Blood Rule (Book 4, Dirty Blood series) by Heather Hildenbrand Page A

could focus
on right now.
    CHAS was down to five. One of them—the
father of my friend—held the fate of this entire room in his hands.
And the fate of my pack.
    I let it all sink in and tried to
figure out what the next move would be in a scenario like this. It
felt surreal. We’d gone from having amnesty to being fugitives in a
matter of hours. And it was all up to Logan’s dad. I hadn’t seen
that one coming.
    “ How much time do we
have?” Derek asked.
    “ The vote is in two
hours,” Grandma said. “After that, everything changes. If Steppe
gets his way and the vote passes, teams will be
deployed.”
    “ We’ll have to fight,”
Derek said.
    I winced at the hardness in his voice.
I had no doubt he meant the words. Or that he spoke the
truth.
    I thought of Kane and his warning the
other day. He was a leader of the best strike team out there. Would
he be the one to come after us? Would one of us have to fight him?
I wasn’t sure if I could live with hurting someone else I knew, not
after Alex. Especially knowing Kane wasn’t even the one voting for
this kind of bloodshed.
    “ It’ll be people we know,”
I said. “Friends.”
    “ They aren’t my friends,”
Cord shot back. Her eyes were lit with a fire I only ever saw right
before she attacked something. She’d looked this way before she
staked Miles. I suppressed a shiver.
    “ We aren’t going to
fight,” Grandma said. “Not yet.”
    “ What?” Derek
asked.
    Wes fisted his hands. “What do you
mean? We have to fight.”
    “ We can’t run away,” Cord
argued.
    “ We can and we will,” Jack
said, his voice raised over everyone else’s. The deep bass of the
alpha shut everyone else up. He wasn’t necessarily my alpha, but
when Jack spoke that way, everyone listened. “For now, anyway,” he
went on. “We have to figure this out, have time to plan it
properly. We can’t rush in with guns blazing.”
    Cord opened her mouth like she was
going to argue, but Jack cut her off with a look. “It’s a figure of
speech. You know what I mean.”
    “ Jack’s right,” Fee said,
her voice gentle by comparison but still firmer than normal. “We
need to regroup. Figure this out. They haven’t even voted
yet.”
    “ Always the diplomat,” I
muttered.
    “ We all know what’s going
to happen,” Derek said.
    “ Until it does, we have no
grounds,” Fee said. “We can’t defend ourselves against something
that technically hasn’t happened yet.”
    “ And once the vote happens
and they come after us? Then what?” Wes asked. His hands were still
fisted, as if attempting to hold his tension closer. There was
nothing I could do to calm him. Not now. I was as upset as he
was.
    “ Then we can respond,”
Jack said, his eyes glinting with the prospect of a fight. That
seemed to calm Derek and Cord some, but Wes remained
rigid.
    “ So we run … where?” Cord
asked.
    “ And for how long?” Derek
added. “I’m not hiding forever.”
    Fee sighed. Grandma and my mother
exchanged a look. “That’s the debate,” Grandma said. “Putting you
all in any one place is dangerous. But finding multiple safe
locations is proving to be a challenge as well. We have some ideas,
but …” she trailed off, her eyes on me, and I
understood.
    “ My pack,” I
said.
    Grandma’s mouth tightened around the
edges.
    “ Tara, there are so many
of them,” my mother began. “It puts you at risk—”
    “ I’m not leaving
them.”
    “ We’re not saying you
should leave them,” Grandma said. “But you should know that Steppe
has summoned you for questioning.”
    I looked at my mom for confirmation.
She nodded, her expression grave. “The notice came by messenger
after you left.”
    “ It’s not quite as serious
as the warrant for Wes or the treaty being rescinded,” Grandma
said.
    “ Not yet,” my mom
interjected.
    “ But the fact that you
lead—or even associate with—the hybrids doesn’t bode well for you,”
Grandma finished.
    “ I’m not