Chapter 24
RAPHAEL
The bullet hit me mid-lunge.
Fire tore through my chest, a white-hot brand of agony that should have dropped me where I flew. My wolf did not care. The pain was distant, unimportant, nothing but noise in the face of the only thing that mattered.
The human who had dared to touch my mate.
Michael’s face filled my vision. Terror twisted his features as he realized, too late, that his shot had not stopped me.
That nothing would stop me. The gun was still rising, still trying to track my trajectory, but the distance between us had already closed to nothing.
His eyes went wide, mouth opening on a scream that would never escape his throat.
I slammed into him.
The impact drove us both backward into the cabin wall.
Wood splintered behind his back, the old boards cracking and giving way under the force of our collision.
Michael’s breath left him in a gust that smelled like fear and coffee and the sharp bite of adrenaline.
The gun went flying from his grip, spinning across the floorboards into darkness, useless now. Irrelevant.
My jaws found his throat. This time, I did not let go.
The scream that had been building in his chest died before it could escape.
The vibration of it thrummed against my teeth as I clamped down, the frantic hammer of his pulse beating beneath the thin barrier of his skin.
He clawed at my fur with desperate hands, fingernails scraping uselessly against my skull, his legs kicking at nothing.
His fingers found my ears, tried to tear them, but the pain was nothing.
Distant static compared to the roar of satisfaction filling my chest.
This man had stalked her. Photographed her. Killed her colleague. Sent threatening packages designed to shatter her peace. Allied with wolves who wanted us dead. Kidnapped her cousin to force her into this trap.
I bit down harder.
Cartilage crunched beneath the pressure of my jaws.
Blood flooded my mouth, hot and copper-thick, coating my tongue with the taste of his ending.
He made a wet gurgling sound, hands falling away from my fur to scrabble at his own throat, as if he could somehow hold himself together.
As if he could stop what was already happening.
His body convulsed beneath me, the involuntary spasms of a creature that knew it was dying but could not accept the truth.
She’s mine. You touched what’s mine.
The wolf did not think in words, not exactly. But that sentiment, that possessive fury, ran through every fiber of my being. This human had threatened what belonged to me. Had put his hands on my mate. Had tried to take her from me.
Now he was paying for it.
I shook my head, jaws locked, and felt flesh tear.
The motion was violent, savage, everything the wolf had been holding back for months finally unleashed.
Michael’s body jerked beneath me, a puppet with its strings cut.
More blood, pumping out in arterial spurts that painted my muzzle, my chest, the floor beneath us.
The smell of it filled the cabin, drowning out everything else.
Copper and salt and the sour reek of fear and the fading scent of a man who had just realized he was already dead.
His hands made one last attempt to push at my chest. Weak. Pathetic. The effort of a creature that had already lost.
Lena blazed through the bond.
Her horror at the violence. Her fear, sharp and bright and overwhelming.
But beneath it all, beneath the shock and the revulsion, her relief flooded through.
Relief so profound it staggered me where I stood.
Relief that he was dying. Relief that I was the one doing it.
Relief that this nightmare was finally, irrevocably ending.
She did not look away.
She was watching through the bond, her eyes on me as I destroyed the man who had hunted her. And she did not flinch. Did not turn away. This was what she had asked for when she said those two words. Do it. She had known what I would do. What I was.
She had chosen it anyway.
I tore out his throat.
The flesh came away in my jaws, a wet squelch of muscle and artery and crushed windpipe.
Michael’s eyes were still open, still staring at nothing, but the light was already fading from them.
His mouth worked soundlessly, blood bubbling at his lips, his chest making small hitching motions as lungs tried to draw air through passages that no longer existed.
One hand twitched against the floor, fingers scraping weakly at the wood.
Then his body went slack beneath my paws.
The pulse I could feel through his torn throat stuttered once. Twice. A long pause where nothing moved, nothing beat, nothing lived.
And stopped.
Dead.
Finally, completely, eternally dead.
The threat to my mate was ended.
I opened my jaws and let the remains of his throat fall to the floor.
Stepped back from his corpse on legs that felt steadier than they should.
Savage triumph flooded through me, a wave of pure animal victory that drowned out everything else.
The wolf wanted to throw back his head and howl victory to the winter sky.
Wanted every creature within miles to know that this was what happened to those who threatened what was his.
My mate was safe.
My enemy was dead.
Everything was exactly as it should be.
I stumbled.
The motion was wrong, my back legs folding when they should have held.
I tried to step away from Michael’s corpse and nearly went down, catching myself at the last moment with a lurch that sent pain screaming through my chest. The agony that I had pushed aside during the kill came roaring back, no longer distant, no longer ignorable.
It consumed me, swallowed me, turned the world into a haze of red and black at the edges.
Pain. Right. The bullet.
In the frenzy of the kill, in the savage joy of destroying my enemy, I had forgotten the fire in my chest. But my body had not forgotten. My body was reminding me now, with every stuttering heartbeat, that the bullet had done real damage.
Blood covered my chest.
Not Michael’s. Mine. Pouring from a hole in my chest that my wolf had been too focused on the kill to notice, spreading through my black fur in a widening stain that dripped onto the floor.
The wound was center mass, just left of my sternum, a dark well that pulsed fresh red with every beat of my heart.
The wood beneath my paws was slick with it, my claws sliding when I tried to find purchase.
Two kinds of blood now, mingling together on the cabin floor.
His and mine. His blood smelled like copper and death, the flat metallic scent of an enemy destroyed.
Mine smelled like home and mate and fear.
That was a lot of blood. Too much blood.
The cabin tilted sideways. Or maybe I did.
Hard to tell. My legs were shaking now, the adrenaline that had carried me through the kill draining away and leaving nothing but weakness in its wake.
The edges of my vision were starting to gray, the lamplight dimming even though I knew the lamps had not changed.
The warmth of the cabin was fading too, cold creeping in from the wound in my chest, spreading through my limbs like frost claiming a window.
“Raphael!”
Lena’s scream cut through the ringing in my ears.
I turned toward her voice, moving too slowly, and saw her rising from the chair.
Her hands were free of the ropes now, raw and bleeding where the fibers had bitten into her wrists.
Her face was pale as death in the lamplight, her eyes wide with terror that had nothing to do with Michael anymore.
She was moving toward me, crossing the distance between us with frantic speed.
Her terror spiked into full panic through the bond, a desperate fear that echoed my own when Michael had his gun to her head.
Her mind was screaming at me, wordless but unmistakable.
No. Not like this. Not after everything.
I tried to take a step toward her. Tried to tell her I was fine, that Michael was dead, that she was safe now. That this was nothing. That I would heal. That wolves were harder to kill than this.
My legs gave out.
The floor rose up to meet me with brutal indifference.
I hit hard, the impact jarring through my wounded chest with a fresh wave of agony that tore a whine from my throat.
The sound was pathetic, animal, nothing like the triumphant growl that had filled this cabin moments before.
I felt the cold seep up from the floorboards into my fur, felt my blood pooling beneath me, warm at first but cooling fast.
Somewhere above me, Viktor’s voice was shouting orders.
“Dmitri! Get the truck NOW! He’s down, he’s bleeding, we need to move!”
“Clara.” Lena’s voice, cracked but thinking. Always thinking, my mate. Even in crisis, even with her world collapsing around her, she remembered the innocent. “Someone needs to free Clara.”
“I have her.” Viktor again, already moving. “Dmitri! TRUCK!”
Clara was sobbing somewhere behind me. The quick scrape of a knife through rope as Viktor freed her. Thunder of footsteps on the porch as Dmitri ran for the vehicle. None of it mattered.
All that mattered was Lena, crossing the space between us in a handful of desperate strides, dropping to her knees beside me in a pool of blood that was getting larger by the second.
Her hands found my fur, my face, pressing against the wound in my chest with a pressure that should have hurt but barely registered through the growing numbness.
Her fingers were warm against my muzzle, tracing the lines of my skull, and I could smell her tears before I saw them.
“No, no, no.” Her voice cracked on each word. “You don’t get to do this. You don’t get to save me and then die. That’s not how this works.”