Again, his offer surprises me.
I briefly consider it and shake my head, though he can’t see me. “This situation will keep on repeating. There are other ferals out there, and I’m the Wolf King. I fought for the right to deal with this problem.”
I lost my parents to a feral. I didn’t want anyone else to lose someone they loved, but my options on dealing with them havealways been limited to two. Kill them, or the silver cage will eventually do the job for me.
There is no humanizing a feral. Once a shifter bit them and their mind spiraled, rejecting and fighting that change, there’s no going back. There’s no mending a shattered mind that has utterly rejected its new reality. It’s something my dad looked into, and I doubt he was the first.
My mom thought they could be saved. They can’t.
“What does your beta think?” he asks.
“Not asked him yet. He’ll suggest something diplomatic, and that won’t work, at least, not in the long term.” And what I want is a permanent solution that I doubt exists.
He snorts. “Sounds like he went to the same school of diplomacy as my beta.”
“How is Heath?”
Tagge sighs. “Trying to convince me to improve my communication habits. Talk first, kill after.”
I make a sound of assent.
“He doesn’t seem to understand that if someone is determined to piss me off to the extent that I want to kill him, I’m eventually going to kill him anyway. Might as well skip over the talking and get the killing over and done with.”
“I wish Finan understood that.” It's my turn to sigh. “He likes to lift his eyebrow to show he disapproves.”
“Heath just stares at me until I get the message. It’s distracting when I’m breaking someone’s neck.”
“Kat went to talk to the feral.”
Leather creaks down the line. He must be sitting in his office chair. As Wolf Lord, he held a council a couple of years ago, and I briefly remember his mahogany and brown leather office.
“She didwhat?” he growls.
I’m glad he’s as worried about Kat as I am. I’m not anticipating anyone or anything to take me out, but it’s a reliefto know that Kat would have Tagge to check in on her. “She said she didn’t want to open his cage, but...”
I know Kat.
If she had thought it was the right thing to do, she’d have opened it. I have the only key, but she’s smart. She’d figure out a way to open it with or without a key.
And I can’t stop thinking about my mom, who opened the cage for a feral she believed was worth saving, and paid for that decision with her life.
When Gregor called to tell me where Kat had gone, my heart stopped.
He’d still been speaking when I bolted out of my office, hoping I wasn’t too late.
“I don’t know what to do.” I scrub a hand over my face, frustrated. “I’m the Wolf King, and I have no fucking idea what to do about ferals.”
“Maybe that’s the problem,” Tagge says thoughtfully.
“What is?”
“You're trying to do it all yourself. This isn’t just your problem. It’s a problem that impacts every pack in the country, if not the entire world. As long as shifters continue biting humans, that problem will never go away.”
“So?”
A knock sounds on my door, and Finan sticks his head in.
I take one look at his face and sit up. “I’ll call you back, Tagge. Something’s come up.”
