Chapter 24 #2
I tried to push reassurance through the bond. Tried to tell her I was okay, that I would heal, that wolves were harder to kill than this. But the connection was sluggish, my thoughts scattered and hard to hold onto. All I managed was a pulse of love, weak and wavering but unmistakably present.
Her terror crashed back through our connection in response. She felt it. She felt me fading.
“Viktor!” She screamed the name without looking away from my face. “Viktor, he’s been shot, he’s bleeding, he’s—”
“I see it.” Viktor’s bulk appeared at the edge of my vision, his face grim. He had Clara in his arms, carrying her toward the door where Dmitri was waiting with the truck’s engine already rumbling.
He set Clara down on the porch, exchanged rapid words in Russian with Dmitri, and then he was back.
Crouching beside Lena, one massive hand pressing against my chest just above the wound.
The pressure sent fire through my nerves, but the wolf was too weak to do more than whimper.
Viktor’s palm was rough and warm, steady despite what I knew he was feeling beneath that professional calm.
“He needs to shift back.” Lena’s voice was steady now, forced calm covering desperation. “Wolves heal faster in human form, right? He needs to shift, he needs to—”
“If he can shift.” Viktor’s voice was careful. Clinical. The voice of a man who had seen battlefield injuries before and knew which ones ended in caskets. “Sometimes the damage is too great. Sometimes the body chooses the form it will die in.”
“He’s not dying.” The words came out sharp, angry, desperate. “He is not dying. Do you hear me?”
Her voice reached me. Even as my vision started to gray at the edges, even as the cold crept in from my extremities, her voice reached me.
Her hands on my fur, her tears dripping onto my muzzle, her love and her terror and her absolute refusal to let me go.
The bond between us was the only warm thing left in the world, a thread of fire connecting her heart to mine.
I would not let that thread break.
The shift started without my permission.
It felt like being turned inside out. Bones cracking and reforming, muscle tearing and reknitting, fur receding into skin that was slick with blood and sweat. The pain of it nearly dragged me under, a white-hot furnace that burned away everything except the need to be human. To speak. To tell her.
The bullet shifted in my chest as my body changed around it, scraping against something vital. Fresh blood poured from the wound, and I heard Lena’s sharp intake of breath, felt her hands pressing harder. The metallic smell of my own blood filled my nostrils, thick and wrong.
I came out of the shift gasping, naked and shivering on the blood-soaked floor.
The bullet wound was still there, a dark hole in the left side of my chest that bubbled with each breath.
Not good. I had enough battlefield experience to know that bubbling meant a lung. Meant I was running out of time.
“Raphael.” Lena’s hands were on my face now, her thumbs tracing my cheekbones, her eyes swimming with tears that caught the lamplight like diamonds. “Stay with me. Please. You have to stay with me.”
I tried to speak. Tried to tell her that I loved her, that Michael was dead, that she was safe, that this was worth it. Worth everything. But the words would not come. My throat worked uselessly, producing nothing but a wet clicking sound that made her face go paler.
Blood in my lungs. Blood in my throat.
Through our connection, I pushed everything I could not say. Love. Relief that she was alive. Pride in her strength. Gratitude for her presence. Apology for the pain my dying was causing her.
Her sob hit me harder than the bullet.
“Don’t you dare.” She leaned down, pressing her forehead to mine.
Her tears fell onto my face, mixing with the blood, warm where everything else was cold.
“Don’t you dare say goodbye. You’re going to be fine.
We’re going to get you to a hospital and they’re going to fix this and we’re going to go home. ”
I wanted to believe her. God, how I wanted to believe her.
But the darkness was getting harder to fight. It crept in from the edges of my vision, narrowing the world down to just her face. Just her voice. Just the warmth of her hands on my skin and the bond pulsing between us, fragile and thinning.
“Truck’s here.” Dmitri’s voice, somewhere beyond the shrinking circle of my awareness. “Help me move him.”
“Keep pressure on the wound.” Viktor, barking orders. “Lena, do not let go. Do not stop pressing.”
“I won’t.” Her voice broke. “I’ve got him.”
Hands grabbed me, lifted me. The motion sent agony screaming through my chest, and I must have made some sound because Lena was there instantly, her free hand finding mine, squeezing tight enough to bruise.
Her grip was the only thing keeping me anchored to my body, keeping me from drifting away into the darkness that called so sweetly.
“I’m right here.” Her voice cracked. “I’m not leaving you. I’m right here.”
Cold air hit my face. We were outside now, though I did not remember leaving the cabin.
The winter sky was black above us, pinpricked with stars I could barely see.
The truck bed was hard beneath my back, lined with blankets that were quickly soaking through with my blood.
The cold metal bit into my spine through the fabric.
Viktor was applying pressure to my chest again, his face a mask of grim determination.
Dmitri was in the driver’s seat, engine already running.
Clara was somewhere behind us, her crying muffled, but I could not see her.
Could not focus on anything except Lena’s face above me and the bond between us, stretched thin and starting to dim.
“Drive,” Viktor barked. “Drive like his life depends on it, because it does.”
The engine roared. The truck lurched into motion.
Every bump in the road was agony, jolts of fire through my chest that should have made me scream.
But I barely felt it anymore. The numbness was spreading, creeping up from my fingers and toes toward my core, a cold tide that swallowed sensation as it climbed.
The world was shrinking, narrowing, becoming nothing but her face and her voice and the desperate grip of her hand in mine.
The night air was bitter against my bare skin, the cold seeping into me from every direction. But Lena’s hand was warm. Her grip on my fingers was the only warmth left in the world.
Lena’s panic rose with every second. She was kneeling beside me in the truck bed, one hand in mine, the other pressed against the wound next to Viktor’s.
Her love was a physical force, pouring through our connection, willing me to live.
Her heart beat fast and terrified through our connection, the depth of her desperation suffocating.
She was praying to every power she had ever believed in and some she had not.
I tried to squeeze her fingers. Tried to let her know I was still fighting. My hand obeyed, barely, a weak pressure against her palm.
“That’s it.” She was crying openly now, tears streaming down her cheeks, freezing in the winter air. “Keep holding on. The hospital isn’t far. You’re going to make it. You’re going to make it because you promised me forever, remember? You don’t get to break that promise.”
Forever. Yes. I had promised her that.
But the black was getting heavier. Harder to push against. My thoughts were fragmenting, scattering like leaves in a winter wind. Lena’s face kept blurring, sharpening, blurring again.
The bond dimmed.
Lena made a sound, a raw noise of pure terror, her panic spiking through our connection. She felt it too. The weakening. The slipping away.
“No.” Her hand pressed harder against my chest. “No, you stay with me. You feel this? You feel me? I’m right here. I’m not letting you go.”
She was there. Barely. Through the dimming bond, through the cold that was swallowing me, her love still reached me. Her determination. Her stubborn, ferocious will holding onto me. She was gripping me with more than just her hands. She was gripping me with everything she had.
“Viktor, he’s slipping away.” Her voice cracked. “The bond is going dim. I can feel it.”
“Keep talking to him.” Viktor’s voice was tight, strained in a way I had never heard from him. “Keep him anchored. We’re almost there.”
“Raphael.” She leaned down, her lips brushing my ear, her breath warm against my skin.
The scent of her surrounded me, cutting through the copper stink of my own blood.
Apples and cream and warmth and mate. “I love you. I love you and I need you and you don’t get to leave me. Not after everything. Not like this.”
I wanted to answer. Wanted to tell her I was trying. That I would never stop trying. That she was the reason I was still fighting, still clinging to consciousness, still refusing to let the darkness take me. For her. Always for her.
But the words would not come.
The stars overhead were disappearing, one by one, swallowed by the darkness that was claiming everything. The cold was inside me now, not just around me. I could feel my heartbeat slowing, each pulse further apart than the last, each beat requiring more effort than the one before.
My wolf was still fighting. Still clawing at the void, still snarling at death itself. He did not know how to surrender. Did not know how to give up. But even he was fading now, his fierce presence dimming to embers where there had been fire.
Lena’s face above me. Tears on her cheeks, freezing in the bitter air. Blood on her hands. My blood. Her love, the only warmth left in a world gone cold.
The bond, stretched so thin I could barely feel it anymore. A thin silk thread where there had been a rope. A whisper where there had been a shout.
Her voice, calling my name. “Raphael. Raphael, please.”
I tried to hold on. For her. For us. For the forever I had promised her in the dark hours of the night, when we lay tangled together and spoke of futures neither of us had dared to imagine alone.
The darkness was too strong.
Her face was the last thing I saw. Her voice was the last thing I heard. Her love, flooding through the bond in a final desperate wave, was the last thing I felt.
Then the bond dimmed one final time.
And everything went black.