Chapter 16
Chapter
Sixteen
Delainey woke up in Reece’s arms. Again. This was becoming a pattern, and she didn’t care for it. She couldn’t come to rely on it.
His arm was heavy around her waist. She was warm and comfortable, and that was the problem.
His chest was a solid wall behind her, and she wished she had woken confused, unsure whose arms she was in or why she shouldn’t be enjoying this.
Her body fit against him, and even against the hard dirt of the forest it felt annoyingly right.
She wanted to drift back to sleep, pretend this waking hadn’t happened, just enjoy the feeling of this man.
This man that she had let shove his hand down her pants and get her off.
And she had fucking loved it.
Fuck.
Yeah, sleep was gone.
She couldn’t let that happen again. It was the woods. It was the stress of the situation. The manacles were cold against her wrists, and she glared down at them.
The magic jewelry on her arms probably had something to do with it, too. It couldn’t be that she wanted Reece’s hands on her. It couldn’t be that he had opened up to her, and she had felt vulnerable and needy, and had wanted to feel alive.
It couldn’t be that a part of her had been yearning for him for weeks.
She stifled a groan, because the last thing she needed was the werewolf beside her waking up to see her morning-after crisis.
Delainey very carefully extricated herself from his arms, barely daring to breathe as she rolled out of his embrace and scuttled five feet and eleven inches away from him. That was the maximum safe distance before her cuffs started to tingle.
Even if she wanted to put ten miles between them, she wasn’t going to invite more pain; besides, that would wake him up, and then she would have to face him.
Crouched five feet and eleven inches away, with sunlight beginning to stream through the trees, she got a good look at him.
The way his face was relaxed. The way his red hair looked brighter in the morning.
The way he had one arm outstretched like he was reaching for her.
He didn’t look like a werewolf who had been forced to kill when he was still a teenager, like a boy who had been forced into a world he never should have known about.
He looked inviting, like he could be hers if she would just take him.
His shirt was wrecked, torn at the left sleeve, the front stiff with dried blood from yesterday’s fight, and rucked up above his waistband to show a strip of pale stomach and the trail of reddish hair below his navel.
Even filthy and sleeping in the dirt, the man took up an unreasonable amount of space, his long legs stretched out past the dead fire pit and his shoulders nearly as wide as the log they’d been sitting on.
A small part of Delainey was tempted to murder him right now, to be free of the manacles and him both, spare herself the embarrassment of facing these thoughts in the harsh light of day.
But getting all emotional after a little bit of murder was what had gotten her into this situation in the first place. And murdering Reece would make things much worse, not that she could fool herself for a second that she would actually be able to do it.
He blinked his eyes open and stared at her.
Still golden. Wolfish.
He looked hungry and not for food. She could see it in the set of his posture, the way his eyes raked her up and down, and she hated that she could read him that well.
Delainey aimed to keep her expression neutral, but from the way her lips felt all pinched, she was probably looking bitchy.
Well… that was better than any of the alternatives.
His gaze came right back up to her face. He must have noticed she wasn’t in the mood to talk. He took in the distance between them and sat up, jaw all square and tight, shoulders set in a hard line. Whatever want had been in his expression drained away like it had never been.
“We need to get back home,” she said, as if he didn’t already know that.
But this expedition was weighing on her, and it wasn’t the hunger, or being incredibly dirty and beginning to smell herself.
Her jacket had a tear along one shoulder seam from yesterday, and her black top underneath was stiff with dried sweat and forest grime.
Her gym shoes were caked in mud up to the ankle, and the blister on her right heel had graduated from a sting to a steady, raw throb with every step.
It wasn’t that they were most likely being hunted through this forest by angry rogues who would only get angrier once they found their associates’ bodies.
It was Reece.
Every moment spent with him was its own kind of torture, tempting Delainey with a want she couldn’t afford to feel.
Elise could go and shack up with a werewolf all she wanted; that was her prerogative.
The coven and the pack were sort of fine with it now.
But the world still wasn’t kind to relationships between witches and werewolves.
Not that Delainey wanted a relationship, of course. That was crazy.
“Austin LaSalle,” she said.
“What?” Reece ducked under a low-hanging branch, holding it back with one hand so it didn’t snap into her face as she followed.
Delainey didn’t answer right away. They had been walking through the woods for more than an hour, and she had been deep in her own thoughts.
Her mind snagged on him, and she decided it was better to talk about that than any other possible topic.
The terrain had shifted from the rocky slopes of yesterday to a gentler grade, the ground carpeted in brown leaves that crunched with every step.
A thin fog still clung to the low places between the trees, knee-high and slow to burn off.
“I was thinking about how he kidnapped Nico and Elise,” she said.
“I was there,” Reece kept his eyes forward, scanning the tree line as he walked, one hand brushing the trunk of each tree they passed like he was reading something in the bark.
“No shit,” Delainey muttered. “It’s just—” She tried to get her thoughts in order. “I don’t know of that many people who are going around kidnapping werewolf and witch pairs. And he has a history of it. Do you think he could be behind this?”
“It’s been months,” Reece stepped over a fallen branch without breaking stride, his boots finding solid ground on the other side with the ease of someone who’d spent half his life moving through woods like these.
“As far as I know, he’s gone. I don’t even know if he’s still alive.
Dawson would kill him if he showed up in Iron Runner territory again. ”
Delainey ran her fingers over the bark of a tree as they passed. “Do you think we’re in Iron Runner territory?”
That wouldn’t be great. If the Iron Runners had captured them, that would be a catastrophe. But if someone else was using their vast territory without their knowledge, it might not be the worst outcome if they could find pack members and explain their plight.
Reece tipped his head back and breathed in deep.
“It doesn’t smell like any pack territory,” he turned in a slow half-circle, nostrils flaring, the tendons in his neck visible as he worked through whatever catalogue of scents his wolf was sorting.
“But we can’t be sure. And even if it was Austin, why would he take us? ”
That was a good question. Delainey didn’t answer, instead turning it around in her mind.
Nico and Elise were the ones who were dating, not her and Reece.
She refused to think about last night at all.
If someone had a problem with witches and werewolves talking to one another, that was a complication on an entirely different level.
And it wasn’t just Austin LaSalle who had issues with witches and werewolves; Elise’s own parents had come to town and made their displeasure known.
She wasn’t about to accuse them of kidnapping her and Reece.
Delainey trudged through the forest and wished she had any idea why someone would do this.
Somewhere ahead and to the left, she caught the faint sound of moving water, not the tiny stream from their camp, but something wider, a steady rush that carried through the trees.
Reece had already angled toward it without saying a word.
Once she got home, she was going to figure it out.