But the question of Cooper remained, lodged beneath everything else, because if Ethan's ritual had not failed, if whatever he had set in motion was still gathering toward its intended conclusion, then the possibility of Ethan turning his desperation toward the child, using Dakota's son as leverage, as punishment, as a means of forcing her back, was not a possibility he could dismiss.
He had seen what desperation did to wolves who had once loved deeply. He had documented its wreckage across too many packs and too many histories. Love and ferocity were not opposites in a fractured mind. They lived together in the same space, and when the balance shifted, the harm that followed was targeted precisely at whatever the broken person understood to be most precious.
Ethan had loved her.
That love, curdled and cornered, was exactly what made him dangerous.
