14 Tommy #2
It went out of her all at once. The column of her spine gave, the flat clean nothing slid off her face like water, and she came apart at the seams in total silence—because the guard was four feet away through a wall of canvas.
She folded toward me and I caught her with my cuffed arm and my free one both, and the heat coming off her hit me like opening an oven.
The fever. It had been there the whole time, under the coat, under the mask, while she stood in front of an armed man and lied for both our lives.
Lied to give my packmates time to flee with the dormants we’d rescued.
Now there was no one to hold it back from and it crested all at once.
She shook against my chest with her teeth clamped on the sound, and that was the thing that gutted me—that even falling apart she made no noise.
“I’ve got you,” I breathed into her hair, the old three words, low as I could pitch them. “Hey. I’ve got you, sweetheart. You did it. That was—Kaia, that was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever watched anybody do, and I once watched Beto defuse an argument between two of his ex-girlfriends—”
“Tommy.” A wet broken almost-laugh against my collarbone.
Then her hand fisted in my shirt and her whole body bowed with a cramp and the almost-laugh turned to a hiss through her teeth.
“There’s—I have to tell you the rest. Nadia told me the rest and I didn’t—I didn’t tell you in the field, there wasn’t—”
“Okay. Okay, tell me.” I got us both down onto the cot, her across my lap, my back to the post, her face tucked under my jaw where her breath came short and hot against my throat. “We got time, right?” I whispered into her hair. “We got a whole tent and a guard who thinks I’m cargo. Talk to me.”
My wolf’s hackles were up. Enemy everywhere. We both knew there wasn’t time and even holding her like this was dangerous.
If someone walked in and found her in my arms I wasn’t sure either of us could come up with good enough lies to keep the story intact.
She pulled back enough to look at me, and the gold in her eyes had banked down from the field’s screaming pitch to something steadier and even more frightening—lucid. Clear-eyed in the middle of the fire. The fog was gone from behind them.
“Nadia’s potions,” she said, then quick as lightning, she pressed a bottle to my lips.
I took the drops under my tongue and only then spoke. “But they already know I’m a wolf.”
Kaia shook her head. She moved her mouth and spoke so low I wasn’t sure I’d have heard her without my wolf.
“Yours is different. It’ll help mask the bond.
I’m the one masking my wolf. Making it look like I don’t have one.
We just need to make yours look like before, like it’s dormant.
Like what got you through the doors. She says as long as we don’t…
don’t consummate the Heat, the potions will hold.
They’ll read me as one of theirs and you as a potential dormant. ”
I frowned and shook my head. I’d heard the stories.
Brann, Santos, Levi. The pain their mates had suffered during the Heat.
The dangers of resisting it. They’d tried all different ways to control it and Nadia herself had told us innumerable times how lethal it could be for a wolf to resist her Heat.
“I won’t risk you. Kaia, the Heat doesn’t stop because we’re in a tent taking some of Nadia’s potions. It’s not stopping. It’s a fever that will burn you out from the inside and your mate is the only thing on this earth that drains it instead of letting it cook you.”
Her hand pressed flat to my chest, over the drum of my heart, her fingers trembling against my shirt.
A cramp took her again and she rode it with her forehead pressed hard against mine, her breath coming in ragged, desperate gasps.
When the spasm let her go, her jaw worked, her lips parting as she tried to force words out.
“Nadia said... if the potions are active... the transition will cook my heart. I have to...” She choked on the words, her eyes darting away in sudden, agonizing shame.
The flush on her neck wasn’t just the fever.
It was the raw, deep-seated horror of a woman raised in sterile corridors, trained to view her own body as a biohazard, now forced to ask for the one thing she’d spent her life locking in a cage.
Her fingers clawed into the cotton of my shirt, her chin trembling as she tried to find the words, anything to hide the desperation of what she needed.
“Nadia said the... the channel has to open. To vent the chemicals. It... it requires...”
She couldn’t say it. The words stuck in her throat, her chest heaving as she fought herself, her identity laying in ruins around her feet.
Admitting she was a wolf, admitting she was in Heat, was hard enough.
Admitting what she needed to survive—while we were cuffed in a cage, while she was pretending to be a Steward—was too heavy a weight for her to carry.
I stared at her, the garbled pack link static from the ridge suddenly clicking into place.
Reed, we need to—Brann, the smoke’s hexed, move the dormants—
No, after that.
Reed had been trying to relay Nadia’s message. Nadia had known Kaia was in transition. She had known the potion would trap the transition inside her.
I remembered what the guys had said. Around the packhouse kitchen table, late at night when the jokes died down and the real talk started.
Brann, Levi, Santos—they’d all talked about the absolute, terrifying pressure of the Heat.
They’d talked about how the mate was the anchor.
The wolf’s body was a lightning rod, and the only way to ground the charge, to keep the female’s soul from burning out of her chest, was to open the channel.
Orgasmic release. The climax vented the poison, grounded the raw magical pressure, and bought the system time.
But Nadia had sent Kaia in here with a suppressant. A mask.
And then I remembered Kaia’s warning out on the ridge. “Don’t answer the bond. Don’t let it pull.”
The pieces slammed together, cold and heavy as iron.
If we mated—if I took her, if I marked her and finished inside her—the bond would snap shut. The mate-surge would fire like a flare in the night, shattering the potions, blowing Kaia’s mask to pieces, and bringing the entire camp down on our heads.
But if we did nothing, the fever would cook her heart.
She needed the release to drain the poison. But we couldn’t have the full connection.
She needed me to anchor her, but I had to stay in the dark.
I looked at the absolute terror in her golden eyes, the silent pleading she couldn’t put words to.
This was my job. This was why I was here. Not to run, not to fight my way out with teeth, but to hold the line for her when she had nothing left.
I slid my hand up to cup the back of her neck, my thumb stroking the soft skin right behind her ear.
“I got it,” I murmured, my voice dropping. “Kaia. Look at me. I’ve got it. You don’t have to say it.”
She nodded, a tear tracking down her cheek.
“But Kaia it only buys us time,” I whispered, the weight of the ticking clock pressing on my chest. “For what, Kaia? Tell me to take this cuff off and I’ll carry you out of here.
I swear I’ll take you into the mountains somewhere so far they’ll never find you.
I’ll make love to you until we’ve burned this fever out of you once and for all. Kaia, please—”
Kaia shook her head. “There’s two hundred others like you that didn’t get out.
And not every Steward or assistant is evil.
I—I have to go back. I have to save my friends.
Save all the patients we left behind.” She took a deep breath.
“Your alpha said—Reed said he’s calling all the surrounding packs for help.
They’re going to attack the retreat center and rescue everyone we left behind.
But Tommy—we have to get back inside and be ready to open the doors for them. ”
I closed my eyes. The pieces clicked together in my head, cold and sharp.
She didn’t just want to survive this tent or bluff her way past a line officer.
She was setting a hook. She had intentionally logged me as a rare male dormant likely bursting with aurum latens.
It was a trapdoor. The Verdant Order would need to confirm my dormant wolf and then prep me for harvest. Which meant they would transport us right back to the Retreat Center where she could reach the patients.
Eli was still down there. My pack’s fight was down there.
Fuck. She was right.
I let my forehead rest against hers for a second, then forced my shoulders straight.
She was asking me to give her everything and take nothing.
To want her and not have it, with my wolf screaming, while I kept us both alive.
Her face crumpled, just for a second, before she dragged it flat. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry—”
“Hey.” I caught her jaw in my cuffed hand, careful. “Kaia. Look at me.”
She did.
“I have spent years being the guy who makes the hard thing into a joke so nobody has to feel it.” My voice dropped somewhere I didn’t recognize.
“I’m not going to do that here. So I’m going to say the real thing one time and then I’m going to do exactly what you need.
The real thing is this. There is nothing they could ask of me, nothing on this mountain or off it, that I wouldn’t hold back for you.
You want me to want you and not have you?
Sweetheart, I have been wanting you and not having you since the day we met.
I am extremely qualified for this assignment. ”
The broken laugh came out of her again, wet, and a tear cut through the grime on her cheek—
I laid her back on the narrow military cot, the canvas protesting with a sharp creak. Instantly, my wolf’s ears swiveled, mapping the rhythmic scuff of the guard’s boots four feet away on the other side of the tent wall.
Hold the line, the rational part of my brain commanded.