Chapter 20 A Spectacular Failure of Safeguards #2
The dark behind the half-shifted wolf moved. No, not moved. Opened. Ian came through it without a sound.
The wolf holding my throat had one second to hear him.
One.
Then Ian hit him from behind, and the world became blood.
Not a clean fight. Not a heroic rescue with moonlight and music.
Ian didn’t shove him away from me and square up like a man.
He tore him off me with one clawed hand buried in the back of his neck and the other hooked under his jaw.
The half-shifted wolf made a choking sound, and Ian drove him face-first into the stone so hard the rock cracked.
I heard bone break.
Ian lifted him and did it again. The second impact sprayed blood across the wall.
The gray wolf lunged for Ian’s side, and Ian turned on it. I had seen Ian controlled. I had seen him dangerous. I had felt the wolf under his skin like a storm behind glass.
This was not that.
This was the storm after the glass had shattered.
He caught the gray wolf mid-leap. His body was half-shifted and wrong in the dark, larger than a man, black claws hooked through fur, mouth full of teeth too sharp for a human face. The gray wolf’s jaws snapped near his cheek. Ian didn’t dodge. He let the teeth cut him so he could get closer.
Then he opened the wolf from throat to belly. The sound it made was high and terrible.
I slapped one hand over my mouth because I was going to be sick, scream, or both.
The first wolf released my ankle and ran.
Ian went after it.
I had never understood the phrase “like an animal” until I saw something that made animals look merciful.
The fleeing wolf reached the hedge lane before Ian caught it.
I didn’t see all of what happened because the wall blocked part of the view, but I heard it.
The wet impact. The snarl cut short. A body hitting stone.
Then another sound, lower and thicker, that my mind refused to translate.
Silence followed.
My ears rang. My throat hurt where claws had held it. My side burned. My ankle throbbed inside my shoe. I tried to sit up and failed, sliding back against the wall with a gasp that turned into something dangerously close to crying.
Then Ian came back. He walked out of the hedge lane covered in blood. Some of it was his.
Most of it was not.
His shirt hung open in ribbons. His hands were claws. His mouth was red. His eyes were gold without a trace of human brown left in them. Blood dripped from his chin onto his chest, then down over the black lines of muscle and torn fabric.
He looked at the dead wolves. Then at me. The bond flooded with one word so huge it drowned thought.
Mine.
I went still. Ian crossed the ground toward me.
“Ian!” Ronan shouted from somewhere beyond the course.
Ian didn’t slow.
“Ian,” Ronan ordered, and this time the Alpha power in his voice struck the air hard enough that even I felt it.
Ian didn’t even look at him. That was when I understood. He was gone. Not angry. Not mostly wolf. Not half-listening under all that blood.
Gone.
Ronan could not reach him. Sava could not reach him. The pack could not reach the weapon they had spent years teaching to kill on command, because someone had put me under teeth and now every command in him had burned down to one law.
Mine.
Ian dropped over me so fast I flinched. His hands hit the stone on either side of my body, claws scraping grooves into rock.
He caged me against the wall, chest heaving, head lowered near my injured shoulder.
Blood dripped onto the ground beside my hip.
His breath came rough and hot against my throat.
I could not move, every primitive part of my body knew exactly how fast he could make me dead if he forgot who I was.
“Ian,” I whispered.
The wolf snarled.
Not at me.
At the space around me. At footsteps. At Ronan getting closer. At Sava moving along the edge of the creek bed with her bag. At every living thing that dared exist near my blood.
Ronan stopped twenty feet away.
His voice changed. “Ian, stand down.”
The snarl that answered him made every guard along the wall lift a weapon.
Ian’s head dipped lower. His nose dragged along the side of my throat, not gentle, not sexual, not even fully aware. Scenting. Counting my pulse. Checking life in the only language the wolf still understood.
His mouth opened near the bite and my entire body locked.
“No,” I said.
The word was small. Too small. His teeth hovered over the place he had marked me.
The bond was not warm now. It was a wildfire. Terror, protection, rage, blood, want, pain, all of it moving too fast for me to separate. His need to hold. My need to survive. His need to prove.
I lifted my shaking hand.
Ronan said, “Cassie, don’t.”
For once, I ignored the Alpha because apparently almost dying had given me a rich new disrespect for authority.
I put my hand on Ian’s face. He jerked as if the touch hurt.
“Ian,” I said again, stronger this time. “Look at me.”
His eyes stayed fixed on my throat.
“No.” My fingers slid against blood and skin and the sharp edge of his jaw. “Not the blood. Me.”
He trembled over me. That was somehow worse than stillness.
“I’m alive,” I said. “You found me.”
A rough sound tore out of him. The bond surged, and for a second I saw what he saw. My body under claws. My blood on stones. The wolf’s hand at my throat.
Too late, too late, almost too late.
My breath broke. Under all that rage, Ian was terrified.
“I’m alive,” I said again, and my voice cracked on it. “Ian, I’m alive. You found me. Now come back.”
His claws dug deeper into the stone.
“I need you,” I whispered. “Not the thing they made out of you. You.”
That reached him. The gold in his eyes flickered like something under deep water.
His mouth closed. His breathing changed.
The shape of his hands shifted first, claws dragging back through skin with a sound that made him shudder.
His shoulders followed, muscle and bone fighting their way toward human.
He didn’t move off me. I didn’t ask him to. Not yet. I kept my hand on his face and felt him come back by degrees, each one brutal.
His eyes found mine.
“Cassie,” he said.
My name sounded ruined in his mouth.
“There,” I whispered, because if I said anything else I might fall apart. “That’s better.”
Behind him, Sava released a breath that sounded like it had cost her. Ronan didn’t move. Neither did the guards. Everyone on that course had just seen the truth. Ian Holloway, pack enforcer, Alpha’s brother, the weapon they aimed when law failed, had gone somewhere no Alpha order could follow.
And I had called him back.
Ian’s hand moved toward my side, then stopped before touching the blood. “May I?”
The question, in that voice, after all that violence, almost broke me.
“This feels like a weird time for manners,” I said.
His eyes stayed on mine. “May I?”
“Yes.”
He pressed his palm carefully over the wound.
I hissed. “Enthusiasm, Ian.”
“I know.”
“Then consider applying less of it.”
A sound moved through his chest. Not quite a laugh. Not quite a sob. Something alive enough that I held onto it.
Sava approached slowly, hands visible, gaze locked on Ian like he was a bomb with a pulse.
“I need to treat her,” she said.
Ian’s body tightened over mine.
I touched his cheek again. “Let her.”
The words went into him through the bond. His jaw flexed. Then, inch by inch, he shifted enough for Sava to reach me.
He didn’t leave or uncage me fully, but he let her touch the wound.
For the moment, that was civilization.