Chapter 15
Briar
After the report back, I go to my room, but I don’t sleep. I lie on the cot with the herbs wearing off by degrees and the dark pressing against the window. I’m thinking about what I did in that kitchen.
Why didn’t you tell them?
The practical justifications come first, because they always do.
I need more information. The pattern isn’t complete.
A partial report is better than a premature one.
I run each one out to its end, and each one fails in the same place: I had enough.
I had the resting point, the circle, the timeline, the size of him.
That’s everything Merric needed. I’ve called in reports on less.
So why didn’t you?
I go through it differently. He’s Forrester. He’s the alpha who ran the corridor, the man I put in a chair, the wolf whose bite is on my neck. He’s a threat to this pack. Merric needed to know where he was. I knew. I didn’t say.
I stare at the ceiling and try to make that make sense.
He came because I called him. Not deliberately.
Not willingly. But my body has been broadcasting for days.
He drove ten hours into hostile territory and waited for me to come to him.
And I went. I stood forty feet away, and I looked at the man who is not the monster I thought he was, and I turned around and walked back down the ridge and told Merric most of what I found.
Not all.
I didn’t stop calling. That’s what I keep returning to.
Even now, lying here with the compound wall between us and the herbs in my blood and every reason I have stacked against it.
I haven’t stopped. The pull is still running toward the boulder field.
My wolf is facing that direction. She’s not straining.
She’s not fighting. She’s just oriented, quiet and certain, the way she gets when she’s already made a decision and is waiting for the rest of me to catch up.
He came because I called him. I protected his location.
I don’t know what that means, and I’m not going to examine it.
I close my eyes.
Fight it. Go to sleep. In the morning, give the full report. Let Merric handle it.
That’s the decision. Clear. Correct. The only option that makes sense for a Frostbourne scout who has a job to do and a pack to protect and no business sitting in the dark thinking about a man who bit her in a clearing.
I take another dose of the herbs. I lie down. I make the decision again, firmly, in case the first time didn’t take.
Full report at first light. Full trail. Everything.
I close my eyes.
I sleep.
I wake up outside.
The first thing I register is cold. Leaves against my ribs. The smell of loam and oak bark and something else — something dense and close, the kind of scent that makes every hair on a wolf’s body stand up. Then sky. Stars. A canopy of branches black against the moon.
My wolf’s body. Not my hands. Paws.
I don’t remember shifting. I don’t remember walking out of my cabin. I don’t remember anything between closing my eyes on the cot and opening them on the east ridge.
What the fuck?
She shifted me in my sleep. She walked me out. She carried me a quarter mile up the ridge in fur, through the patrol Dane posted tonight. She got past them because she’s Briar’s wolf, and Briar’s wolf doesn’t get caught. And she brought me here.
I made a decision, dammit! We weren’t going to go.
She doesn’t care.
His scent hits me, and my whole body tenses.
Close. So close, my nose is full of it. The thick alpha musk of him, and under it the sharper note of a male whose body is responding to a female in heat. Thirty feet. Maybe less. Downwind in the thicket east of my position.
He’s been lying there. Waiting. The way I waited on his ridgeline weeks ago.
I stand. My wolf is vibrating. Every hair is up. I shift to human because I need my voice. The night air on my bare skin after the shift sends the heat through me so hard I have to brace a hand against the nearest tree to stay upright.
He steps out of the trees.
The huge brown wolf I remember. Eyes catching the moonlight. Thinner than the clearing — he’s been running hard, not eating.
He shifts. The wolf contracts, and the man comes through.
Naked. Twenty feet away. His eyes are gold, even in human form, the wolf right under the surface. His body is taut, every muscle held, and he’s hard — visibly, unashamedly — and he isn’t trying to hide it.
My mouth goes dry. My body goes wet. Both at the same time. The contradiction is so bare it would be funny if anything about this were funny.
Don’t look at him.
I look at him.
“What are you doing here?”
He looks at me for a long moment. The gold in his eyes. The way he’s holding himself — controlled but barely.
“You know what I’m doing here,” he says.
I don’t respond to that. Instead, I say, “Every wolf in that compound is on your trail. Half of them would happily rip you to pieces themselves.”
“I know.”
The words are so simple, yet they show that he understands the threat, and he’s here anyway. That’s so much harder to be twenty feet away from than arrogance would have been.
“You’re mad,” I mutter.
“You’ve been calling me,” he says. “Your body has. Every hour.”
“I wasn’t calling you.”
“You’re soaking wet standing there. I can smell it from here.”
The fury comes fast. The humiliation of being read by a wolf’s nose while my own scent calls me a liar. I cross the distance, and my palm hits the side of his face before I’ve decided to swing.
He catches my wrist before the second one lands. “Is that your thing, Briar? Inflicting pain?”
“On you, yes,” I hiss.
“I got your message.” His jaw works. Something crosses his face — the gold in his eyes going briefly dark. “The girl—”
“Don’t.” The word comes out before I’ve decided to say it.
He stops. Considers. He wants to say it — I can see that plainly, the effort of keeping it back — and he sets it aside anyway.
Not because it doesn’t matter. Because I asked him not to.
The distinction is in the line of his jaw, the slow breath he releases, and I hate that I can read him well enough to see it.
His worldview is changing. Inch by inch.
“Not now,” I say. “This isn’t the time.”
He nods. Once.
His fingers tighten around my wrist, and the contact, after days of bitter herbs and cold water and nothing, sends a shock through me that buckles my knees. His other arm locks around my waist and catches me against his chest before I drop.
Skin to skin. The heat coming off him is the same heat burning in me, and my body fits against his the way the mark on my neck fits the teeth that made it.
His thumb finds my pulse.
“Your heart’s racing,” he says, against my hair.
“I hate you.”
“I know.”
His other hand finds my hip. The grip from the clearing — possessive, bruising. My body leans into it when it should be pulling away.
“This doesn’t mean anything,” I say. Rougher than I want it. Lower.
“It doesn’t have to.”
“That’s right. It doesn’t.”
Neither of us believes it. But the heat isn’t interested in truth. The heat is interested in his hand on my hip and his breath on my neck. In the fact that my wolf walked me here in my sleep, and I’m standing in the dark with his arms around me. The decision I made three hours ago is dust.
I made a decision. She didn’t care.
Maybe I don’t either.
“Fine,” I say, exasperated. “Just — get it over with.”
I grab a fistful of his hair and drag his mouth down to mine.
It isn’t a kiss.
It’s teeth. It’s fury. It’s the taste of him flooding my mouth after wanting nothing else.
His arms lock around me, and my legs are around his waist before I’ve decided to climb him.
The growl he makes against my mouth is the sound from the clearing — deep, possessive, alpha — and my wolf answers it with a cry that isn’t human and isn’t sorry.
I stop fighting it.