Chapter 34 The Answer at Last
Nora POV
Conrad’s iron-gray wolf lowered his head and advanced like I was already dead.
My right rear leg had quit. Blood pooled beneath me on the wet concrete, warm against the cold, and every beat of my heart pushed more of it out of the torn thigh.
I got my forelegs under me and bared my teeth, tasting blood that was mostly my own.
My wolf snarled with everything she had left, which wasn’t much.
I couldn’t fight a wolf twice my weight from the floor with a dead hind leg.
I couldn’t run. I couldn’t stay on my feet.
But I could see the lift.
The hydraulic lift I’d rebuilt in my second week sat fifteen feet to my left, its platform raised with Pete Rasmussen’s plow truck still on top. The control panel was mounted on the steel column at chest height.
Conrad paced closer. Deliberate. He wasn’t rushing because he didn’t need to.
Outside, through the open bay doors, I could hear Jules’s desperate snarl and the heavy crash of bodies hitting ice and steel.
Wade was out there bleeding. Rafe was down in the snow, conscious and shaking, with my torn thigh screaming through the bond.
The bond.
The answer had been mine since September. My wolf couldn’t speak, and only my human mouth could give the acceptance that would free Rafe from the bond crippling him now.
I had to shift.
Conrad lunged.
I threw myself sideways on three legs, dragging my ruined thigh across the concrete in a smear of blood.
Pain blanked everything, and I felt Rafe’s agony spike through the bond in answer, felt his wolf howl somewhere in the snow.
I scrambled beneath the raised truck on the lift platform, the same gap I’d used to dodge the gray enforcer.
Conrad was too big for the gap. He hit the platform’s edge and snarled, circling, looking for the angle.
I didn’t give him one. Behind the lift column, shielded by the truck’s undercarriage and the steel around the hydraulic cylinder, I forced the shift.
It hurt worse than any shift I’d ever felt.
Bones wrenched, and muscles tore as my body twisted back into human shape.
Every second of the change sent fresh pain through my injured thigh.
I bit down on my own arm and tasted blood.
As the last of my fur receded, the cold concrete struck my bare body.
I crouched naked and shaking behind the lift column, my right leg useless beneath me.
Conrad’s claws scraped steel as he tried to reach me around the platform.
I pressed my back against the column and said the words.
My voice came out ragged but clear, loud enough to carry through the bay and out the open doors into the storm.
“I accept your rejection.”
The bond broke.
The bond tore free instead of fading or easing with distance as it had when I’d driven east in September.
The place where it had lived beneath my breastbone seemed to rip open and empty out, and grief and relief struck together so hard I couldn’t tell which was which.
The rejected bond that had connected me to Rafe since the ceremony ground, carrying his guilt and my anger and his sickness and my pleasure across every mile and every night for more than a month, was gone.
Just gone.
I pressed my hand flat against my chest as if I could hold the emptiness closed.
Tears burned my eyes, and whether anyone saw them no longer mattered.
I had finally spent the answer I’d kept since that night, and the decision was mine alone.
I gave it because Rafe lay helpless in the snow twenty feet away and I was the only person who could free him.
I chose.
Outside, Rafe’s snarl shook the bay. The pain had stopped reaching him the instant the bond broke, and he surged up from the snow.
I heard the enforcer at the bay door yelp, and the door rattled in its frame. Through the gap beneath the raised truck I saw Rafe’s wolf, massive and furious, driving the enforcer sideways into the doorframe. The enforcer went down and didn’t get up.
Conrad’s head whipped toward the sound. His attention left me, and through the open bay doors I saw the yard.
Wade was bloodied but on his feet, his sandy fur matted dark along his left side where the bite had opened him.
He had the wolf that had bitten him pinned against the icy concrete near the chain rack, jaws locked on the back of its neck and his massive weight holding it flat.
The wolf thrashed, but Wade held it there.
Jules was smaller and faster, his dark fur streaked with blood as he drove another attacker back from the stairwell that led to the shelter.
He fought like he cooked—precise, efficient, every movement doing exactly what it needed to.
Bette and Hank and Arvid were safe behind the sealed door below.
Jules was making sure they stayed that way.
Rafe cleared the bay door and put himself between Conrad and me.
Conrad changed.
The shift took him in the middle of the bay floor, bones cracking and fur pulling back into weathered skin.
He rose on two feet, naked and bleeding from a cut along his forearm where the platform edge had caught him.
Even stripped of clothes and insignia, Conrad Sutherland still looked like a man who expected the world to obey.
“Enough.” His voice carried over the wind. “The bond is broken. Come home, Rafe. This is finished.”
Rafe’s black wolf snarled without moving.
“I said come home.” Conrad’s pale eyes swept the bay, found me crouched and bleeding behind the lift column, and his mouth thinned. “She broke the bond. There’s nothing left for you here.”
Rafe’s wolf lowered his head and showed his teeth.
Conrad turned to the enforcers. The ones still standing.
Three of them, bruised and bleeding, circled at the bay’s edge with their ears flat and their tails low.
They’d watched their Alpha’s coordinated assault.
They’d watched him send them to die on ice while he waited in the trees.
Now they watched him standing naked on cold concrete, giving orders to a son he’d cast out.
“Bring him down,” Conrad said. “Bring them both down. The pack has watched my heir kneel to this woman. She is the reason I’ve lost my son.”
The enforcers didn’t move.
“I gave you an order.”
One of them, the big gray whose muzzle I had slashed earlier, took a half step back.
Rafe’s answer was to shift his weight and plant his wolf more firmly between his father and me.
Conrad’s face hardened as he stared at the son who had refused him at Copper Point and walked away with only a duffel and work boots. He shifted again, the change fast and savage, and his iron-gray wolf lunged past Rafe toward the gap beneath the raised truck.
Toward me.
I was already moving. Dragging myself across the bloody concrete on my forearms, my right leg a dead weight behind me, my left knee scraping against oil-stained floor I’d mopped a hundred times.
I grabbed the steel housing with both hands, hauled myself upright on one leg, and hit the descent lever.
The hydraulic system I’d rebuilt engaged. The platform dropped.
The edge of the descending platform caught Conrad’s shoulder in mid-lunge and threw him sideways, tumbling him across the concrete and directly into Rafe’s path.
Rafe struck before Conrad could recover.
The black wolf drove the iron-gray one into the bay floor and pinned him, jaws closing on Conrad’s throat with a grip that meant death.
Conrad thrashed beneath his son’s weight, claws raking at Rafe’s chest and belly, but Rafe was bigger and younger and had the leverage and the fury of a wolf whose father had just tried to kill the woman he’d spent a month trying to deserve.
Blood welled around Rafe’s teeth. Conrad’s struggles weakened.
“Rafe.” My voice was barely a whisper. My throat was raw, my body was freezing, and I was holding myself upright by the lift column with blood running down my right leg and pooling beneath my bare foot. “Rafe, stop.”
His wolf’s ice-blue eyes found mine, bright with rage and pain.
“Don’t kill him.” I forced the next words out louder. “He’s beaten. Let Copper Point judge him.”
Rafe’s jaws tightened. Conrad choked beneath him.
“Rafe.”
He released Conrad’s throat. The iron-gray wolf collapsed on the concrete, breathing in harsh, wet gasps, blood seeping from the puncture wounds along his neck. Alive but beaten, he stared at the ceiling.
Outside, the fighting stopped.
The three enforcers who’d heard Conrad order his own son brought down looked at each other, looked at their Alpha bleeding on the floor, and dropped to their haunches in the snow with ears flat and tails tucked. They were done.
Jules limped through the bay door in wolf form, bleeding from his shoulder and his split lip, and positioned himself beside Rafe. Wade followed, slower, his massive frame hunched against the wound along his side. He stood at the bay entrance and filled it, and nothing was getting past him.
Headlights swept the yard.
Three trucks came down the service road with their high beams cutting through the snow. Behind the lead cab’s windshield, I saw Gordon Keane’s profile.
Delia had told us Gordon was following Conrad. Now he was here.
Four Iron River wolves climbed from the trucks, stripped, and shifted to block the road behind Conrad’s vehicles. They didn’t have to attack. The Copper Point enforcers who were still capable of walking looked at the fresh wolves and whatever fight was left in them disappeared.
I slid down the lift column and sat on the cold concrete in a spreading pool of my own blood. My vision swam. The adrenaline that had kept me moving was draining out as fast as the blood from my thigh. The bay tilted sideways, and I pressed my palm flat against the floor until it leveled again.