I thought it might be... We waited quietly in darkness and silence. Some of the packlings were still kneeling, while the rest of them were pretending not to listen to our conversation.

No more noises. I was almost ready to write off the sound as a caged feral when the lights turned on, straight off again, then back on. A grin crept across my face. The packlings were set to muttering. Apparently, electrical failures weren't common.

Because it wasn't a failure. It was a signal from my brother, meant to tell me that he was in the room which controlled the prison's door system. Now all we needed to do was prepare the clueless packlings. I nudged Lewis, who was still nursing his ribs and giving me a hurt look.

With a visible effort, he straightened and cleared his throat. "Alright, everybody, we will be departing the cell shortly. Please collect all your belongings and ready yourselves."

"This is an escape attempt, not a commercial flight," I snapped under my breath.

"How am I supposed to know what to tell them?" he hissed back. "If this fails, their children die."

"Then you tell them it won't fail and their children won't die, dumbass."

Our whispered argument hadn't gone unnoticed, and not many of the packlings looked comfortable with their Alpha being advised by a rogue, but they listened readily enough when Lewis turned back to them.

"It's dangerous, I won't lie, but this way we're less likely to end up dead, okay? Well, probably, anyway — I can't say I've actually calculated —"

I hit him again, and he quietened down. Better no speech than a speech like that. I felt a stab of nostalgia for my wonderful rogues who never needed encouragement to do something reckless.

The packlings still looked half-panicked when the cell door slid open, long before we were ready. Rhys wasn't at the controls after all, I reckoned, because he knew to wait. That begged the question. Who was?

I had barely slipped into the corridor when the door to the children's cell opened, also ahead of schedule. I'd wanted to get the fighters arranged as quickly as possible, but instead we faced widespread chaos as parents pushed their way to the front to find their kids after a week of separation.

Shitty shit shit. There wasn't time for this. And we couldn't wait for the little kids to waddle their way out of the building. I seized the first toddler I saw, and despite his best distressed efforts to slap me, I passed him to a woman too young to have her own pups.

"Enough!" I shouted over the ruckus of relieved tears and name-calling. "Move or die. Your choice. Fighters to the outside, everyone else in the middle. And be quiet, for Goddess' sake!"

Of course, that didn't stop most of the parents, but it did give a semblance of order to the confusion. Nobody seemed to care that the Alpha's job had fallen to a rogue, least of all Lewis, who was at the front with a squadron of his best men, trying to keep his head down.

I pushed my way through a throng of families to reach those elites. We were already spilling down the corridor, so all I had to do was take another ten steps to reach the prison exit. The door was already open, someone framed in the entrance. A beautiful but gaunt young woman.

"Quick now, before the smoke reaches us," she told me.

One look at her and my confusion evaporated. She was not my brother, of course, but she was easily recognisable as one of Ember Pack. And there was a hollowness in her expression which reminded me of how Fion had looked whenever she had been close to her mate. So it was not difficult to guess why she hadn't been in the cell with the rest of us.

See, ferals — wolves as they were — had rather mangled ideas of consent. I'd dodged the same fate so lightly last night, without even thinking that others may already be suffering it. But Rhys had thought and Rhys had found them and even convinced them to help him, apparently.

The time for thought ended there, because then she was stepping back and I was moving past to see a dozen more females just like her, one of whom was exiting a room full of switches and monitors. The prison controls, I was willing to bet, and they made me remember that we hadn't been the only prisoners.

"Clear the way out," I told Lewis hastily. "Let the other flockies follow a little way behind."

He nodded. Soon the bulk of the Ember survivors had passed me, their arms full of children. The fighters had already shifted into their wolves. And now there was a distinct smell of burning, and wisps of smoke were filling a side corridor. Rhys was doing his job.

Leo and Tally tried to stay with me, but I pushed them on, their protests drowned out by the clamour of a hundred terrified packlings. There weren't any ferals to be seen, which meant the plan was working, I supposed.

Then I slipped back into the prison. As I had half suspected, there were several women lingering at the bars of feral cells and a single teenager trying to persuade them to leave their mates behind.

"We'll come back, okay? We'll come back and get him."

He sounded like Lewis. He also looked like Lewis, and I would have mistaken him for Lewis if Lewis hadn't been outside by now.

"No, we won't," I snapped. Because I was impatient, I hadn't slept in a while and I didn't want to burn alive, I didn't bother with gentle persuasion. Instead I grabbed a fistful of the woman's shirt and threw her towards the steps. Then the next one, then the one after that, until the prison was empty of sane wolves.

Only the boy remained, his eyebrows furrowed. "These men are still pack members, and they don't deserve to die like this."

"I don't give a shit what they deserve. Either the fire kills them or it doesn't. It's out of our hands, so move your bastard Alpha arse before I move it for you."

He shook his head, and I made sure he saw my punch coming so he could move his hands down to catch it, leaving his throat exposed. I aimed a second blow below his chin with my left. While he was still choking on air, I dragged him to join the sobbing women on the steps. Half a minute of herding got everyone into the corridor, and then it was just a matter of slamming the door and locking it.

If the door was fireproof, those fresh-turned ferals might even stand a chance. The prison was lined with concrete, after all, so I didn't see how the fire would get in. Smoke ... was another matter.

To my relief, as soon as the women saw the orange glow of fire in the corridor, they began making their own way out of the building. I followed the sound of their footsteps, now that the smoke was thickening. I was still dragging the boy, who seemed far younger when he was coughing than when he was standing up to me. Fifteen, maybe? He was probably one of Lewis's many little brothers.

My wolf desperately wanted to get away from the fire. It was base instinct. So I was confused when she had a change of heart in a split second and began tugging me towards a side corridor. Dizzy and breathless and I was, it took a while to process her explanation.

Mate.

Leo should be outside. I knew that, of course, but my wolf's panic defied logic. Against my better judgement, I sent the boy stumbling towards the exit and trekked into the blinding smoke. This place was closer to the fire's heart. Flames licked at a doorway to my left, and I veered away.

I couldn't breathe at all now. Even with the collar of my shirt pulled over my mouth, I couldn't breathe. Where was Leo, in all of this? Another dozen paces and I was in an open space (or what felt like an open space, because I couldn't see jack shit).

No, I couldn't see, but I could recognise the shapes of the tiles beneath my bare feet, which I knew because I'd been kneeling on them the night before. This was the dining room, and close by I could hear the sound of knuckles on flesh.

Fighting. Leo was fighting. He must have gone chasing after ferals to defend the Ember escapees. But that had been before the place became a smokehouse, and now I was willing to bet he couldn't breathe or see either.

I fumbled my way to the noises, seized something which felt like an ankle and twisted. It wasn't Leo — my wolf knew, somehow. A yelp of pain was my reward, so I kept twisting until I felt something break. The punching sounds had stopped now. I nearly tripped over two more motionless ferals, and then I found my mate, finally, sat up against a wall.

I didn't try to use my eyes, which were burning, or my voice, which was raw. But I found his hand and squeezed, trying to pull him up so we could find a way out. He didn't manage to move, but he squeezed back.

"You should have gone while you had the chance," Leo told me through our link, hazily and faintly, as if he were trying very hard to stay conscious. "I think I'd be okay with dying if you weren't going to die with me."

I ignored him. Of course we weren't going to die. I stood up and felt my way along the way until my hands touched cool, smooth glass. A window — perfect. But no matter how hard I punched at the damn thing, my hands took all the damage. Bloody double-glazing. And there didn't seem to be anything heavy around, no matter how much I fumbled.

I went back to Leo. I forced my eyes to open and look at the smoke. It didn't seem to matter anymore whether they got damaged. Still nothing. But my mate gave me a faint smile as he gave way to the blackness which was beginning to nag at me.

Death. Coming so quickly and easily. It was a pool deeper than sleep, but still so easy to fall into. I was aware of someone else battering at my mind, their worry hounding me, but it all seemed so unimportant, so distant, when I could hear blood pounding in my ears.

"Leo?" I tried unsurely. He didn't show any sign of hearing, so I straddled his legs and kissed him clumsily, sharing the little oxygen I had left. And despite everything, despite being in the horrible process of dying, he managed to kiss me back.

And then, all of a sudden, stopped.

"Leo?"

I groped for his neck, looking for a pulse, but my elbow hit something heavy. I ran my hands over it once, twice: a large metal cylinder, and I burst into a combination of laughter and coughing. We wouldn't be dying today, after all.

"Shit," I choked out, "that was a close one."

But when I looked back at my mate, he wasn't looking at me. He wasn't looking at anything at all.