The answer surprised him. “Do you think you could kill someone, Samantha?”

“I suppose if that someone was bent on harming me, I could.”

“What if you were ordered to kill someone? As an assignment?” Pappy asked carefully.

Sam thought about the question. She looked up at the man standing next to her in the moonlight. She wanted to kiss him so badly, her lips tingled. He was looking at her so intently, she felt like he was reading her mind. She felt flustered. In the time it took her heart to beat twice, she was in his arms, and he was kissing her. Her world spun, righted itself, then went out of control as she grappled with her emotions. When he released her, she was so shookup, he had to hold her upright. “What…what was the…the question again?”

Pappy’s voice sounded so gruff, Sam could barely make out the words. It sounded to her like he said, “I don’t remember.” He was gone a second later, sprinting across the field.

Sam let her knees fold as she slipped to the ground. She cried then because she knew she’d just found the love of her life. In five days she would leave this place and that love. Her shoulders shook with pain and anguish.

“I think he needs you, Alpha, go to him,” Sam blubbered. The wolf-dog paced and whined. “Go!” she cried brokenly. The dog sprinted off.

Sam walked back to the barracks and let herself in. She knew she’d never sleep, so she curled up on the couch and cried until she couldn’t cry anymore.

Pappy was breathless when he reached his father’s cabin. He was a wild man when he burst through the door and woke his father. “I need to talk to you, Pop. I want you to listen to me, but I don’t want you to say anything,” at which point he switched to Greek and rattled off a monologue that caused Kyros’s hair to stand on end. When he wound down, he stared at his father. “Now you can say something.”

In his life, Kyros had never seen his son in such a state of agitation. He understood it, though. “It should be her decision, not yours. You aren’t God, Kollar. You make your own decisions, no one else’s.”

“I don’t want to turn her into a killer. I don’t want her to be like Adrian or me. She needs a life outside this…this…” Pappy waved his arm toward the window, his eyes glazed when he couldn’t come up with a suitable term to explain what he was talking about.

“If you fail her, the others might walk with her. Is that what you want?”

“Hell, no, it’s not what I want. It’s not what they want either. I fell in love with her, Pop.”