A month after she'd disappeared, they found Clara's body in a creek down by a grocery store. The manager had stepped out back for a cigarette break and saw the edge of her pink dress entombed in the mud. That was all Matt knew, because it was all his mother would ever tell him before her face went hard and the look in her eyes died out to the unfocused distance. It was like something clicked in her brain. The snap of two magnets poppin' together. Whatever it was made her an empty, shriveled husk of a woman.

His dad shared that look too. Every time his missing swing would lose him the softball game. Every test he failed, every rule he broke, every time he tried with everything he had and never made the cut, his dad would get that look in his eyes. To Matt, that look always meant this was a mistake.

He was a mistake.

Clara probably woulda grown up to be a lawyer or a scientist or a doctor. She probably woulda had kids now. A family and a white picket fence house. In Matt's mind, Clara made straight A's and wore promise rings and braided flowers into her hair. Clara kept her parents together. Clara was everything anyone ever wanted to be.

Even when he was young, that was the way Matt envisioned her.

His dad never hit him, but there was a time where he came real close. The Sunday morning that Matt had shattered one of the dozens of portraits of Clara that hung on the living room wall. It was on accident and it wasn't. He shouldn't have been throwing his old baseball around in the house, but a part of him aimed for Clara's photo on purpose. He still remembered the feeling of his dad's rough hands, scratching the bones of his neck as he ripped him up by the collar of his shirt.

Matt wasn't made to do good. His clumsy hands couldn't write poems or paint portraits, or even throw a decent pitch. He wasn't smart enough to be a scholar or strong enough to be an athlete. He didn't know jack shit about cars or politics or woodworkin' gun-racks out of cedar trees.

Matthew Richards was never going to make his father proud. But for Jaylin and the others, he refused to be a disappointment.

Sadie had him locked around the arm. He moved quickly but carefully. One sloppy step and his shoes scuffed against the tiles beneath him. He didn't know how many wolves would be around the next corner, so he moved like he was walking between razer wires. Every bit of him was itching to turn back. Leaving Tisper felt like an abandonment. Even though she told them to go. Even though she was more useful with leverage-it still felt like they'd tossed her to the wolves.

He was so much weaker without her. Weak and small and afraid.

"It's gotta be left," Sadie whispered to him, and he turned down a hallway where the walls had been paved with deep purple paint. They were looking for a staircase or an elevator-any way to reach the floor below. But the place was so much bigger than it looked from the outside. Matt's legs burned from all the running. He'd planned by now to be curling weights like they were made of feathers, sporting a six pack and running 5K's without breaking a sweat. The police academy's physical exam was a cruel, ruthless test and if he wanted to pass, he'd needed to start his endurance training early. When I get back home, he kept telling himself. Now he regretted putting it off, the muscles in his thighs gone tense, cold sweat crawling down his back.

They neared the end of the hall, and around the bend, the red of Ziya's throne room cast a gradient fuchsia on the plum textile walls. Matt slowed his pace. Sadie had locked on tight to his hand, her warm fingers threading through his own. Her breath rattled and her hands gripped tighter.

"What happens if we don't make it out of here, Matt?"

He turned to look back at her-the space between her brows glistened with sweat. The shortest of her curls had fallen from her messy bun, her round eyes wide, glittering tinsel in the slow strobe of candle lights. It was wrong, seein' Sadie so afraid. Wrong like cold ice on soft teeth.

"What is it you always say about your witch stuff?" he asked. "It's all about believing."

"But I was talking about spells and cards and candles, Matt. Not this-not..." She blinked, fresh tears wetting her eyes. "Not this, Matt. I don't even have the supplies for a protection spell. I don't have anything, I can't do anything."

"You can do anything, Sadie."

Her large eyes flashed up to him and she parted her lips to protest, but there was nothing Sadie could say that would make Matt believe in her any less. And before she could utter a sound, a door above them flew open with a boom so loud, it shook the window on the wall beside him.

"Queen," Matt heard someone say-an edge to the voice that he couldn't pick apart. It sounded like fear-but more in the way of someone who was happy to be afraid.

He pulled Sadie forward, through the curved hallway until that candle light grew. The walls peeled away and the first thing he saw was the purple beneath Alex's eye. His lips ever moving, whispering soundless words. Imani laid crumpled to the floor beside him, the candle sconces turning all her wild edges the color of lilacs.

"What's wrong with Alex?" Sadie whispered.

Matt didn't know, but that wide-eyed, crazy way he rocked back against his bound wrists reminded him a whole lot of that night in the Watch. The night Alex had begged him to knock his lights out for just a moment of silence. Maybe this was just how Alex looked when he couldn't make the voices stop.

Matt tore his eyes from his moving lips. The hallway had led to the back, right corner of the dais, and from here, he could only see what existed behind the back of Ziya's throne. He shuffled closer to the end of the hall, until the rest of the throne room came into view. Buckets of blood soiled the checkered floor-a thin layer stuck to Jaylin's skin, matted his hair and the fur of the beast that laid limp in his lap. An empty throne and a bloodied wolf. It didn't take long for Matt to put two and two together.

Ziya had her head tilted up to the railing above to question the intrusion. "What is it?"

"The juveniles," said the voice. "They've escaped their cells."

Ziya's face twisted into a furious confusion. She snapped her head to the front of her throne room, where Nicon curled forward, bleeding profusely from the holes in his arms and legs. Izzy and Elizaveta huddled close and Jaylin sat there in pools of blood, holding on tight to his dying wolf. Matt surveyed the rest of the room with his eyes. Felix was nowhere to be seen, but four more faces he didn't recognize had taken stance at the doors. A large balding man and a slender one with glasses, as well as two women who looked identical down to their haircuts. At this point, Matt wasn't sure if they were twins or clones-but for just a moment, one of the women met his eyes.

A heavy weight sat in his throat and he swallowed it down like dry food, but the twin said nothing. Her eyes moved slowly back to Ziya.

"Lock the doors," Ziya ordered. "I don't want them escaping."

Her wolves sealed the doors closed-the women first, and then the men. A cold silence crept over the room like shadows. The front doors rattled in a soft groan of wind.

Then he heard them.

The hard, tooth-chilling screeeeech of claws on metal. Doors jerked and shuttered, rattling and pounding vibrations into the walls. The sound carried throughout the throne room, the metal of shivering doorknobs, clacking and chattering from every direction.

Beasts clawing for escape.

Sadie slipped out of his hand. "Did you hear that?" she whispered.

"The doors? Yeah-"

"No," Sadie said. "Listen."

Matt shifted just a bit closer to the end of the hall. Nearly every wolf in the room had turned their heads to the those large wooden doors. But when Matt listened close, it wasn't wind he heard howling through them.

It was a croon in the distance. The soft, yonder cry of a wolf. And then he heard another... and another.

And for the first time, Bailey shifted on the tile floor. He shoved himself up to his knees, blood still stained to his face. He raised his head to the high arched ceiling, shut his eyes and took a breath. "You might want to call in your wolves, Queen."

"She's here," Izzy whispered.

Then a wild, wicked grin slipped over Elizaveta's face. "Qamar," she purred.

Ziya's head snapped once more to the door. Her face bristled with a sudden flare of revolt.

"Enough! Bring in my wolves," she shouted.

The twin who'd caught Matt's eyes turned to Ziya in protest. "We can't open the doors, my queen. The juveniles."

Her jaw went tight and Ziya let out a blistering screech. She tramped down the steps, into the pools below and ripped a knife from the belt of the dead hunter. "I've had enough!" she snarled, "I am not going to lose." The blood soaked into the trail of her dress, that silver knife flickering in the red light of the candles. Each sharp step pressed her closer to Jaylin. "You were supposed to be the key. You were supposed to be the arsenal that would put my sister into the ground. You were the door to total reigning." Her fingers went tight around the hilt of the blade. "Let go of him," she said. "She turned my own against me, I kill one of hers. An alpha for an alpha."

Jaylin's red, teary eyes went narrow. He clutched the wolf tight against his chest, face pressed into the fur of his neck. She'd sooner take the beast from his cold, dead body.

"So be it," Ziya said. The knife raised up, a rosy shimmer slipping up the metal.

And Matt recalled the card Sadie had pulled for him at the Watch. The Hanged Man. He'd only seen it once, but he remembered it so clearly. That man in red tights, dangling by the ankle from the T-cross of a wooden beam.

"You're here to give something, Matt," she'd told him. "That's a good thing, right? That means you're useful. You have a means to contribute."

"But what am I giving?"

"Well... you'll just have to think about that."

He'd thought about it ever since then. He hadn't stopped thinking about it. Because the truth was, Matthew Richards wasn't made for happy endings. He wasn't made for honor, he wasn't made for success. He didn't have that fire in him, he didn't have the brains it took to be somebody.

Matt wasn't made for greatness, but maybe he was made for this.

He slipped around the corner before Sadie could reach out and stop him. He heard her voice behind him, but nothing else. The carpet of the dais was soft beneath his feet, and he bounded down the staircase, stopping slick on the puddle of Jaylin's blood. He turned to Ziya and in that moment, something cracked in him like glass. The sound of ripping cartilage or snapping bone. He heard it and he felt it, but it didn't hurt. It didn't hurt when the knife went in.

Jaylin screamed his name and the sound moved through him in slow pulses. Something warm was starting to congregate in his chest-fuzzy and prickly like hot static. He glanced down to the wooden handle of the blade, stuck until him up to the hilt. The warm wet red stained his t-shirt. That fuzzy heat climbed into his face and his legs gave out beneath him, splashing into the cool blood at his feet.

"Matt!"

The tile floor rolled beneath him. But just as he'd never felt the knife, Matt didn't feel himself hit the ground, either. He was just there. Splayed out on his back, watching the dark, star-speckled skylights, through the paned glass in the ceiling.

He felt hands on his face, heard his name cried in the distance, but those stars were too lovely to look away and dying felt a lot like falling asleep.

"Matt!" Jaylin's voice sounded soft and heavy, like it was buried beneath the earth. Matt turned his head to see the tears cutting clean lines through the blood on his face. He was hunched forward, that wolf still cradled in the crook of his arm. His hand trembled against Matt's cheek. The longer Matt stared, the less focused he became. And when Jaylin was nothing but a dark, shifting blur of shadows, he turned his eyes back to the skylights.

He'd feared this moment for so long, but it was nothing like Matt imagined. Everything was so comfortable. Dying was so easy. The only part of it that hurt was the fact that as he laid there, watching a shooting star crease the sky, all Matt could think was,

would he be proud now?

_______

an; I know this is a tough chapter to read. I am here to address your concerns ♥