Chapter 8
Garrett
Her blood is on my teeth. I run my tongue along the inside of my lip, and there it is — iron, salt, and something that belongs to her and only her. I want to spit to get rid of the taste. But I don’t.
Four red lines run from my collarbone to the bottom of my ribs. They’re still open. Little beads standing up along each furrow like she signed her name on me in Braille. I press my thumb against the lowest one and the pain sings back up my arm, clean and specific.
My wolf hums.
That’s the word for it. A low, pleased sound in the base of my skull.
Good. She marked us back. Not a bite, but still good.
I close my eyes. Count to five. Open them.
The clearing hasn’t moved. Everything is just as it was when I burst through the trees. I can see the ground where she stood. Grass flattened in the shape of her foot. Another flattened patch where she went to her knees when—
Don’t.
I turn my head. Look anywhere else. The moon. The trees. The dark line of the ridge.
My jaw aches. I lift a hand to it and work the hinge with two fingers.
Something pops back into place that shouldn’t have been out, and the last of the fangs slide up into my gums with a slow grinding burn that feels like teething in reverse.
That part — that part’s mine. I recognize that pain.
Shifters know the shape of their own body hurting.
The rest of me is a stranger’s.
I stand there until my hands stop shaking. They take their time.
“Alpha controls the animal.”
My father’s voice. Maybe twenty years ago. The kitchen, the smell of bacon, his hand on the back of my neck, firm enough to mean it. “You hear me, Garrett? A man who can’t hold his wolf is no kind of man at all.”
Yes, sir.
I said yes, sir for twenty years. I said it with my spine and my shoulders every morning of my life. I said it when I took the alpha seat, and everybody in the big room went quiet and watched to see if I’d flinch.
Control. I lost it tonight.
Tonight, my teeth went through my own jaw to get out, and I put them in a woman’s neck.
And then the alpha knot. Jesus… I’ve kept that locked down since a catastrophic date with Livvy Hartley in the back of my pickup when I was nineteen. The night I learned I carried the gene. I never lost control again.
Until now.
I bend over. Hands on my knees. The grass blurs.
She tastes so good, my wolf offers, helpful as a cat bringing in a dead rat.
“Shut up.”
She tastes like ours.
“Shut up!” My voice goes flat across the clearing. Somewhere, something small in the underbrush decides to be somewhere else. Leaves rattle and go still.
I straighten up. Drag the back of my wrist across my mouth. It comes away dark.
She’s north.
I can feel it. Maybe five miles out. Moving. Her anger hits me like it’s my own. It has a color. I don’t know how to describe that, except that it’s red, it’s hers, and it’s about me.
Under the red, something else. Something warm. Content, almost drowsy. Her wolf.
Her wolf wants me.
Her woman wants me dead.
I laugh. It comes out once, short, ugly, and I bite down on it.
“What a monumental fuck-up,” I mutter. Which is just about the biggest understatement I’ve ever made.
I turn toward the ridge and start walking.
The night air is cool on the parts of me that aren’t bleeding. I’ll deal with the cuts later. Nothing on me is going to kill me in the next hour.
Ridley is in the seep, knee-deep in the wet green, tearing up mouthfuls of that lush grass that only grows where water comes up through the earth. She lifts her head when she catches me coming down. Ears go flat. Nostrils work. I watch her decide.
Then the ears come up. Not friendly. Just: oh, you.
“I know,” I say. “I stink.”
My wolf doesn’t think so. He wants to soak in that scent till it becomes part of our skin.
I lead Ridley up out of the seep. The saddle is still cinched.
Tack’s dry. I put a foot in the stirrup and swing up, and the leather sticks to bare skin in a way that makes me grit my teeth.
Nothing to be done about it. No way in hell I’m going back to that cabin to fetch my gear.
I click my tongue, and Ridley picks her way onto the trail.
She sets her own pace. I let her. My hands find the reins without my asking. Years of muscle memory.
Halfway down the ridge, the pull shifts.
She’s moved farther. The tug in that direction aches. Not pain. Absence. A wrongness in the space where she should be.
“Bullshit, Forrester, she should be nowhere near you.”
Ridley’s ear swivels back to me. Swivels forward again.
She should be under us in the grass, my wolf says, warm.
I don’t answer him. I’m learning I can’t out-argue him. He doesn’t use arguments. He uses facts. Her skin against mine. Her voice when she—
Stop.
I grip the reins tighter. Ridley feels it and slows, and I make myself loosen up.
The compound comes through the mesquite.
First, the sodium lights over the equipment yard, then the porch lamp at the big house.
I take Ridley south, along the fence line, past the hay shed.
The barn’s dark. Good. The guys on watch tonight — Miller, probably Chase — they’ll be up at the main gate, eyes on the county road.
Nobody sees me. Thank fuck. Because even being alpha won’t stop the questions when I ride in buck naked in the middle of the night.
I swing down inside the barn, close the door behind me with my hip, and stand there a second in the dark, letting my eyes find the shapes. Row of stalls. Wheelbarrow. The feed bin with the loose lid. Home. My hand remembers the light switch without looking. I don’t turn it on.
Ridley walks herself into her stall. She’s done this long enough to know there’ll be fresh hay waiting. I pull the saddle. Blanket. Bridle. Hang each one where it lives. My body does it. The rest of me is… elsewhere. Watching the body from six feet off like a spotter on a ridge.
I rub Ridley down. Check her feet. There’s a pebble wedged in her near hind. I work it out with the hoof pick.
“Good girl.” I stroke the flat of her forehead, up between her eyes. “Good girl. Thank you.”
She blinks at me, slow.
I lean my forehead against hers for maybe ten seconds. She lets me. She’s let me do that since the first day I put a saddle on her and decided she was my new partner.
Horses are better than people. I have held this opinion consistently.
In the tack room, I find jeans on the shelf where I keep them, a flannel, and a pair of socks.
The flannel goes on over the claw marks and sticks immediately.
I don’t button it. Jeans on. Boots on — spare boots, the old ones with the broken-in ankles.
I cross the yard. Gravel under my boots.
The dogs in the kennel don’t bark — they know my step.
One of them whines, a low, interested sound, as I pass.
The house is dark. Pop’s chair on the porch is empty, the cushion flattened in his shape.
Ma’s window upstairs is shuttered. The kitchen smells of the onions she cooked at six and the coffee she made at seven, and under that, the lemon oil she uses on the sideboard every Sunday.
My whole life has smelled like this for as long as I can remember.
The third stair creaks. The seventh creaks. The one at the top landing creaks if you step in the middle and stays quiet if you step on the edge, and I step on the edge now.
I reach my room. My door.
I close the door behind me and stand inside it.
My bed. The quilt I’ve had for over a decade. The reading chair with the lamp. The window over the desk that looks east, toward the ridge I just came off of.
The room fits the way a shoe fits when your foot’s swollen. The shape is the same. You’re the thing that changed.
I sit on the edge of the bed. The mattress takes my weight the way it’s taken my weight every night for — I don’t even want to do the math. I rest my elbows on my knees and let my head hang.
North. Still north. She’s stopped.
Her anger has changed. Still present, still aimed at me, but set. Decided. She has made a decision about me, and it is not a decision in my favor.
But under it, her wolf is lying down. Curled. Content. I swear to God I can feel the other animal’s chin on its paws.
And something in my chest — the man part, not the wolf — leans toward that warm, curled thing.
My wolf chose a magic-blooded female. I’ve tried to figure that out and haven’t managed it.
The woman who sat across from me with a knife and a dead child’s rabbit, who cut my flesh and didn’t flinch…
she carries the blood I spent a decade clearing off my land.
My wolf doesn’t care. He’s been pulling toward her since the clearing without once asking what that means for the rest of it.
I don’t have an answer. I just have the pull.
I close my hand around a fistful of the quilt and hold on.
“No.” I say it out loud, to the empty room. “No.”
Yes, my wolf says.
I press the heels of my hands into my eyes until I see sparks. I breathe out through my nose, long and slow. I don’t have time for more complications right now, goddammit.
Conner is gone.
I haven’t let myself think about that since he said he was going. Conner is gone. My brother is gone. He spoke to me on the phone, and his voice wasn’t my brother’s voice. It was the voice of a man who was leaving. A man who’d decided we’d done things he couldn’t be part of anymore.
And now, I can’t blame him.
The Syndicate envelope is in the jacket I draped over the chair in my office. A threat I need to contend with.
There’s a woman out there with my bite on her neck.
I can’t think about all of them. Not in one night. Not in one skull.
I choose the woman. Not because she’s the most important thing. Because she’s the one I can feel.
She moves. Another mile. Two. The wire thins and hums.
I lie back and stare up at the ceiling, watching the shadows of the trees outside the window moving across it. Just as they always do.
Nothing in this room is different. Except me. Because of her. My would-be killer.
My tongue finds her blood on my teeth again.
She touched us gently. Before the blade. Her hand was gentle.
I remember it. I remember it precisely. Her fingertip at the pulse point in my wrist. The pause. The way she pulled her hand back a little too fast, like she’d surprised herself.
I remember it because he remembers it. Because we remember it.
“Go to sleep,” I tell him.
She’s ours.
“Shut up.”
He goes quiet. I turn my face toward the window.
She’s mine.
She doesn’t want to be.
I have no right to want her to be, either. Not after what’s happened. But under the shame — and the shame is there, the shame is real — under the shame, there is a quieter thing. A thing that is glad. A thing that is glad she is tied to me.
I will deal with that thing later. In the morning, I’m going to go down those stairs, pour a cup of coffee, and tell Dawes I was running a lead on the south boundary.
I’m going to deal with the Syndicate envelope.
I’m going to sit at the head of the table at the ten o’clock meeting, and my face is going to do what my face has done for years, and no one at that table is going to see anything different.
Tonight, I lie here and feel a woman I don’t know ride farther away from me, mile after mile. And I want to go after her.