His Regret: I Am Not Your Mate

Chapter 11

Chapter 11

Flora's POV

Chaos broke out around us in every direction, wolves crashing through the trees, warriors shouting orders, arrows cutting through the dark like flashes of lightning. I'd never seen a real battlefield before. I'd treated the aftermath a hundred times, held shaking hands and steadied racing hearts long after the fighting stopped, but I'd never been inside it, never felt the ground itself shake with the force of bodies colliding.

I stuck close behind Eric, my hand fisted in the back of his shirt without even realizing I'd grabbed hold of him, my whole body trembling with a fear I couldn't push down no matter how hard I tried.

"Eric!" Aiden's voice cut through the noise, sharp with command. "Get her out! Protect the Soother first, that's an order!"

Eric hesitated. I felt it in the stiffness of his back, the way his whole body seemed to strain toward the fight instead of away from it, every instinct in him built for staying and killing, not retreating.

"Eric!" Aiden barked again.

"Understood," Eric said, low, and then his hand closed around my wrist and he was pulling me hard through the trees, cutting a path away from the worst of it, his blade flashing out twice to clear rogues from our way without ever slowing down.

We ran. My lungs burned, branches tore at my sleeves, and behind us I could hear snarling getting closer instead of farther, at least three rogues breaking off from the main fight to chase the easier prey instead of the harder one.

Eric spotted the cave first, a dark gash in the hillside half hidden behind brush, and he shoved me toward it without ceremony.

"In. Now."

I scrambled inside, my hands scraping against damp stone, and he followed a second later, already dragging branches across the opening behind us, working fast and silent until the entrance disappeared behind a screen of leaves.

The cave swallowed us in darkness and cold. Water dripped somewhere deeper inside. The air smelled like wet stone and earth, and the walls pressed close on every side, close enough that I could have reached out and touched both at once.

My chest went tight.

It wasn't the cave. Not really. It was the dark, the closeness, the way the walls seemed to lean in around me the exact way they had back in that room, the one with no windows, the one where Nathan used to lock me in for days at a time while the rats came creeping.

My breath started coming too fast. I clutched my satchel to my chest like it might hold me together, my whole body shaking now, and I hated myself for it, hated that after everything, after Nathan was so far behind me, this was still what broke me open.

Eric finished with the branches and turned around. I saw him take in the sight of me, shaking in the dark, and something shifted across his face, some understanding I hadn't expected him to reach for.

He didn't say anything. I thought he might, watched his mouth open like the words were right there, but whatever he meant to say, he swallowed it back down.

Instead he pulled off his jacket, thin as it was, and spread it carefully across the damp stone floor. He gestured toward it, silent, an offering instead of a command for once.

I pressed my lips together and stayed standing.

"Sit," he said, quiet.

"I'm fine standing."

"Flora." He said my name like it cost him something to keep his voice gentle. "Sit down."

"Why," I said, my voice coming out sharper than I meant, my fear curdling into something easier to hold onto, something with teeth. "So you can feel like the noble Gamma who protected the useless Soother? Save it."

Something flickered across his face, hurt maybe, though it vanished fast behind that familiar wall he always threw up.

"At a time like this," he said, evenly, "I have a duty to protect this pack's Soother. That includes making sure you don't freeze to death on wet stone while we wait this out." He paused, and something almost sheepish crept into his voice, unfamiliar on him. "And besides. I might need you to comfort me again before the night's through. Can't have you catching your death before you're useful to me."

I stared at him, torn between fury at the word useful and something else entirely, something that noticed the careful way he'd draped his jacket instead of just tossing it at my feet, something that noticed he hadn't looked away from me once since we ducked into this cave, not even when I was shaking hard enough that my teeth clicked together.

"Fine," I said finally, and lowered myself onto the jacket, more because my legs were starting to give out than because he'd convinced me of anything.

He settled a short distance away, close enough to watch the cave mouth, far enough that his shoulder didn't brush mine, though I felt the warmth of him anyway in that cramped, freezing dark.

Outside, faintly, I could still hear shouting, the distant clash of the fight still raging somewhere beyond the trees. My hands wouldn't stop trembling. I pressed them flat against my satchel and focused on breathing, in and out, the way I'd talked a hundred warriors through their own worst moments, except now there was no one steadying me but myself.

Eric watched the entrance in silence for a long while. Then, without looking at me, he spoke again, quieter this time, almost like he wasn't sure he wanted the words to actually leave his mouth.

"You're shaking worse than the cold explains," he said. "What is it about this place."

I didn't answer right away. The dark pressed in around us, patient, waiting, and somewhere deep inside my chest, old memories scratched at the door I'd kept locked for years.

"It's nothing," I said finally, echoing the exact words he'd given me not so long ago, and I watched something like understanding pass behind his eyes, like he recognized the lie because he'd told it himself.

Neither of us pushed further. We sat there instead, in the cold and the dark, listening to the fight rage on somewhere beyond the leaves, both of us guarding secrets neither one was ready to hand over.