Chapter 30
Juliet
Harrison’s claws bit into my throat as he dragged me backward, using me as a shield.
Blood from his latest bite slicked my chest; hot and accusing, as he snarled at Bronc across the room.
“One step closer,” he hissed, “and I’ll carve her throat like a pig.
” His teeth grazed my ear, whiskey-sour breath thickening the air. “Mine.”
Bronc froze in the doorway, muscles coiled like a spring.
His eyes met mine—storm-dark rage colliding with my tear-blurred gaze.
Don’t, I wanted to scream. But Harrison’s grip tightened, claws drawing fresh blood as he wrenched my head sideways with a sickening pop of tendons.
Pain shot through me, white-hot and nauseating.
My wolf stirred feebly beneath my ribs, but I felt her even if she was dulled by despair…
or maybe shame. It’s the first time I’d felt her since Harrison had destroyed Bronc’s mate mark.
“Pathetic,” Harrison spat at Bronc. “You think she wanted you? She begged for my mark.” His laugh was jagged glass as he licked a stripe up my bleeding neck. My stomach roiled; my traitorous body shuddered anyway—omega instincts flaring at his touch like a poisoned kiss.
Bronc’s snarl shook the walls. “Let. Her. Go.”
Harrison shifted me just as Bronc lunged, claws slashing air instead of flesh, as I choked on a scream.
They circled like wolves now: Bronc’s movements lethal precision; Harrison’s brute savagery dragging me with him until my knees buckled under his weight…
until I saw it: an opening when his grip slipped on my bloodied skin…
My wolf surged suddenly—a molten eruption in my veins—begging me to twist free…
But it was too late.
Harrison pivoted faster than thought, his claws raking across Bronc’s chest with a wet rip. Crimson bloomed beneath the torn fabric of his vest; Bronc staggered but didn’t fall… No! My heart seized as Harrison raised his hand for another strike—aiming straight for Bronc’s throat this time.
The world narrowed to fire and fury.
I threw myself sideways with feral desperation, teeth bared even before fur split my skin…
The shift tore through me in seconds—bones snapping like dry twigs. Claws erupted first; fur followed in a tsunami of vengeance.
Harrison turned too late.
I was already airborne… jaws wide… fangs sinking into his jugular.
He thrashed violently… claws shredding my flank… but I bit down harder…. tasted copper… crunch. He gurgled wetly. Then, he collapsed beneath me…. still twitching… still staring hate into my soul… until nothing… I’d all but detached his head from his body.
The silence hit louder than his death rattle.
My wolf vanished like smoke, leaving me human again. Naked. Shaking. Kneeling in a pool of his blood; my blood.
The bond snapped like a severed wire. Agony detonated in my chest. Bile rose as full-body tremors wracked me. Mate. The word echoed hollowly; killer.
Bronc rasped my name, hands hovering inches away like I might break. Maybe I already had.
“Juliet.” His voice cracked, blood dripping down his chest, mingling with mine on the floor.
I scrambled backward. Every inch of skin burning under fluorescent lights. Under his gaze. How could he look at me? My thighs smeared red, hands trembling where they clutched shattered ribs. Filthy. Unclean. The mate-bond might be ash now, but its ghost clung like oil.
“I didn’t—” The words shattered mid-sob. “My fault. All because that cursed bite made me crave his hands while hating him.”
Bronc sank down beside me, slow as sunrise against hellscape shadows. “You survived,” he whispered roughly. “That’s all that matters.”
But it wasn’t true. Not when every ragged breath stank of Harrison. Not when half of me still screamed WHY DID YOU MAKE ME KILL YOU?
I gagged, retching bile onto concrete.
Bronc reached out again. This time I didn’t flinch as his calloused palm cupped my cheek. So warm, so wrong. I shouldn’t let him touch what Harrison ruined.
His thumb brushed away blood or tears as he leaned forward until our foreheads touched. “Little Wolf.” Broken reverence. No disgust, only grief.
I wanted to collapse into him–but how? When guilt gnawed deeper than any claw mark? When even victory felt like chains?
In the silence between us, Harrison’s corpse kept laughing.
The sound that broke from me was all anguish, no relief.
It was never meant to be like this. I was supposed to just save my mother.
Swift. I’d let him bring me here, then I’d call for Bronc and he’d save me.
But Harrison was ruthless. A step ahead.
The bite. He made me need him. Crave him.
He broke me and made me something dirty. I killed my mate. Even now, he’d won.
I bit back the cries of pain. And now my wolf was gone again.
She must hate me to have left me again. The thought swarmed like flies, filled the empty, rattling spaces of me.
They all would hate me. I hated myself. My heart clenched, making every breath feel tight and perilous.
I didn’t even notice my nakedness, the way I lay bare and exposed, covered in blood under the white fluorescence, beneath Bronc’s terror-stricken gaze.
I thought he might never speak. The man I hadn’t trusted. The man I’d just killed for. The man who found me in the arms of another man. How could he touch me? How could he—
“Juliet.” My name, ragged on his lips, broke through the staggering press of it all. He reached for me again. But I shook my head. I was too dirty for him. He deserved better than me.
“Bronc,” I gasped, “I thought—I thought—” The words tangled between us like a snare, impossible to untangle.
He knelt next to me. Looking at me like I was a feral animal he was too afraid to touch.
That’s what I was. “I know Little Wolf. You wanted to fix things.” There was no accusation in his voice, only sorrow.
He closed his eyes for a moment before he turned to look at the ruin behind us.
“I’m so glad he’s dead. And you’re not.”
“I hate him. He only ever hurt me, and he made me want it. Now, I killed him, my mate, so I have to pay. I HATE HIM! I HATE HIM! IT HURTS!” I turned in on myself, leaving Bronc to kneel beside me, helpless.
A thousand unnamed emotions split through my chest.
The slam of the door was the only warning we got. Bronc reached for his gun before he saw who it was.
Doc had burst into the room, taking in the sight with a single sweep of his eyes.
“Goddamn,” he muttered, and then he was kneeling beside us, checking my vitals with one hand while the other rummaged through his medical bag.
He was all focus, no panic, even in the blur of motion.
“You’re lucky she survived,” he told Bronc.
“You’re healing?” Pointing to the gashes on his chest.
Bronc nodded, eyes still on me. “I’m alive thanks to her. She…” he nodded to Harrison’s body, then he asked, “What do we need to do?”
“Get her cleaned up, stop the bleeding, and get her the hell out of here.” Doc picked me up and took me to the bathroom.
Then he worked in silence as he turned on the shower and helped me in.
When I was clean, he helped me dry, then took care of my wounds.
He pressed gauze to my side and wrapped a bandage around me like a belt.
Bronc came in to help and had to catch me twice when I flinched from the pain.
Everything felt frayed, like a loose wire ready to snap. Harrison was dead. I was alive. This was supposed to be a victory, but all I could feel was the crushing absence where my mate should be Even a mate I hated..
I looked at Bronc with sorrow-filled eyes. My shame was overwhelming me.
“Would it be okay if Doc carried me?” I asked, looking down at my hands.
Bronc lifted my chin and looked into my eyes.
“Juliet. Listen to me. I love you. Nothing that has happened could ever change that. You will always be my beautiful Little Wolf, who blew into my life one day and turned it upside down. And I never want to live in a world where it’s right-side up again.
I never want to live in a world where you’re not in it.
” He kissed me lightly on my nose. “Do you have anything that is decent that you can put on?”
I started sobbing again. “No, he didn’t allow it.”
“Don’t cry, sweetie. Hold on.” He got on his comms and asked Menace to bring a shirt and sweatpants out of his bag. In a matter of minutes, I was dressed in his clothes and wrapped in a blanket, drifting off.
“Stay with us, Juliet,” Doc murmured as he carried me. He was in my ear. We were in the stairwell now, Bronc leading the way with long, sure strides. “Just a little further.”
Every word sounded like it was meant to soothe, but there was a heaviness to them that made my heart clench tighter, sharper.
“We almost there?” Doc called from a floor below. I could see the door at the bottom, flames licking out around the edges. My breath hitched. We were out of time.
“Almost,” Bronc answered, voice low, urgent.
It was the first time I’m been outside in two weeks.
I looked back, watching as smoke rose in furious black columns from the building we’d left behind. I saw the outline of Harrison’s empire burning.
Bronc was at our side in a flash, steady hands helping Doc load me into the van parked just beyond the shadows. “Jet’s ready,” he said. He spared a glance at the fire blazing behind us, then turned his attention to the blanket-wrapped mess of me in the backseat. “Let’s go home.”
I could feel Bronc’s eyes on me through the rearview mirror as we sped toward the runway. He was in the moment, all instinct and urgency.
The soft, distant thrum of the private jet’s engine drew closer.
Every second between us and the plane was time I had to think about what had just happened.
The full weight of it settled over me like a bruise.
I shivered against the numbness that followed, pressed my cheek to the cool window as Doc worked silently to secure my bandages.
The hangar loomed ahead. Lights lit the asphalt beneath us as we screeched to a stop, and Doc was at my side again, and then Bronc, half-dragging, half-carrying me as we rushed up the jet’s steps.
The pilot shouted a quick, “Hang on tight,” and we were airborne in less than ten minutes, the ground nothing but a distant smear of red and black beneath us.
My mind was an unsteady pulse, full of half-formed thoughts and hollow beats.
How could Bronc want me after this?
The unasked questions tore at me like a hundred unanswered wounds. My wolf was still silent through all of it, and Bronc’s steady presence was the only thing that kept me from breaking into a thousand unsalvageable pieces.
We’d survived. I’d survived. But at what cost?
Harrison was dead.
The wheels hit gravel with a jolt that shuddered through my bones.
Home. Or whatever this place was now. My hands clenched against the armrest as Bronc’s plane taxied across Iron Valor’s private airstrip.
Pine trees blurred outside the window like smudged watercolor strokes. Safe ground didn’t feel safe yet.
“Stay with me?” I asked before Bronc could unbuckle his seatbelt. My voice cracked like dry kindling. “In our cabin. Keep everyone else…away.”
He didn’t ask questions, just nodded, his calloused thumb tracing circles on my wrist until my pulse slowed to match his rhythm.
By dusk, whispers of pack life buzzed beyond our cabin walls, distant laughter, engines rumbling toward the lodge, but none of it touched us. The fire crackled as Bronc handed me the tea he’d brewed too strong. I let it scald my tongue, anyway.
“The shifter woman from Illinois,” I finally said, staring into the mug’s murky depths. “She won’t go back?”
Bronc sank onto the couch beside me. “No.” His thigh pressed warm against mine. “Menace offered her your old apartment. Ma was happy to have a new pup to dote on.” A beat of silence thickened before he added carefully, “Penny thinks she should stay close.”
Penny. The name scraped loose something brittle in my chest. “And you think I should talk to her too?” I asked flatly.
His exhale ruffled my hair as he leaned closer. “She gets it.” No pity there—just a quiet certainty that made my throat burn hotter than the tea. “Survivors shouldn’t heal alone.”
I didn’t look at him when I whispered okay, but his low growl of approval hummed under my skin like static before a storm.
Later, fingers tangled in his shirt as moonlight pooled on our bedspread, I pressed my lips to his collarbone and let myself say it aloud: “I want your bite over Harrison’s scars.
” The words trembled like prey in a snare—weak, raw.
But Bronc stilled beneath me like lightning had struck him before rolling us sideways in one fluid motion until our gazes locked.
“Whenever you’re ready,” he rasped, pupils blown black with hunger even as his palm cradled my jaw like something breakable.
“But we go slow.” A promise and a warning rolled into one breath that smelled of bourbon and cedar smoke.
Beneath it all, steel resolve sharp enough to gut any ghost that tried clawing between us again… even mine.
He fell asleep first for once; exhaustion pinching those stubborn furrows between his brows soft again in shadow light while my fingertips hovered over his throat where no scar would ever tarnish what we claimed next time—and there would be a next time soon as Penny helped me carve room for him there without drowning in old blood.