#Chapter 182 – The Trump Card

Inside the house, Ian, Emma, and Delia jump when they hear the sound of the bombs.

Mrs. Walsh just sits still. It’s a sound she’s heard before, one she was expecting.

“Wha-” Ian says, his mouth open and his head turned towards the windows, wishing, desperately, that he could see out. “What was that?”

“Bombs, darling,” Mrs. Walsh says from her spot in her armchair by the unlit fire, her head resting back against the fabric, exhausted. “That is the sound of the battle beginning.”

Ian grimaces and Emma knows that he wishes, above all, that he could be there. Ian is a boy who needs to be in on the action – he will be absolutely restless until he feels that he’s at the center of it all, helping his side.

Keeping him here, safe and sound, is torture for him.

“Mom,” Emma says softly, turning her face to her mother, trying again. “This can’t seriously be what you want for your pack, for its future.”

Mrs. Walsh turns her face away, as she did before.

They had tried, earlier, to persuade her. To convince her that a pack with Emma and Evelyn at the head, instead of John and Joyce, would be the better choice for everyone. But she had simply sat down in that chair and not responded – not at all – to anything that Emma had to say.

Delia hadn’t said anything, had merely sat quietly on the sofa. She knows that it’s not her fight. Eventually, Emma had given up and went to sit with Delia. They had sat in silence until the sound of the bombs started.

Ian surprises them all, though, by going to sit in his grandmother’s lap.

She welcomes him there, wrapping her arms around him as he curls up with his head against her chest. She rests her chin on his head.

“Grandmama,” he says softly. “Why does my grandfather hate my dad so much? Why does he want to kill him?”

Her face goes pale at that and she looks down at her grandson. He’s clever enough, she knows, to realize that the two forces going at each other outside are, indeed, his father and his grandfather. So she can’t lie to him to make it any better.

softly. “I don’t think he wants to kill him. It’s just…very important, for your grandfather, to maintain control.

daddy trying to take away the control?” Ian asks,

Victor is the one to come to the property, Walsh started this fight. “Your grandfather thinks that he will be better at leading the people than your father

don’t see why it matters,” Ian says, his voice rueful. “Alvin and I are going to inherit both packs in a little bit of time. They’ll be combined anyway. This all seems…” Ian takes a moment, staring at the iron shutters over the windows of their cage, trying to put words to emotions perhaps too intense for a

terrible waste,” he says finally, his voice very soft. “If people are

stares at the wall in

baby,” she says softly, stroking his hair in the same

of the wolfsbane smarts against his skin and his eyes as

writhing on the ground, screaming, their hands going to their faces, their eyes, their

it away, knowing that the men will be grateful, in the end. He doesn’t know a single man among them that wouldn’t trade three days of pain for a swift death, which was the other

agony themselves – likely

of Walsh and Willard’s forces out for

his mouth and

picking up speed again as they hurtle towards

every opportunity, instead of a kill. To press the advantage, but to be aware that they’re fighting amongst

accurately shoot, and Walsh’s uninjured forces are scrambling to man the front lines. Victor’s smile deepens as he

Walsh’s encampment, knowing that Walsh is no fool. That he’s not going to just let Victor dash in and take over without a fight. He will have something up his sleeve, and Victor is on

just inside the chain-link fence surrounding a watch

watchtower, Victor thinks, confused. Why the hell do they need to concentrate on manning a watchtower when his army is rushing forward towards

Beta black climbing the steps of the watchtower, Victor notes a flash of

s**t.

suddenly, that Walsh is going to play his

noise of an amplifier being attached to a microphone.

the front of the watch

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