Chapter 7
Jason
“Explain.”
Froggy doesn’t waste a damn second. The moment we’re out of the humans’ line of sight, he whirls on me, his hackles raised, eyes wild, breath puffing hard enough to stir the damp leaves on the ground. “Explain what the actual hell that was, Jason.”
I drag in a breath that tastes like wet bark and guilt.
A mulchy leaf is stuck to my paw, clinging like a parole officer who knows exactly what I did. What I caused.
“She fell because of me.”
The words land in my chest like another nail hammered into a coffin already full of my fuckups.
Buff huffs. “No shit.”
A nerve jumps in my jaw. I bare my teeth before I can stop myself. Even though I accept the blame, it pisses me off that he calls me out on it.
“I wasn’t asking for commentary.”
Froggy is pacing now, each turn hacking at the silence between us, his tail twitching like it wants to choose violence. “What did you think was going to happen when you chased the fucking horse?”
Heat flashes under my fur; anger, guilt, shame, all tangle together.
“The horse was spooked because of us,” I bite out. “I wasn’t going to leave her to fate.”
I bend to nose the leaf off my paw, not because it’s bothering me, but because I need an excuse to hide my expression.
“God knows what the horse would’ve done in its panic. As it is, it threw her pretty fucking hard.”
Too hard.
Hard enough that the sound is still rattling around inside my ribcage, refusing to settle.
Hard enough that my instincts are still bristling, snarling for a do-over I’ll never get. I squeeze my eyes shut against the memory of her body pitching forward, the thud when she hit the ground. My stomach twists, but I straighten.
Froggy snaps, “And? So fucking what? Since when do you care about humans?”
I whip my head toward him, a low growl scraping up my throat. “What do you mean since when? This is the first time anything like this has ever happened.” My voice drops low, tight. “It could’ve been Maggie.”
“But it wasn’t,” he fires back. “It was a stranger.”
Buff snorts, shaking his head. “None of this makes sense.”
He’s right. It doesn’t make sense.
Not now, when my pulse is still thrashing like I’m the one who hit the ground.
Not then, when every instinct screamed for me to save her even though I didn’t know her name.
Not during any second of it, when something in her scent, something raw and hurting and powerful, spiked straight through the noise in my head and made me move without thinking.
None of this makes sense.
And that’s the part that scares me the most.
Froggy thrusts his muzzle toward me, way too close. “You almost blew our cover. You almost got seen. You almost—”
“She couldn’t see me.”
The words rip out of me, edged in something I don’t want to name and coated with anger because she can’t see and for some unknown reason that doesn’t sit right with me.
Everything stops. Ever seen a confused wolf? Yeah. Me neither. Until now.
Froggy’s eyebrows bunch together, a ridiculous little scrunch that would’ve been hysterical if my insides weren’t still twisted from the fall, from the sound she made hitting the ground, from all the ways I fucked this up.
“What do you mean?” he snaps. “She was stroking you like a fucking cat.”
My thoughts lash out like a whip. Hard and unforgiving. “She’s blind.”
The penny drops for Froggy. I see the exact second it clicks. His ears twitch, his posture dips a fraction, but he doesn’t soften. Not even a little.
No, he still looks pissed. Offended. Like my explanation is just one more complication we don’t have time for.
But underneath all that? Something else sparks in his eyes. Something wary.
Buff softens immediately. “Is that why her eyes looked so… wrong?”
A snarl tears out of me before I can swallow it. “There is nothing wrong with her.”
Froggy snorts. “We were at a sanctuary for the differently abled. Obviously something was—”
“There. Is. Nothing. Wrong. With. Her.”
Each word drops heavier, darker, a warning vibrating straight out of my chest.
Silence slams over the forest. Even the wind seems to still.
Buff lifts his ears, slow and careful, like he’s approaching a wounded animal, or a dangerous one. His instincts are on the money. Because right now, I feel dangerous. Like my temper is thinner than spider silk and just as deadly.
“I’m just saying her eyes didn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen.” His voice is soft, but my muscles still lock up.
He’s right. Her eyes weren’t like anything I’ve seen either. Not damaged. Not broken. Just… different. A different kind of being. A different kind of strength.
And in that the second, I realized what that difference meant. The second I scented her vulnerability entwined with something fierce and quietly unshakable, something lodged under my skin like a hook.
A hook I can’t seem to dislodge.
I force myself to breathe. Inhaling slow, controlled breaths, I try to drag the air past a knot in my chest.
“Sometimes that happens when people go blind,” I say. “Doesn’t mean anything is wrong with her.”
Froggy’s frown deepens, but his voice softens like it usually does when something actually rattles him. “She reached for you like you, a fucking wolf, were safe.”
The words punch low. I swallow hard because he’s right. She did reach for me.
She didn’t flinch or panic, she just reached. Like she instinctively knew where solid ground was, and it happened to be my fur.
A shudder ripples down my spine before I can stop it.
Because if it had been one of the Eustace gang instead of me, she’d be dead. Or worse.
“She was in shock,” I mutter, clinging to the explanation even though it feels thin. “I smelled other dogs. They must be assistant dogs. She thought I was one of them.”
But something presses into me anyway. Hope, maybe? Like maybe she wasn’t reaching for a dog. Maybe, just maybe, she reached for me, because she knew she could trust me.
And I have no idea what the hell to do with that.
Froggy rolls his eyes. “Great. But most of the dogs are the size of golden retrievers. Not ten times the size.”
“You need to stop exaggerating. Ten times the size,” I huff. My fur bristles anyway, because sure, I’m big, but not that big.
“Guys, can you just stop fighting for a second?” There’s something in Buff’s tone that sounds almost like excitement.
“He’s a fucking idiot,” Froggy spits.
I ignore him and look at Buff.
Buff is thinking. And that’s never good.
A cold ripple scrapes down my spine. Because with Buff, thinking always comes right before something either brilliant or catastrophic—usually both.
Then I feel it through the bond.
That spark.
That bright, stupid, dangerous flicker of hope igniting in his chest.
And then it hits me.
Like a punch of someone else’s idiotic idea slamming straight into my ribs. Like I can already hear the words forming in his brain before he even opens his mouth.
Nope.
No, no, no.
He winks. Actually winks.
Oh fuck. I am not going to like this at all.
He looks up, eyes wide, glowing with that deranged Eureka-light only Buff gets when he’s about to suggest something harebrained.
“Jason.”
“No.”
The growl flies out of me so fast it startles a bird out of a nearby tree.
“She needs a guide dog.”
“Absolutely not.”
“And she already trusts you.”
“That’s the stupidest fucking idea I’ve ever heard.”
“Well,” Buff says, maddeningly reasonable, “do you have anything better?”
I stare at him like he’s just sprouted fangs and glitter and joined a vampire coven.
Has he lost his goddamn mind?
“Think about it,” he presses, leaning in with that dangerous, hopeful energy humming through the bond. “You kept her calm. You helped her stand. She held on to you like you were a life raft.”
His words hit something deep in me because I felt that moment.
Her fingers sliding into my fur with this desperate, instinctive trust that didn’t belong to a stranger. Her body leaning into mine because she couldn’t see and the world had just turned on her, so she reached for the nearest solid thing.
Me.
A wolf.
The last thing she should have trusted.
And yet she did.
“Don’t,” Froggy barks. “Don’t you dare.”
But Buff’s tail is wagging like he’s lost every last functioning brain cell he ever had.
“I’m just saying… we hide you in plain sight, and while she’s working with you, Froggy and I get fake IDs and figure out how to smuggle you across the border.” With each word, his voice brightens with insane, reckless hope. “No one suspects a guide dog. No one hunts a guide dog.”
“We are not turning Jason into a pet!” Froggy screams, fur bristling so violently he looks static-charged.
“Not a pet,” Buff counters. “A partner.”
The word hits me dead center, hard and unavoidable.
Oh!
It lands in my chest like someone punched straight into the part of me I never let anyone near.
Partner.
My breath stutters because there’s a difference, and we all feel it. A pet is owned. A partner chooses. And the horrifying, impossible truth vibrating under my skin?
Some part of me had already chosen.