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“You need to sleep,” he says, turning away from the landscape streaming by to look at me. I open my mouth to argue, but he presses, “Whatever mess you’ve made, you can tell me about it after you’ve cared for your woman and gotten some sleep.”

“I need to keep an eye on him,” I say, feeling responsible for Ferris’s current state. I was the one who left them at the camper alone. I was the one who hit him with the gun. Tied him up. Muzzled him. My stomach curdles just thinking about it.

Ren deadpans, “You really think your omega is going to let sleeping beauty out of her sight? She’s probably already building a nest for him. Go,” he orders. “Whatever you need to say to me can wait.”

I feel like I’m moving through sand as I walk back down the short train car to the room where Raine has laid out our blankets across the floor. Tore must have helped her get Ferris into the middle. She’s stripped down to a pair of shorts and a clean tank top and has curled against Ferris with her face buried in the shirt that I stole from his room in Grand Prairie all those days ago.

I strip out of my boots and shirt and kneel down at the edge of the blankets to crawl in behind her. “Hey baby,” I say softly. She immediately rolls over and burrows into my chest with a whimper.

“I missed you,” she says.

“I never left.”

“I know, and I’m so thankful to your wolf for helping us get here. Ferris would have never made it without you. But I missed this,” she says, pushing her face into my neck and collarbone. One of her hands comes up to absentmindedly trace the scars on my chest.

I pet her hair, still crusted in places from the Biter battle. My wolf internally snarls at how poorly we’ve taken care of our pack. “I know, baby. I missed you too.”

As we lie together, our breathing syncs, making Ferris’s rapid breaths seem more pronounced in the silence between the three of us.

She sniffles, clutching at my chest. “What are we going to do if he doesn’t make it out of this?”

“He will,” I insist, but the truth is, I don’t know how we’ll make it through if he turns. How does anyone keep going after their loved ones are infected and lost to madness?

Her voice is broken when she speaks again. “Did you see Vale? The whole time we’ve been hiking here, I’ve been telling myself that she was doing well, that she was safe with Tore, and that they were going to be okay. She might be alive, but something tells me she’s far from okay.”

My heart clenches, hurting for us and for Vale. “I know,” I breathe.

I hear her whispering something like a chant into the hollow of my neck, but I can’t make out the words. I just hold her and let her absorb whatever she needs from me as my eyelids grow heavy with the rocking of the train.

Ifind Ren watching over us when I wake in the middle of the night.

I ask him, “Any changes?”

“Nah, he’s still out cold. There’s nothing we can do for him other than wait. I checked his bite not too long ago, though. Y’all slept right through it.”

“Is it getting worse?”

“That depends,” he drawls. “How long has it been since he was bitten?”

I try to formulate an exact number, but the time is a little foggy since I was in wolf form. “Best guess . . . nearing forty hours?”

He hums. “Let’s look again.”

I gently maneuver a sleeping Raine away from my chest and position myself on the other side of the nest so that I can roll Ferris just enough for us to see his shoulder. The waning moon shines her light onto the flesh that should be teeming with large, reaching black veins. Yet, there are only a very few small ones that appeared right after infection.

Confused, Ren says, “By now, the virus should have turned him. The research says that most infections spread to the brain within an hour. In special cases, it might be up to six hours. Yet, look how underdeveloped the veins are around the bite. Forty hours with this little spread is unheard of.”

“I think it’s time we had that talk,” I tell Ren, getting up and leading him out into the hall away from my sleeping pack.

As the train gently rocks, he leans against the hallway wall and pins me with his probing gaze. “Alright, I’m listening.”

“I was able to secure an alliance with Grand Prairie, but the price was higher than we expected.”

“It always is,” he mutters.

“Tore probably already explained that Aspen and Koda have been assigned to stay there to assist their leader, River, with squashing a potential political danger?”

“Yes, he mentioned it,” Ren says. “I was shocked to hear that Aspen agreed to it, but Tore explained the situation with your mate, and we all know Aspen isn’t really mad about being left with Koda,” he smirks.