BITE ME, MY ALPHA

CHAPTER FIVE

Dominic’s pov

The first thing I felt was the cold, and the second was the pain.

It sat on my side like a hot blade someone had forgotten to pull out. I dragged in a breath and smelled hay, dust, old wood, and something herbal and bitter pressed against my skin. My body felt wrong. Lighter, and softer around the edges. No fur. No claws. Just bare skin against a rough cloth, and the dull, humiliating understanding that I had shifted back without meaning to.

Then I heard the breathing behind me, quick and shallow, the kind that belongs to something about to bolt.

I turned my head, and a girl stood in the doorway of the barn with a wrapped bundle clutched to her chest and her eyes wide enough to swallow the moonlight. She was young, her hair braided into two and her chest was rising and falling so fast I could almost hear her heart.

"Don't scream," I said. My voice came out rough. I watched her flinch.

"You're..." She stopped. Her gaze dropped, flew back to my face, and her cheeks burned red. "You have no clothes."

"I noticed."

She took a step back, her hand found the handle of a pitchfork leaning against the wall. She raised it with both hands. "Stay where you are. I don't know who you are or what you did with my animal, but I'll use this."

Something in my chest almost laughed, which was strange, because nothing about this was funny. I was bleeding out in a stranger's barn, miles from home, and a girl half my size was threatening me with a farm tool.

"Your animal," I said, slowly, "is the only thing I did anything with." Her brows pulled together. "What does that mean?"

"Look at the bed you made." I nodded toward the nest of cloth and dried wood beside me, the sheet still dented where I'd been lying. "Look at the bandage. You wrapped it yourself."

She looked. The sheet, the wound, the heat of the dent in the cloth. Her grip on the pitchfork loosened an inch.

"No," she whispered. "No, that's not possible."

"It's more possible than you think."

"Those are stories. Old stories for children." She shook her head hard, backing away until her shoulder hit the doorframe. "My father never wanted us to speak of them."

That caught my attention. Most humans didn't know. The ones who did never spoke of it, so why would a poor farmer's daughter have a father who forbade the subject? I filed the thought away.

"What's your name?" I asked.

"Why?"

"Because I'd like to know who saved my life."

She hesitated for a long moment. "Lyra."

"Lyra." The name felt strange in my mouth. "I won't hurt you. I couldn't, even if I wanted to. Look at me."

She did. Truly looked this time, past the nakedness and the fear, at the dark, ugly burn on my side and the blood that had soaked through her careful bandage. Her face changed. The fear didn't leave, but something stronger rose over it. She put the pitchfork down.

"That's silver, isn't it?" she asked, and then looked startled at herself. "I don't know why I said that. I just... the wound looks like it's eating you."

"It is."

"It's not closing."

"It should have closed within minutes. It hasn't." I tried to push myself up and the world tilted, and a sound escaped my throat that I would never admit to making. "Silver doesn't just hurt us. It slows everything."

She was beside me before I could finish. She knelt, set the cloth bundle down, and reached for the old sheet, which she pulled over my hips without quite looking at me, still pink to the tips of her ears.

"Hold still," she said. "I'm going to clean it again."

"Lyra."

"I said hold still."

I did.

She worked with a quiet focus that surprised me, crushing leaves between her fingers, mixing them into a paste with water from a small bowl. Her hands were rough, callused in places a girl her age shouldn't have calluses. The first touch of the herbs against my side made me hiss through my teeth. The second touch made me go very still.

It wasn't the medicine. It was her fingers on my skin, and a heat that bloomed beneath them. Warm and slow and entirely unrelated to the wound. My wolf, which had been dragging itself through the dark all day, lifted its head.

I clenched my jaw. I had no business feeling anything of the kind. I was bleeding, hunted, and engaged to a woman I'd never met, and my body had picked this exact moment to lose its mind over a young lady smelling of hay and wild mint.

"Am I hurting you?" she asked, glancing up.

"No."

"You made a face."

"It's the medicine."

"Liar," she said softly, and went back to work. I almost smiled.

When she finished wrapping the wound, she sat back on her heels and wiped her palms on her skirt. Then she remembered the bundle, unwrapped the cloth, and held out two pieces of cold chicken like a girl offering a treaty.

"I brought this for the animal," she said. "I suppose it's for you now."

I took it. I hadn't realized how hungry I was until the smell hit me, and I ate the first piece in three bites. She watched, a flicker of something close to amusement tugging at the corner of her mouth.

"That was my family's lunch tomorrow," she said.

"Then I owe your family a lunch."

"You owe me an explanation." She folded her arms. "Who did this to you? Who would shoot a man with silver?"

The chicken suddenly tasted like ash.

I thought of the trail, and the way the arrows had come before I'd even had time to turn. I thought of the ambushers waiting at the exact bend in the path I would have ridden home on. Nobody had known where I was going. I hadn't known where I was going. I'd stormed out of the palace with nothing but anger and a horse. And still they had been waiting.

"I don't know," I said, and the lie sat in my mouth, because it wasn't a lie so much as a question I wasn't ready to ask. "But whoever it was knew where I would be."

She studied my face with a quiet that unsettled me more than any threat. "That frightens you."

"Nothing frightens me."

"That's a lie too."

I opened my mouth to argue, and nothing came out. Nobody spoke to me like that. Not my father, not my men, not even Silas.

"Lyra," I said, and her eyes lifted. "I need you to tell no one. Not your mother, not your father, not the village. If whoever did this learns I'm alive and here, they won't stop at me. They'll burn this place to the ground to finish the job."

Her face went pale. "You're asking me to hide you."

"I'm asking you to trust me."

"I don't know you."

"No," I said. "But I'm asking anyway."

She looked toward the barn door. Then back at me, and I could see her counting something, not her options so much as the cost of each one. It struck me that this girl was used to counting costs.

"I have six days," she said quietly, almost to herself.

"Six days until what?"

Before she could answer, a voice carried across the yard, thin and sharp in the cold night air. "Lyra? Lyra, is that you out there?"

Her whole body went rigid. "That's my mother."

Footsteps crunched against the frozen ground, coming closer. A lantern bobbed past the gaps in the barn wall, throwing long stripes of gold across the hay.

"The loft," Lyra whispered, already hauling me by the arm. I had barely gotten to my feet, the sheet clutched around me and the world spinning, when she shoved the nest of cloth out of sight and pushed the empty chicken wrapper into my hand. "Go. Quietly. Please."

I climbed, every movement pulling at the wound, and flattened myself in the dark above the beams just as the barn door creaked open. Below me, through the slats, I watched Lyra smooth her skirt, drag in one steadying breath, and turn toward the light with a smile so convincing I almost believed it myself.

"Lyra? What are you doing out here so late?"

"It's the goat, Mother," she said, her voice light, her hands trembling at her sides where only I could see them. "She's sick. I think I'll need to stay with her a few nights."

I lay in the dark with the smell of hay in my lungs, listening to a girl I barely knew lie to protect a stranger, and for the first time in my life, I had no idea what came next.