Bound to the Enemy Alpha

CHAPTER TWO

JANET

He weighs more than any man has a right to.

I've been dragging him for what feels like an hour but is probably closer to fifteen minutes, stopping every thirty seconds to adjust my grip and listen for sounds from the direction of the house. My arms have passed the trembling stage and are now working on a deeper, more fundamental kind of exhaustion. My sandals are soaked through. At some point I bit down on my cheek hard enough to taste copper.

"I want you to know," I breathe into the dark, "that I had plans for tonight. Sitting quietly. That was the whole plan."

He says nothing. His head lolls against my shoulder.

I take the long way back, looping through the stand of birch trees that runs behind the property, avoiding the main path entirely. By the time the house comes into view, the carnival music has gone quiet. I freeze, my chest tightening.

Quiet means they're back.

I wait there for a long moment, my heart loud in my ears, watching the dark windows. No movement. No lamps lit. Maybe they came home tired and went straight to bed. Maybe luck, for once, is running in my direction.

I push the back door open with my shoulder and ease us both through.

The house holds its breath around me.

I move through the kitchen slowly, testing each floorboard before I commit my weight to it, keeping close to the wall where the boards are less likely to flex. He's semi-conscious now, I can feel the small, uncoordinated movements of a body trying to help without quite knowing how which makes him harder to manage, not easier.

My room is at the end of the hall.

Ten steps. Eight. Five.

I get him through the door and lower him onto my bed as carefully as I can, which is not very carefully at all. He makes a sharp sound and I clap a hand over my own mouth by instinct, as if I'm the one who made the noise. For three seconds I don't breathe at all.

Silence.

I let myself breathe again.

In the lamplight, the damage is worse than I thought.

The wound in his side is deep, the kind that doesn't come from a fall or an accident. Someone did this deliberately. The blood has slowed but not stopped, and the fabric around it is stiff and dark. I wet a cloth from the pitcher on my dresser and kneel beside the bed, pressing it against the wound with steady pressure the way I once watched the healer do for my father's hand.

The moment the cloth makes contact, his hand shoots up and closes around my wrist.

I don't scream,barely.

His grip is iron. Not the grip of someone barely clinging to consciousness. The grip of someone who has woken to danger so many times that the reflex runs deeper than thought.

His eyes open.

Up close, they are extraordinary not a single shade of dark but many, like the center of something burning. They move across my face with an alertness that doesn't belong to someone who just lost that much blood.

"Who are you?" His voice is low and rough-edged, scraped over gravel.

"My name is Janet." I keep very still, acutely aware of his grip on my wrist. "You were injured. I brought you inside."

"Where." Not a question. A demand.

I hesitate for half a beat. "Fearlock territory."

The change moves through him like weather. Something behind his eyes goes cold and careful, and the quality of his stillness shifts from injured-man to something I don't have a word for.

"You should not have done that," he says quietly.

"You would have bled out before morning."

"That may have been preferable."

I stare at him. He stares back. Neither of us blinks.

"I didn't ask for your opinion on my choices," I say finally. "I'm trying to keep you alive. If you'd like to argue about it, you can do that once I've finished stopping the bleeding."

Something shifts in his expression so small I almost miss it. Not quite softening. More like re-evaluation.

He releases my wrist.

I press the cloth back against the wound and he goes still again, watching the ceiling. I'm starting to get my breathing under control when I hear it: the unmistakable creak of the floorboard outside my door. The second one from the left, the one I always avoid.

My whole body goes cold.

"Someone is awake," he says, very quietly. He's already read it on my face.

"Under the bed." I pull back the hanging edge of the blanket. "Now. Don't make a sound."

He moves faster than a man with a wound like his should be able to. One second he's on the mattress; the next he's beneath it, and I have just enough time to turn toward the door with the cloth in my hands and arrange my face into something resembling calm.

The handle turns.

Julia fills the doorway in her nightgown, her hair loose around her shoulders, her eyes moving through the room with the slow, deliberate attention of someone looking for exactly the thing she suspects she'll find. Her gaze travels across the floor, over my rumpled bedding, and lands on me.

"You're awake," she says. Her voice is neutral, which is somehow worse than suspicious.

"Couldn't sleep." I hold up the damp cloth as evidence. "I spilled water getting a drink. I was cleaning it up."

A lie but a small, verifiable one. The pitcher is out. The cloth is wet. My eyes are dry.

Julia doesn't move from the doorway.

Her gaze drops to the floor near the bed. Then back to my face. The silence between us stretches long enough that I become aware of my own heartbeat, each one taking too long.

Then, from beneath the bed, I hear it.

The smallest possible sound less than a breath, more than nothing. The compressed exhale of someone who is injured and trying very hard not to make a sound and failing by the thinnest possible margin.

Julia's eyes narrow.

"What was that?"

I hold my face very still and think, in the fraction of a second I have, about what the rest of my life looks like if she crosses this room and looks under that bed.

I think about the man beneath it wounded, enemy, impossibly dangerous and the fact that whatever comes next, I already made my choice when I dragged him out of the forest.

"I didn't hear anything," I say.

Julia takes one step into the room.