I stand. Check the restraints; wrists first, my fingers sliding under the cuffs, testing the gap between steel and skin.
My knuckles brush the inside of his wrist. The first cut is mostly healed already, the new tissue pink and raised. A pulse moves against my fingertip.
The cuff is tight. The check is done. My hand stays anyway — two seconds, maybe three — the pad of my index finger against the beat of his blood. I don’t decide to do it. I don’t catch it happening until it’s already happened. When I pull away, my wolf objects. Silently, thank God.
I don’t look at his face.
I check his ankles. The chest strap. Everything holds.
“Going somewhere?”
Away from you before my wolf loses causes more trouble.
I don’t say that. I don’t say anything. I walk out, close the door, and drop the bar into the brackets.
I pull in a deep breath, then I strip and shift.
The change drops me into my wolf’s body, and the relief is immediate. Four legs. The Hill Country opening around me in scent and sound, the sharpness that my form brings to every landscape. Maybe if I let her move, she’ll stop behaving so erratically.
I run south. Into the scrub, onto hard limestone, stride and breath finding their rhythm. The run takes the afternoon’s strain out of my muscles. The proximity. His questions. The arm heoffered before I asked. My fingers on his wrist. The warmth of his skin.
It falls behind me. Ground, track, and terrain. No room for the rest.
I run hard for an hour. When I turn back, the edge is off. The pull toward the cabin is still there — it doesn’t leave — but I can handle it.
The cabin comes into view through the brush.
The bar is on the ground.
No.
I stop. Twenty yards out. Nose working, ears forward.
His scent is everywhere. Fresh. Moving. Trail from the cabin door running south, then angling east, the stride lengthening. Walking, then running, then — the scent shifting, human to wolf, the musk deepening — shifted. Full wolf. The prints near the creek are deep and wide-spaced. Four hundred pounds moving at speed.
Fuck, fuck, fuck!
I go to the cabin. Inside, the chair is destroyed.
Not overturned. Shattered. Wooden components splintered outward, the steel frame wrenched sideways. The anchor bracket is still in the floor; he didn’t beat the hardware. He beat the furniture.
I analyze what’s left of it. The wrist cuffs are on the floor, intact, still locked at the angle that should have prevented a shift. They did — his wrists didn’t change. His chest did. Expanded the torso — partial shift, ribcage and shoulders — and used the chest strap as a lever against the chair back. Wood fractured at the joint where the back met the seat. Once the back went, the strap loosened, and his arms had the range to work the cuffs off the broken armrests.
I built for a wolf trying to shift his hands. He shifted his chest.
I underestimated him. His strength.
Stupid, Briar. Stupid!
He’s smarter than I wanted him to be.
And he went south. Toward the compound. That could mean two things: he’s going back to his walls and his authority, and the world that made sense before I put him in a chair — or he’s going back to his pack to bring them out here to get me.
Either way, I can’t let him reach it.
I shift in the doorway and run.
His trail is fresh and saturated. Blood from the forearm wounds threads through his track — torn open by the shift, bleeding onto the stones. A big wolf, injured, running on adrenaline that’s already crashing.