6 Avaline #2
Reed’s massive chest seized. The golden glow in his eyes shattered into raw, bleeding agony. “I...I wanted her to find her wolf. I thought if I anchored her spirit, she’d be safe—”
“You lit a bonfire in a paper house,” Maren cut in, ruthless and clean. “You forced an Old-World bonding rite on a soul that had no vessel built to hold it. You broke the latch, lit her up like a flare, and then the monsters came over the ridge before you could close the circle.”
I felt the shudder that went through Reed’s entire frame.
“They didn’t just dose her,” Maren continued, her hands moving methodically as she rubbed the birch-root salve across my ribs, fighting the frost. “They found the open channel you left behind. They saw the half-struck rite glowing in her core. They used your own open bond as the cage to entomb her wolf. For twenty years, she’s been sitting in the dark with your fire trapped in her marrow. She’s Frost-Locked.”
“That doesn’t make sense!” Reed challenged, his voice rising in fierce, desperate defiance as he tightened his grip on me.
“What about Nadia? Nadia is our pack doctor—she’s treated dormant purges across five different bonds!
She has the clinical protocols! I’ve triggered her Heat and I can anchor it by—”
“No. You can’t,” Maren said, voice flat.
“Hold on,” A deep voice boomed down the aisle, rough and protective as a bulkhead door.
Through the haze over my eyes, I watched the massive hotshot take a heavy step forward, gripping an overhead stanchion with a white-knuckled fist.
“Del,” Reed warned.
“Reed’s right,” Del said. “Nadia drilled the protocol into every single one of us on the crew. When Brann pulled Wren through her First Shift, when Santos held Nell through the fever—mating was the only thing that anchored their souls! The Alpha takes the Heat, claims his mate, and anchors her body to his seed, or she burns up from the inside out!”
“She’s right on the edge, Maren.” Another wolf stepped up beside Del, his jaw tight, his hands gripping his turnout harness with nervous precision. “Every rescue protocol we have says Reed consummates the bond or his mate dies. If Reed doesn’t claim her, how does her body survive?”
“Quiet your mouths, the lot of you!” Maren snapped, her sharp eyes cutting across the two broad-shouldered hotshots like a whip.
“Listen to me with your ears and not your pack drill! Wren, Nell, Genny, Kaia, Sloane—they had living wolves sleeping inside their ribs! Their vessels were whole! Your hotshots were there to catch the beast, take the lightning, and ground the current. Avaline’s wolf isn’t in her ribs—she’s stranded miles away across a river of poison! ”
“No!” Reed’s hands shook violently where they cupped my frost-bitten face. “The mate bond anchored them through the fever! If I take Avaline, if I anchor her to my seed, the Founding fire will flush the poison out of her system—”
“You touch her to claim her and you will bury her before sunset, Superintendent,” Maren snarled, her chapped hand smacking Reed’s wrist hard enough to make the diamond plating ring.
“If you try to siphon off her Heat in the physical world—that surge of fire will detonate the Frost-Lock in her marrow. You will rupture every blood vessel in her chest. Her heart will burst like frozen glass. Do you understand me? No claiming. Or you will murder your mate with your own hands.”
The words hit the cabin like a blast of cold.
Through the fog blurring my vision, I watched Del freeze, his massive frame going utterly rigid in the aisle, the color draining from his weathered face.
The other wolf stared at Reed, his dark eyes widening in pure, sickening horror as the reality landed.
The rest of his pack lowered their heads against the bulkhead, an unnatural, suffocating stillness falling over the unmated hotshots.
Even through the icy lethargy dragging my brain under, my mind catalogued their faces: the sorrow, the grief, the realization of what this meant.
They looked at Reed not just as their Alpha, but as a brother who had spent twenty agonizing years carrying a cold hearth—lighting a solitary fire on a ridge, praying to a moon that never answered.
And now, having breached a fortress and torn through bedrock to find the woman whose absence had broken him, he was holding her dying, shivering body against his bare chest, smelling her Heat filling the cabin, feeling every primal instinct in his blood scream to claim her...
while knowing that a single touch of love would execute her on the spot.
A collective ache rippled through the hotshots—the phantom resonance of unmated wolves witnessing a fated bond twisted into an instrument of absolute torture.
I could feel that torture living in the very meat of my own body.
Down in my core, the proximity of Reed’s fevered skin was driving the primitive mechanics of the bond into a frenzy.
A slick, agonizingly ache pooled between my thighs, my hips twitching with an involuntary need to grind against my mate’s hard thigh.
The hard ridge of his arousal pressed against my hip was a maddening promise that my starving flesh desperately wanted to yield to.
My body was begging for his mouth, for his hands on my hips, for the devastating fullness of his cock to end two decades of solitary confinement.
It was pure cruelty. To finally be in his arms, to feel the heat of the man I had kept a seat for through years of hell, while knowing that crossing the line into physical consummation would shatter my body from the inside out.
“Reed,” I whispered, my teeth clicking together so violently that the word fragmented. “She’s telling the truth. I can feel the ice in my veins.”
Reed’s jaw locked so hard the muscles along his neck stood out like cables.
His knuckles turned bloodless against the wool blanket as he fought the roaring monster inside his chest, holding his massive hips an agonizing fraction of an inch from mine, denying himself the one thing his entire existence had been built to take.