Chapter 13
Chapter
Thirteen
Reece woke with his arms around Delainey, and it felt right. Even after a day in the woods and a kidnapping breakout, she still smelled delectable.
Her skin was warm and still floral under the dirt and smoke. Light trickled in through the trees, and his skin was cold where it wasn’t wrapped around the woman next to him. Her back was pressed against his chest, his arm slung around her midsection, keeping her close.
Underneath him the ground was hard and cold and uncomfortable, but he didn’t give a single damn.
Delainey was soft in her sleep, the sharpness gone, and he almost wished he could flip her around to see what she looked like when she wasn’t on guard. She was so different from the waking Delainey that it almost hurt to think about.
What was this woman like when she wasn’t looking for threats around every corner? Could he be so lucky to find out?
Her curls had loosened overnight, fanning across the crook of his arm in a dark halo pressed flat on one side where she’d been lying against him. Her jacket was bunched at her shoulders, and her hands were tucked under her chin.
His wolf was close to the surface, and that was his excuse as he nuzzled his nose against the curve of her neck and followed it up with a trail of kisses, tasting the salt of sweat on her skin. His wolf rumbled in satisfaction, knowing this was everything he wanted right in his arms.
Finally, she was close. She was here. She was his.
The fire in her scent ignited a fire of need in his belly. As Delainey stirred, she made a happy sound and arched her neck.
Even with his wolf riding high, Reece knew he was a total asshole to steal a final kiss.
She stiffened, realizing exactly whose arms she was in. The moment shattered. Delainey extricated herself from his embrace and didn’t look at him as she straightened her clothes and brushed off dirt from sleeping on the ground with no protection other than what they were wearing.
Dead leaves clung to the back of her jacket and the seat of her jeans.
She picked a twig from the tangle of her curls and flicked it aside, then scrubbed her palms together to knock the grit from them.
The scratch along her jawline from the shack’s floorboards had scabbed overnight into a thin dark line.
He might have tried to shift and sleep as a wolf; he could have offered her more warmth covered in fur, but that hadn’t occurred to him last night.
“I’m going on the other side of this tree,” Delainey told him, jabbing her thumb over her shoulder at a wide-trunked hickory about four feet behind them, “and you are going to stay right where you are and ignore any sounds. Got it?”
Reece suppressed a smile and nodded. Words were hard this morning, so he didn’t try to search for them.
His stomach growled, but he didn’t want to hunt for food. It was early, and they needed to find a way out of these woods and get back home as fast as they could.
Did anyone realize they were gone yet? He was sure the pack would be in an uproar.
How far away had Nico and Elise really been when the attack took place? Had they come rushing, or had they been too far to hear the disturbance?
Surely someone would have realized something was wrong when Reece didn’t check in and didn’t come home. He had to assume the same was true for Delainey.
A coven and a pack weren’t all that different when it came to the way your movements were monitored and your loved ones meddled. Knowing they were gone didn’t mean anyone would know where to look.
Delainey came back from around the tree, and he made no comment about what she might have been doing there.
“We need to move,” he said. He pushed himself to standing, his joints stiff from the night on the ground, and rolled his neck until something popped. The words were a struggle to get out, but she didn’t argue.
The fire had died during the night.
Delainey had risked her unstable magic to put up a protective ward circle around them; it had burned a hole into the forest floor in some places, but it seemed to have held.
She broke the circle, and they left their camp.
She found the same stream he had the night before and paused to dip her hands in the water to wash them, then cupped water in her palms and washed her face, then drank deep. Reece did the same.
The stream was barely two feet across, running over a bed of smooth gray stones and exposed tree roots; the water was clear enough to see every pebble at the bottom. It was ice-cold, and it ran fast enough to produce a low, constant murmur that had been background noise all night.
Then they took off walking again.
Delainey didn’t talk. Yesterday she hadn’t stopped thinking out loud, her theories, her plans, even complaining about blisters.
Now she was keeping whatever was going on in her head to herself. A part of him wanted to ask why, but his lips tingled with the memory of the kisses he had peppered on her neck, and he worried that was the reason.
Had his wolf ruined everything already?
The manacles were heavy on his wrists.
He wondered if he could shift and slip the bindings off that way, but wolf paws were not that much smaller than human hands. He had a feeling nothing would be that easy; something magical would prevent it.
Reece fucking hated magic.
He hated the way it crawled over his skin and defied logic. He hated the slimy smell of it, the way it took the rules of the world and threw them out.
It was never clean, never simple, and it didn’t play fair.
But he kept those thoughts to himself. His only ally right now was a very magical woman, and he didn’t feel the need to insult her skills or her arsenal, when those might be the thing necessary to their survival.
He hated to rely on magic, but he wasn’t a fool.
They had made it a good distance from their overnight camp when the scent of something wrong tickled his nose, and he froze. He took a couple more steps before the tingling of the cuffs must have warned her about the distance.
“What?” she asked. “Another bunny?”
“We’re not alone.” Before he had time to say anything more, two werewolves, one in human form, one wearing his wolf, burst from the trees and attacked.
The wolf came first, a lean brown shape exploding through a wall of trees, leaves and broken branches flying in its wake, already mid-lunge before its paws cleared the undergrowth.
The one in human form was a half-step behind, a thick-necked man in dark tactical clothing, his boots chewing up the ground as he sprinted.
The human wolf grinned. “We’ve been looking for you.”
And the fight was on.
Reece couldn’t be in two places at once. He launched himself at the one in wolf form, assessing that claws were more of a threat to Delainey than hands.
He dropped low and drove his shoulder into the wolf’s chest as it leapt, the collision jarring through his collarbone and sending both of them crashing sideways into the base of a tree. The wolf’s ribs compressed under his weight with a sound like cracking kindling.
He had to hope Delainey could manage herself. He had seen what she could do, and he fully believed in her.
Fighting a wolf in his human form was difficult, not impossible; he and the other betas sparred this way from time to time to get the practice in.
Reece summoned his own claws and raked them down the side of the wolf’s flank.
His claws caught in the thick fur and tore through the hide beneath.
He felt the moment they hit muscle, the resistance giving way to a hot, wet slide, and the wolf screamed, a sound that was almost human in its pitch.
“Leave one alive,” Delainey yelled.
She was right. They needed information, needed to know who took them, who was behind all of this.
He knew she was right.
But the wolf had attacked him and had attacked her.
No one got to attack her and live.
The wolf writhed beneath him, snapping at his forearm.
Reece pinned its head against the ground with one hand, feeling the skull shift under his palm, the jaw still working, hot saliva and blood smearing across his fingers.
He couldn’t stop himself from digging his claws deep into the jugular of the rogue under him and tearing, letting blood flow.
The arterial spray hit him across the chest and throat, shockingly warm against his skin, and the wolf convulsed once beneath him before going slack.
The wolf in human form didn’t realize his friend was already dead as he charged at Delainey.
She cursed and let out a burst of magic that sent him flying back into a tree. The blast left a visible ripple in the air, like heat rising off asphalt, and the man’s body folded backward around the trunk on impact.
Bark splintered outward from the point of contact, and a shower of leaves rained down from the canopy above. A sickening crack announced that something was very wrong. He slumped to the ground, his head lolling to the side before he fell over and was still.
Deathly still.
Fuck.
Delainey stared at where the rogue lay, then looked down at her hands and the manacles. She swore and took slow steps toward the body. She jammed her fingers to the pulse point in his neck and shook her head.
Dead.
The man’s eyes were open, fixed on nothing, and his neck was bent at an angle that no living spine could hold. He was maybe thirty, with a cropped beard and a scar through one eyebrow.
She didn’t let that stop her. She worked swiftly, checking the human rogue’s pockets, and came up empty except for two protein bars, which she stuck in her own pockets.
“No wallet,” she said. She wiped her hands on her jeans and stood, stepping back from the body. “No phone, no ID. He knew what he was doing.”
Reece agreed. He looked down at the carnage around them. Two dead bodies would be a lot to answer for, even in self-defense.
Blood was soaking into the forest floor around the wolf’s body, turning the dead leaves black. Reece’s hands were slicked red to the wrists. His shirt was ruined, torn at the shoulder where the wolf had snapped at him, the front soaked dark.
“We need to move,” Delainey said. She was already turning away from the bodies, her jaw set tight. “They might have friends.”
He agreed, but he kept his eyes on her every step of the way.