THE BROKEN BOND

HUNTED

The bullet grazes my shoulder, and I shift.

My wolf explodes from my skin mid-run—all fangs and instinct and pure survival—as the hunters close in. The paranormal wards shimmer ahead like prison walls. The ravine behind me is a two-hundred-foot drop. And I have approximately three seconds to decide which death I prefer.

I choose neither.

I leap.

The fall is longer than it should be. My bones scream as I hit the bottom, the impact driving air from my lungs and white-hot pain through my ribs. Something cracks—collarbone maybe, or ribs, or both. My left leg doesn't want to cooperate.

I don't have time to assess the damage.

The hunters won't follow immediately—humans are cowards that way, won't risk a fall they might not survive—but they'll find another route down. They always do. I push myself up, bite back a scream, and hobble deeper into the ravine.

The air changes here. Thicker. It tastes like old stone and something else—something that makes my wolf sit up and take notice despite the pain, despite the fear.

Magic.

Old magic. The kind that predates human civilization, that's been soaked into the earth so long it's become part of the landscape itself. There's a cave mouth about thirty feet ahead, the kind of opening that doesn't show up on any map, that requires supernatural senses to even perceive.

I'm half-wolf, half-broken, and completely out of options.

I stumble toward it.

Inside the cave, the darkness is absolute. My wolf eyes adjust slowly—there's nothing here to see anyway. Just rock and shadow and the soft drip of water echoing off stone.

I collapse maybe twenty feet in, my back against the cold wall, breathing ragged and painful. My ribs are definitely broken. My leg is swelling fast. The cuts on my face are bleeding. I look like I've been through a war.

I've been through worse.

"You can't keep running forever," I mutter to the darkness, to myself, to the universe or whatever's listening. "Sooner or later, they'll catch up. Sooner or later, this ends."

As if in response to my surrender, a sound echoes deeper in the cave. Not water. Not wind.

Footsteps.

My wolf goes rigid. For a second—just a fraction of a heartbeat—I think it's the hunters. But the footsteps are wrong. They're too steady, too assured. They move with the kind of confident grace that comes from someone who owns the ground they walk on.

Someone supernatural.

Someone powerful.

A figure emerges from the deeper darkness, and even through my pain-fogged brain, even through the shadows and the distance, I recognize what he is. The way he moves. The way the air changes around him. The way my wolf, battered and scared and desperate, looks up with something that might be recognition.

Alpha.

Not just any alpha. The kind of alpha that makes lesser wolves want to submit on sight.

"Well," he says, and his voice is smooth as whiskey and twice as dangerous, "this is unexpected."

I push myself up on my elbows, refusing to cower even as my body screams in protest. "If you're here to help them, get it over with."

The man steps closer, and now I can make out his features. Dark hair, sharp jaw, eyes that are gold-flecked in the shadows. Mid-thirties, maybe. Built like someone who's spent the last decade learning how to hurt people.

He looks at me like I'm a puzzle he's trying to solve.

"Who's chasing you?" he asks.

"People who want something I won't give them."

"Cryptic." He tilts his head slightly. "I like that. Less boring than most rogues I encounter."

Rogue. That's what they call wolves like me. Unattached, unmated, unclaimed. Outside the pack hierarchy. Disposable.

"Are you going to help them, or are you going to leave me alone?" I ask, not bothering to hide the exhaustion in my voice. And the fear. Let him see the fear. Fear is honest.

The man smiles. It's not a warm expression.

"I'm going to do neither," he says. "I'm going to take you with me."

"Like hell you—"

He moves faster than my eyes can follow. One second he's twenty feet away, the next he's knelt down beside me, his hand gently cupping my broken ribs with a touch that somehow doesn't hurt despite the injury.

"Easy," he murmurs. "You're in no condition to argue."

My wolf, despite every instinct screaming at me to run, despite every lesson learned in seven years of solitude, leans into that touch.

"Who are you?" I whisper.

"Someone with answers to questions you don't even know you're asking yet," he says. And then, before I can respond: "My name is Kael. And you, Isla Thorne, are about to become very important to my world."

The world spins.

Then everything goes black.