The Luna's Time Loop

What He smells

His hand stayed over my mouth, and even if he had lifted it, I had no answer for him. The truth was too big to fit into words, and the few words I did have would only get me killed faster.

The rain came down harder, ticking against the leaves overhead, running cold off the ends of my hair and down inside my collar. His chest was a wall at my back, warm through the wet cloth, and his heartbeat was slow where mine was trying to c***k a rib. I was pinned between a stranger and a tree in enemy woods, and the part I couldn't make sense of was that it was the calmest I had felt since I woke.

He turned me by the shoulders and set my back against the nearest trunk. Bark bit through the wet cloak. He didn't crowd me the way Jax always did, all heat and demand and needing something back. He just looked, close and unhurried, rain sliding off a face that had been carved out of hard weather.

His eyes caught what little light came through and threw it back gold at the rims. There was a wolf sitting right behind them, close to the surface, studying me the same way the man did. Part of me knew I should be afraid of that. The rest of me was still drowning in the quiet his hands had given me, and I hated how badly I didn't want him to let go.

He was dressed for the woods, not for a court, dark leathers gone black with rain, a blade at his hip he hadn't bothered to draw. He didn't need it. I had felt how fast he moved. Whatever he was, he had decided I wasn't worth steel, and that stung in a way I didn't want to look at.

His gaze dropped to the clasp at my throat, the silver crescent of my house, and his jaw went tight.

"Silverwood." He said it low, like the word tasted of something he wanted to spit into the mud. "You're a long way from your walls, little ghost."

I pushed against his grip. He let my mouth go, but his arm stayed banded across me, holding me to the tree without any effort at all.

"Let me go," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I felt.

"You crossed onto my land." He still didn't move. "You don't give orders here."

His land. Enemy ground. I had walked into it on purpose, and now the rain was the only thing between us, and I could feel every place his body met mine.

Then he went still. His head tipped a fraction, and I watched him breathe me in.

The gold at the edge of his eyes bled wider. Whatever he caught off my wet skin, it changed him. His whole body drew toward me like a hook had set behind his ribs and someone was pulling the line.

I felt the change in him against my body, the way his breath went ragged, the way his hand flexed at my waist like he was fighting to keep it where it was. Whatever he smelled, it was doing to him what his touch was doing to me. It was pulling something up out of the deep.

"What is that," he said, rough.

He leaned in until his breath stirred the hair at my temple, and he dragged the scent of me in deep, and a sound broke out of his chest that was more animal than man.

"You smell like death," he said against my ear. "Cold ash. Ozone. Rain in a burned forest."

Another breath, slower this time, and the arm across me tightened.

"It's the best thing I have ever smelled," he said. "And I want to tear the throat out of whatever put it on you."

His voice had gone to gravel. I could feel the growl of it through my back, through my ribs, low enough to live in the bone. No one had ever wanted anything the way he seemed to want the ghost of my deaths, and I didn't know whether to be sick or to lean into it, and that not-knowing scared me worse than his teeth ever could.

It was my deaths. The scent he was losing his mind over was every silver ending I had ever woken from, and I could no more explain that than I could explain the frost in my bones.

I should have run. His grip had loosened enough that maybe, for one second, I could have slipped it. But the moment I imagined pulling away from his skin, the memory of the cold rose up in me, the frost in the marrow and the blade behind my ribs, and my body simply refused. It wanted to stay exactly where the pain wasn't.

"You're not what you're pretending to be," he said. "Princesses don't smell like graves."

"You don't know anything about me."

"I know you're shaking." His voice dropped. "And it stopped the second I put my hands on you."

I had no answer for that either.

He watched me not answer, and something in the set of his shoulders eased, like the silence told him more than a lie would have.

"You're afraid of the wrong thing," he said. "You keep bracing for me to hurt you. I'm not the one who's going to."

I wanted to tell him he was right, and that the one who would was three walls away, warm in a bed, smiling in his sleep. I said nothing.

A voice cut through the trees behind him.

"Commander."

A second wolf stood at the edge of the clearing, lean and scarred, his eyes moving between us and not liking what they found.

"We're not the only patrol out tonight," the scout said. "Silverwood's moving in the east woods. A lot of them, and fast."

Commander. The word landed and rearranged everything I thought I was looking at. This was not some scout who had caught a stray girl in the dark. This was the man who led the packs my father's warriors had bled and died against, the name spoken like a curse in my own hall. The enemy commander, holding a Silverwood princess against a tree with one arm.

He should have taken me then. A hostage. A blade at the throat of an entire kingdom. I braced for it.

Instead he looked at me for a long moment, and then he did the last thing I expected. He stepped back and lifted his hands off me completely.

The cold came back all at once, like a door thrown open onto winter. The static tore up my arms. The phantom blade pushed in behind my ribs, and the thing in my throat closed like a fist, and my knees stopped holding my weight.

I went down.

He caught me before I hit the roots, one arm sweeping under me, hauling me back into his heat. The instant his skin found mine the pain cut off again, clean, and I sagged into him and breathed and hated that I needed it this much.

For a moment he just held me, both of us breathing, the rain loud in the leaves. I could feel his pulse under my cheek, steady, unbothered, and mine slowly falling into step with it whether I wanted it to or not.

"So it's me," he said, very quiet. Not a question.

He looked down at my fingers, white-knuckled around his forearm like it was the only solid thing left in the world.

"You come apart the second I let go."

"I don't need you," I said into his chest.

"Your body is calling me a liar."

He shifted his hold, careful now, taking more of my weight without being asked. It should have felt like a trap. It didn't. That was the trouble with him. Nothing about him felt like a trap, and I had spent long enough with Jax to know that the sweetest cages are the ones that never look like one.

Then a horn split the woods.

Long and low, from the Silverwood side, the note that meant a hunt was loose in the trees. And under it, closer than it had any right to be, a voice I knew better than my own carried through the rain.

"Izebel!"

Jax.

The enemy commander's arm tightened around me. The man who was going to put a silver blade in my chest was closing from the east, and the only thing holding me on my feet was the last set of hands in the world that should ever have been touching me.