Chapter 6
Briar
He’s watching the door when I come back, and I stop in the doorway.
I went out to settle myself, and now that I’m looking at the room, I’m unsettled all over again.
He’s strapped in the chair, afternoon light through the window dappling his chest, his arms, the first cut already scabbing over on his forearm.
The rabbit on the floor between us where I left it.
He’s still naked. I knew that.
Knowing it and walking back into it are two different things.
I cross to the table. Pick up the knife. Don’t look at him while I do it.
“Second one?” he says.
“Yes.”
He doesn’t argue. Doesn’t brace. His eyes follow me the way they’ve followed me all morning. That’s not unusual, considering the circumstances, but there’s an intensity to it that makes my skin feel too tight.
I pull my chair close and sit. Take his right arm — the unmarked one — and turn it forearm up across the chair arm.
I’m determined to ignore the warmth of his skin and the alpha aura rolling off of him.
But my wolf tips toward the heat of him the way she’s been tipping toward his scent all morning, a slow, persistent lean that I’ve been correcting since I walked back through the door.
Work.
I make the cut. Same depth, same length. He doesn’t flinch. But his free hand grips the chair arm, the tendons standing hard, and holds it there longer than the pain alone would keep it.
I sit back and watch the blood come.
“You’re going to tell me something,” he says.
“Maybe.”
He waits.
“Ruthie Hartwell,” I say. “Twelve years old when she went in. Fourteen when she came out. She made things from what she found in there… turned fabric scraps into jewelry.” I pause. “Because they were something she could own. And every teenage girl wants to be pretty.”
He’s very still.
I stand. Step back. I try to convince myself that it’s to give him time to think.
But the reality is that I’m uncomfortable being so close to him.
I turn away to steady my breath. When I turn back, he’s still watching me.
His eyes are darker than chocolate, and every so often, there’s a flash of gold in their depths that tells me that his wolf is close.
Doesn’t scare me. I’ve faced worse.
Have you?
Those eyes stay on me as I reach for his arm for the third cut. His breath brushes over my hair.
“Those families you sent through? They separated them when they arrived. The little ones screamed the loudest, but eventually that stopped.” I watch as the blade sinks in and the flesh parts beneath it, then look up and meet his eyes.
“They gave them wrist tags. Like livestock. With a number. Like Sparrow, who was 47. And Arden, who was 219.”
He doesn’t speak. But I watch his face while I talk, and the muscles in his jaw work when I mention the children. Not performance. He can’t help it.
I make another cut.
His arm stays still under my hands. I finish and hold the arm steady while the blood comes, and I’m watching his face, and he’s not looking at me. He’s looking at the rabbit.
I move my hands from his arm.
He says, “How old?”
“Which one?”
“The youngest. That you know of.”
“From your corridor?”
He nods.
I think of 47, holding up his fingers. “Sparrow is about five now,” I say. “But he would have been around two when he went in.”
His head drops forward. Just for a second. Then he brings it back up.
I back off again and let him sit with that.
For the next cut, I come to him, and he turns his arm within the cuff before I ask. Forearm up, the inside of his wrist toward me. The gesture is so absent of resistance that it stops me. He’s offering his arm the way you offer something you owe.
I make the cut fast and don’t watch his face.
The silence after has a different quality than the ones before. Not empty. The room has been accumulating something all afternoon, and I can feel it pressing down on us.
The next cut, he speaks first.
“The toy,” he says. His voice has lost the commanding edge he came in with. What’s left is rougher. Less managed. “Where exactly did you find it?”
“A storage room,” I say. “Facility basement. Rows of shelving. Boxes on every shelf, organized by code. Each box had an intake number.”
“What was in them?”
“Belongings. Whatever the wolves had when they arrived. Clothes, shoes. Children’s things.”
His hands open on the chair arms. Fingers spreading, closing, spreading again.
“The box this came from,” he says. “F-7.”
“Yes.”
“How many boxes were coded F-7?”
He’s looking at the rabbit.
“I didn’t count,” I say. “The shelving ran the length of the room.”
He nods. Once. Small. And doesn’t speak again.
I make the cut, and he doesn’t move at all. When I sit back, I realize my hands aren’t quite steady. Not from the cut — the cut is fine. Something else. The room, the afternoon, the hours of proximity to this man, and what his scent has been doing to my wolf all day.
She’s been pulling toward him since I walked back through the door, and it’s been building with every hour and every cut and every time I’ve taken his arm in my hands and held it.
My beast wants him. I don’t have a clinical word for it, and a clinical word wouldn’t help anyway. She wants the source of the scent that’s been in my lungs all afternoon. The warmth of his skin under my hands. The pulse I can feel every time I hold his arm for the blade.
I’ve run alone for years. Had men when I’ve wanted them. Short and sweet. We’ve always been comfortable working that way. On the same page.
She has never done this.
It feels like a betrayal. Like I’ve been betraying the reason I came here. I hate it.
Get out of this room. Get away from him.
I stand. Check the restraints; wrists first, my fingers sliding under the cuffs, testing the gap between steel and skin.
My knuckles brush the inside of his wrist. The first cut is mostly healed already, the new tissue pink and raised. A pulse moves against my fingertip.
The cuff is tight. The check is done. My hand stays anyway — two seconds, maybe three — the pad of my index finger against the beat of his blood. I don’t decide to do it. I don’t catch it happening until it’s already happened. When I pull away, my wolf objects. Silently, thank God.
I don’t look at his face.
I check his ankles. The chest strap. Everything holds.
“Going somewhere?”
Away from you before my wolf loses causes more trouble.
I don’t say that. I don’t say anything. I walk out, close the door, and drop the bar into the brackets.
I pull in a deep breath, then I strip and shift.
The change drops me into my wolf’s body, and the relief is immediate. Four legs. The Hill Country opening around me in scent and sound, the sharpness that my form brings to every landscape. Maybe if I let her move, she’ll stop behaving so erratically.
I run south. Into the scrub, onto hard limestone, stride and breath finding their rhythm. The run takes the afternoon’s strain out of my muscles. The proximity. His questions. The arm he offered before I asked. My fingers on his wrist. The warmth of his skin.
It falls behind me. Ground, track, and terrain. No room for the rest.
I run hard for an hour. When I turn back, the edge is off. The pull toward the cabin is still there — it doesn’t leave — but I can handle it.
The cabin comes into view through the brush.
The bar is on the ground.
No.
I stop. Twenty yards out. Nose working, ears forward.
His scent is everywhere. Fresh. Moving. Trail from the cabin door running south, then angling east, the stride lengthening.
Walking, then running, then — the scent shifting, human to wolf, the musk deepening — shifted.
Full wolf. The prints near the creek are deep and wide-spaced. Four hundred pounds moving at speed.
Fuck, fuck, fuck!
I go to the cabin. Inside, the chair is destroyed.
Not overturned. Shattered. Wooden components splintered outward, the steel frame wrenched sideways. The anchor bracket is still in the floor; he didn’t beat the hardware. He beat the furniture.
I analyze what’s left of it. The wrist cuffs are on the floor, intact, still locked at the angle that should have prevented a shift.
They did — his wrists didn’t change. His chest did.
Expanded the torso — partial shift, ribcage and shoulders — and used the chest strap as a lever against the chair back.
Wood fractured at the joint where the back met the seat.
Once the back went, the strap loosened, and his arms had the range to work the cuffs off the broken armrests.
I built for a wolf trying to shift his hands. He shifted his chest.
I underestimated him. His strength.
Stupid, Briar. Stupid!
He’s smarter than I wanted him to be.
And he went south. Toward the compound. That could mean two things: he’s going back to his walls and his authority, and the world that made sense before I put him in a chair — or he’s going back to his pack to bring them out here to get me.
Either way, I can’t let him reach it.
I shift in the doorway and run.
His trail is fresh and saturated. Blood from the forearm wounds threads through his track — torn open by the shift, bleeding onto the stones. A big wolf, injured, running on adrenaline that’s already crashing.
I’m faster. Always have been. Lighter, built for speed, where he’s built for power.
The distance closes. Three miles from the compound. Two. The lights through the trees, and he’s angling toward them.
I know the terrain. There’s a gap in the ridge he’ll have to go around because he won’t fit through it. But I will. I cut east, through the gap, down a limestone scramble, and come out on the far side of a clearing between him and the compound trail.
I reach it first. Plant my feet. Face the brush.
I wait.
It doesn’t take long.
He crashes through thirty seconds later. Brown wolf, massive, dark fur silver-edged in the light of the moon. Bleeding from the shoulder and the forelegs. His eyes find me. He skids, paws tearing grass, and stops.
Two wolves in the clearing. Moonlight on everything.
He could go through me. He has a hundred and fifty pounds on me, maybe more. He could barrel past, and I’d bounce off him. He’d reach the compound in minutes.
He doesn’t.
He stops. Golden eyes on my silver ones. His sides heaving. My weight balanced, my body between him and where he’s trying to go.
Ten feet apart. The moon above. The brush dark around us.
He doesn’t move. I don’t move.
This is going to get ugly.