Chapter 19 #2
"But I need something from you. The water on the other side of the island, the south cove. People are going to swim there soon. A lot of them. You have to let them. No more disrupting equipment, no more turning boats away, no more singing that pulls people toward the shore."
"My water," the siren said, and the possessiveness in those two strained syllables was unmistakable.
"Your cove stays yours. Protected. But the rest of the island's water has to be safe." Willow held her gaze. "You protect your baby. I protect my people. We stop fighting each other and start watching each other's backs."
The siren was still for a long time. The fog thickened around the cove, closing them off from the rest of the island.
Willow could see her working through it, the push and pull of need against instinct visible in the tension of her jaw and the way her fingers curled and uncurled against her belly.
She wanted to trust. She was too tired and too vulnerable to keep fighting everything that came near the island.
But trust was a luxury pregnant creatures on the run couldn't afford, and Willow understood that with a clarity that went bone-deep, because she'd spent three months on this island learning the exact same lesson.
"You... keep them away?" the siren asked. "From the nest?"
"I will make them listen," Willow said. "I'll make them see what I see."
Silence stretched between them, long enough for the fog to shift and resettle. Then the siren spoke the most words she'd managed yet, her voice cracking on every other syllable with the strain of it.
"You come back. You... tell me. If they say no."
It wasn't just an agreement. It was a condition. If the pack refused, the siren wanted warning. Time to prepare, or fight, or flee. Willow felt the weight of it settle on her shoulders alongside everything else she was carrying.
"I'll come back," she said. "Either way. I promise."
The fog seemed to hold its breath around them, everything suspended in the space between one woman's word and another's faith in it.
Then the siren dipped her chin again. The tension in the air shifted, the vibration changing from warning to something quieter, an agreement carried on the same frequency as a held breath released.
Willow let out her own breath. Something unknotted in her chest that had been wound tight since the pack meeting where Ryker had reduced her to nothing.
She'd found the answer the pack couldn't, negotiated a peace none of them would have taken the time to offer, and she'd done it with no authority or approval.
For that she would have to pray to the Goddess the Alphas would see reason.
Her whole body was shaking now, teeth rattling, the cold no longer something she could hold at arm's length through force of will. She had to move now. If she didn’t get warm soon, the cold would finish what the freezing water started.
She got to her feet in stages, using the rock for balance, and the siren watched her rise without flinching.
Her ankle screamed when she put weight on it.
Blood had soaked through her boot and left a trail on the wet stone.
Her hip and elbow throbbed, and when she stood upright the world swayed for a dangerous second before it steadied enough for her to move.
She looked at the siren one more time. That pale face, those dark eyes, one hand on the belly that held everything she had left. She pressed warmth into the air one final time, a goodbye that carried the promise of return, and turned toward the rocks that would take her back to the path.
Ryker was fifty feet away from her and climbing down the rocks as fast as he could.
She hadn't heard him over the surf and the chattering of her own teeth.
He was moving on the rocks at the waterline, soaked to the thighs, boots full of water, jeans dark and heavy with it.
He'd been in the cove. His forearms were scratched raw where he'd gripped the rocks and his eyes were gold, full gold, not a hint of blue or grey smoke but the burning metallic color of a wolf so far forward the man was barely holding the wheel.
His gaze locked on the blood at her ankle, then swept up to the seawater still dripping from her hair, noticing the way she shook so hard her whole body jerked with it, and a sound tore out of his throat that wasn't words. Low and rough and broken.
Then he looked past her at the water and everything in him went completely still.
The siren was right there. Ten feet out, head and shoulders above the surface, watching them both with those flat dark eyes. Close enough to see the teeth. Close enough to catch her scent.
Shit.
Ryker's lip peeled back from his teeth. The gold in his eyes blazed and she saw his muscles coil, his body preparing to shift, to launch, and put himself between the creature in the water and her.
"Don't." Her voice came out rough but she made it hard. "She's not a threat. She's pregnant and she's scared and she's the answer to everything you've been investigating for weeks. So don't. Give me a chance to explain. I deserve that much."
He stared at the siren. Then back at Willow.
The muscles in his jaw worked, the war between wolf and man playing out across his face at close range, and for a long terrible second she thought he was going to ignore her.
Then he pulled in a breath through his teeth, forced his shoulders down, and the gold dimmed. Not gone. Controlled. Barely.
He stripped off his jacket and wrapped it around hers before she could say anything else.
The relief of that move almost enough to make her cry.
The jacket was heavy and warm from his body heat and it smelled like cedar and whiskey and him, the scent she dreamt about before the spell had broken their bond.
His hands brushed her shoulders as he settled the weight of it on her, and the tremor in them was bad enough that she felt it through the fabric.
"You're bleeding."
"I noticed."
"You could have died." He sounded like he was barely holding it together. "I was so far away when I saw you dragged under and I couldn't—" He stopped. Swallowed hard. "I got here as fast as I could."
"It’s okay." She pulled the jacket tighter. "I handled it."
"How did you even know where I was?" she asked.
"Sage was worried after you left. She found me. She said you had that look. The one you get before you do something crazu."
Willow filed that away for later. Sage, who had every reason to hate this man, had gone looking for him when she got worried. That was either an act of desperate pragmatism or a thread Willow didn't have the energy to pull while hypothermic.
The climb out of the cove was slow and ugly, her ankle protesting every step, but she did it under her own power and he let her, one hand hovering near her elbow without touching it.
At the top, on the flat ground above the waterline, the fog curled around them thick and cold, muffling any other sounds from the island.
For a moment, so brief she almost missed it, the old rhythm tried to surface. She opened her mouth to make a crack a joke about his timing. The old banter from before was right there, so close she could taste it, waiting for her like it had never left.
Then the weight of everything between them settled back into place. The accusations. The pain she couldn’t forget.
Her face closed and she watched the light flicker and die behind his eyes when it did. He didn't argue. Didn't reach for her. He just stood there with the cold cutting through him, watching her pull his jacket tighter around her shoulders.
She hobbled past him toward the path that led back to the village. The jacket was too big for her, the sleeves hanging past her hands, the hem hitting mid-thigh, and it was the warmest thing she'd felt in hours. She didn't offer to give it back and he didn't ask.
She followed the path, her feet avoiding the ruts without thinking even as her ankle protested each step.
The fog was thinning as they moved away from the cove, the sounds of the festival filtering through the grey in scattered bursts.
Distant music, a child's laugh, even the clatter of a vendor's cart.
Normal life, happening around them as if nothing had happened.
But something had shifted between them on the rocks above that cove, in the fog and the cold, in the space between his trembling hands and her sharp tongue.
She wasn't ready to name it. Wasn't sure she wanted to.
But she could feel it the way she felt changes in air pressure, subtle and certain and impossible to ignore, a warmth that had nothing to do with the jacket and everything to do with the way he'd looked at her when she climbed out of that water.
Not like a threat. Or a variable. But like a woman he was terrified of losing.