Chapter 2: Mate
871 Words
Luka's Pov
The cold doesn't bother me.
I've been out here since midnight, same path, same trees, same snow coming down the way it's been coming down all week. I walk when I can't sleep and I can't sleep most nights so I know this path the way I know the back of my own hand. Every root, every turn, every place where the ground dips before the ravine.
I know the moment something is wrong before I know what it is.
I stop.
The air shifts. There's something underneath the pine and the cold and the wet earth — faint, threading through everything else, and I breathe it in once and go very still. My wolf goes still with me. For a second we are the same thing, pointed in the same direction, neither of us moving.
Blood.
And underneath the blood, something else entirely.
Something that has no business being on a mountain at two in the morning. Something warm and jasmine and — I breathe in again, slower this time, and whatever it is goes straight to my very being and stays there like it was always supposed to be there. Like I've been walking past an empty space my whole life and something just stepped into it.
I look down into the ravine.
For a second I don't move. I just look.
Then I'm going down the slope and I don't remember deciding to.
She's at the bottom.
On her back, one arm at a wrong angle, snow settling on her like it's been settling for a while. Her gear is torn in at least four places, a long split across the left shoulder, the right knee shredded, a section at her ribs where something sharp caught her on the way down. Thin lines of dark against the snow where the tears opened her skin. Nothing deep. But she went down hard and she went down fast.
I crouch beside her.
Her scent hits me like something I've been waiting for without knowing I was waiting.
My wolf surges and my eyes go to her face and I can't move. I just... look at her. Snow in her hair. Lashes against her cheek. The slow rise and fall of her chest. Something in me that has been quiet my entire life wakes up all at once and it is not quiet at all.
I have run this pack for seven years. I have made decisions that cost people things they didn't get back. I have never once not known what to do next.
I don't know what to do.
My wolf is clawing at me from the inside, I breathe and press two fingers to the side of her jaw.
Her pulse is faint.
She's hurt, I tell him. Stop.
He doesn't stop. He has been waiting longer than I have and he does not care about anything else right now.
I look at her face again and I think, without meaning to: where have you been.
I don't let it show. There is no one here to see it but I don't let it show anyway.
I slide my arm under her shoulders and I lift her and I start walking.
.
.
.
The estate is dark and quiet when I come through the side entrance.
I don't take the main hall.
I carry her up to the medical wing and I'm laying her down on the bed when I hear the soft sound of slippered feet on the floor behind me.
"Luka."
Mrs Aldea's voice is the same. Low and certain and not at all surprised by anything.
She comes to stand beside me and looks at the woman on the bed and then she looks at me, at the blood on my jacket, at my face.
"Go," she says.
I don't move immediately.
She puts one hand on my arm. Brief, and firm. "I'll take care of her," she says. "Go."
I go.
I stand in the hall.
The scent of her is still in my jacket.
I put my back against the wall. I think about the Kane file on my desk and the board meeting at seven and all the things that are waiting for me that I am supposed to care about.
At some point I realize I've been standing in the hall for twenty minutes.
I go to my study. I open the Kane file. I read the same page three times. I close it.
At five I get up and walk back down the hall and stand in the doorway of the medical wing. Her breathing is even. Mrs Aldea is in the chair beside the bed, knitting something small and yellow, and she looks up at me when I appear in the doorway and raises one eyebrow in the specific way that means she sees exactly what I'm doing and is choosing not to say anything about it.
I go back to my desk.
I can't sleep.
.
.
.
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At six forty the knock comes.
Mrs Aldea opens my study door and leans against the frame with her arms crossed.
"She's awake," she says.
Then, quieter "Luka." She paused. "She doesn't remember anything."
- Writer
