Chapter 3
1087 Words
I didn't run. Not yet.
Whatever was breathing in the tree line hadn't moved either, and a thing that was only hungry didn't wait like that. It watched. It measured. I stood still and let my eyes adjust, taking in what I could. One set of prints was closest to me, deep on the outside edge and favoring one front leg. Injured, maybe. Or simply heavy.
Then I heard a second breath to my left.
A third came from farther back.
Three. At least three.
I started backing toward the road, slow and careful, the same way you'd back away from a dog that hadn't decided whether you were a threat or a meal.
"She really did leave," a voice said from somewhere in the dark, low and amused. "Told you she would. Word travels faster than she walks."
That stopped me harder than the eyes had.
She.
Not it. Not something.
They knew who I was.
Someone inside Ashgrove's walls had known I was leaving before I'd finished packing and had known it well enough to pass the information along.
"Who sent you?" I asked.
Nobody answered.
Three shapes burst from the trees at once, already shifted, already moving, and I stopped thinking in questions.
I went for the low ground, forcing the nearest one into an awkward downhill stride. When he lunged, I stepped toward him instead of away, driving my shoulder into ribs that felt weaker than they should have. He crashed into the frozen earth.
Three seconds.
That was all it bought me.
The second one hit me from the side. Claws opened my forearm. I twisted free and drove my knee into his joint. It buckled, and he dropped.
The first was already back on his feet.
Something raked across my side.
The pain arrived half a second after I understood how bad the wound was.
I pressed my palm against it and reached for the only thing I had left.
Resonance didn't ask whether I had the strength to spare. It took what was there, pulling heat from muscle and bone I couldn't afford to lose. The wound began to knit, too slowly and at too great a cost. My pulse thinned and raced at the same time, and gray crept into the edges of my vision.
One of them lunged again.
I rolled away.
My hand struck the ground, and moonlight caught the strip of leather wrapped around his wrist.
Three curved lines meeting at a point.
The same symbol I'd noticed before.
I didn't know what it meant.
I remembered it anyway.
I was still on one knee when everything changed.
The three attackers went still.
All at once.
Not fear exactly.
Recalculation.
One of them shifted backward, weight coming off his front paws.
"Ashwood," he said.
The name came out carefully, like it might still bite him.
A shape emerged from the darkness behind me.
He didn't hurry.
That was what I noticed first.
He wasn't rushing toward a fight he needed to win. He walked like the outcome had already been decided.
"Leave."
One word.
No roar. No raised voice.
Nothing about it was a request.
They didn't leave.
One of them lunged at him.
I barely had time to follow the movement.
Kade moved once.
The attack ended almost as quickly as it began.
There was no display of strength, no wasted motion. He simply made the right decision at the right moment, drove the attacker down, and turned before the second could reach him.
A claw caught his forearm.
He didn't even look at the cut.
Seconds later, two of them were down.
The third bolted into the trees.
I expected Kade to follow.
He didn't.
He turned toward me instead.
"Don't," I said when he crouched an arm's length away.
My voice came out thinner than I wanted.
"You're bleeding."
"I know."
"Let me see."
"Don't touch me."
He stopped.
Just stopped.
His hand remained half raised, but he didn't reach for me.
"I'm not going to hurt you," he said. "But you're going to bleed out arguing about it."
That was probably true.
I was cold in a way that had nothing to do with the weather.
"Fine."
That was the whole negotiation.
He put two fingers against the side of my throat.
The second his skin touched mine, something detonated.
It wasn't romantic.
It wasn't warm.
It felt like being struck by something enormous and silent, a full-body recognition that arrived before my mind could catch up. My pulse thundered in my ears. Something deep inside me strained toward him, instinctive and absolute, like a compass needle finding north it had never known existed.
He recoiled as though he'd touched a live wire.
"No."
Not to me.
To himself.
His jaw tightened. His eyes widened for a fraction of a second before the control returned.
"What was that?" I asked.
He didn't answer.
He was staring at his own hand like it belonged to somebody else.
I felt it too, whatever it was, thrumming behind my sternum, unwanted and enormous.
The first clear thought that cut through the pain, the blood loss, and the cold wasn't mate.
It wasn't anything soft.
Absolutely not.
I'd just walked out of one house where a family decided what happened to my life without asking me.
I wasn't doing that again for a stranger in the dark, whatever his wolf thought it recognized.
"Whatever that was," I said, "it doesn't mean anything."
He looked at me for a long moment.
"No," he said finally. "It doesn't."
He didn't argue.
Somehow, that unsettled me more than an argument would have.
"You need a healer," he said. "You're not walking back to Ashgrove like this, and there's nothing on this road for another six miles."
"I'm not going anywhere with you."
"I'm not asking you to trust me."
His voice remained level.
"I'm telling you that you won't survive the night out here alone."
I opened my mouth to argue.
The ground tilted sideways.
He caught me before I hit it, one arm under my shoulders, careful even as my body went limp. I felt him hesitate for half a breath, as though some part of him still expected me to push him away.
I couldn't.
That impossible pull surged again where his arm held me, sharper this time, spreading through my chest as the darkness closed in.
The last thing I heard was his voice.
Low.
And for the first time, genuinely unsteady.
"What are you?”
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