Chapter Fifteen #3
His claws extended another half-inch, pricking the skin beneath my jaw, and I felt the warm trickle of blood working its way down my neck and into my collar.
I drove the switchblade up through the underside of his jaw.
The blade went in clean. Three inches of carbon steel traveling through soft tissue and into the base of his skull with the kind of precision that comes from having done this before, in different uniforms, in different countries, to men who deserved it less than Declan Morrow deserved it now.
The sound he made was brief. A wet, surprised exhale that carried no volume and all the finality in the world. His weight went from controlled to dead in the space of a breath—the heaviness of a body that has stopped participating in its own existence.
His grip on my throat loosened. His claws retracted. His eyes, fixed on mine, went from focused to empty in the time it took my heart to beat once.
I turned my face to the side. Blood hit my cheek—warm, thick, the particular copper-metallic smell of it filling my nostrils—and I got my arm under his shoulder and shoved.
The body rolled off me with the leaden resistance of something that had stopped cooperating, and I lay on the gravel road for exactly two seconds.
The sky above the trees was black. No stars.
Cloud cover, thick and low, the kind that turns night into something solid.
The gate lights threw their amber glow across the gravel, catching the dark wet patches that weren’t all mine, and the silence that followed was the particular silence of a place where something violent has just ended and the world hasn’t caught up yet.
I pulled the blade free. Folded it one-handed, the mechanism clicking shut with a sound that felt obscenely normal, and got my feet under me.
Standing hurt. My ribs protested—cracked or close to it, the kind of pain that lived in your breathing and got worse when you moved. My left arm was still bleeding freely through the torn jacket, the fabric gone dark and heavy with it, and the split in my lip had started to swell.
I wiped blood off my face with the back of my hand and left a rusty smear across my knuckles that the gate light turned the color of old wine.
The shapes in the tree line were gone. I hadn’t seen them leave. One moment they were there, the next they weren’t, the darkness swallowing them whole the way darkness does when it decides it’s finished with you.
Headlights swept the road.
An SUV—black, nondescript, the same model Ashe had driven—skidded to a stop several feet away, gravel spraying from the tires in a fine arc that caught the light.
The engine was still running when the driver’s door opened, and Braham was out before the vehicle had fully settled, crossing the distance in long, fast strides that ate the gravel between us in seconds.
He stopped in front of me. Close enough that the cedar-and-scotch smell of him cut through the blood and the pine and the copper-metallic reek of the body at our feet.
His gold eyes moved fast—checking, cataloguing, tracking every cut and bruise and the blood that wasn’t all mine with the focused intensity of a man who was doing a great deal of work to keep his expression controlled and not entirely succeeding.
His hands came up to my face. Warm. Large. Certain. His thumbs traced the line of my jaw, checking the hinge where Declan’s fist had connected, and his fingers pressed gently into the sides of my neck where the bruising would already be forming under the skin.
“Grace is at the house,” I said. My voice came out rougher than I’d intended, the split lip making the consonants sound wrong. “Ashe took the back road.”
Braham’s jaw was tight enough to break. The muscle along the hinge stood out like cord under skin, and when he spoke, the words came out level through what looked like genuine physical effort. “I can see that.”
I looked up at him. Lip split, ribs screaming, left arm still leaking through the ruined jacket, and the absurdity of the moment landed with the weight that only arrives when you’ve just killed a man and the love of your life is standing in front of you looking like he might murder the entire state of Oregon on your behalf.
“Declan explained the whole thing, by the way.” I gestured vaguely at the body with my good arm. “Very thorough. You should know about the Morrow bloodline ability.” A pause. The gate lights caught the gold in his eyes and turned it molten. “I’ll tell you inside.”
Braham held my face in both hands for a long moment.
His thumbs traced the line of my jaw again, slower this time, and something moved behind those gold eyes that was too large and too specific to be just relief.
Too complicated. Too raw. The kind of look that lived in the space between words and didn’t bother trying to cross over.
I held his gaze and didn’t look away. The gravel was cold under my boots.
The blood on my face was drying. The body at our feet was already cooling, and somewhere deep in the trees, the night had gone quiet in the way it does when something violent has passed and the world is deciding what to do with the aftermath.
His hands were warm on my face. Mine were shaking, and I couldn’t make them stop, and I didn’t try.