I’m faster. Always have been. Lighter, built for speed, where he’s built for power.
The distance closes. Three miles from the compound. Two. The lights through the trees, and he’s angling toward them.
I know the terrain. There’s a gap in the ridge he’ll have to go around because he won’t fit through it. But I will. I cut east, through the gap, down a limestone scramble, and come out on the far side of a clearing between him and the compound trail.
I reach it first. Plant my feet. Face the brush.
I wait.
It doesn’t take long.
He crashes through thirty seconds later. Brown wolf, massive, dark fur silver-edged in the light of the moon. Bleeding from the shoulder and the forelegs. His eyes find me. He skids, paws tearing grass, and stops.
Two wolves in the clearing. Moonlight on everything.
He could go through me. He has a hundred and fifty pounds on me, maybe more. He could barrel past, and I’d bounce off him. He’d reach the compound in minutes.
He doesn’t.
He stops. Golden eyes on my silver ones. His sides heaving. My weight balanced, my body between him and where he’s trying to go.
Ten feet apart. The moon above. The brush dark around us.
He doesn’t move. I don’t move.
This is going to get ugly.
Chapter 7
Briar
We shift at the same time. I don’t decide to do it. My wolf takes my body and remakes it, bones snapping into new shapes, and then I’m standing barefoot in the grass with nothing on and the night air biting every inch of me.
He’s done the same. The wolf is gone. The man is here. As naked as I am.
Don’t look at him.
I look at him.
He’s— Fuck. I saw him in the cabin, stripped him myself while he was under, and I thought I’d already accounted for what he looked like. I hadn’t. Unconscious, he was a body. Awake, standing, the moonlight catching the sweat on his skin and the blood still running from the cuts I gave him, he’s something else. The breadth of his shoulders. The way the muscle sits on his frame, heavy, earned, nothing decorative about it. He’s built the way a working animal is built, for function, for endurance, andmy wolf’s response to the sight of him is a sound in my chest that I barely manage to swallow.
What. The fuck?
His eyes drop down my body. Not slow, not deliberate. Fast. Involuntary. The way your eyes go to fire in a dark room. He drags them back up, and I can see the effort that costs him. My skin is tingling everywhere his gaze touched, and I’m furious at both of us.
“You think you can just leave?”
“I already did.” He rolls his shoulders, muscles bunching smoothly beneath taut skin. There’s a deep gash in his flesh that he probably got when he smashed out of that chair. “You want to drag me back?” He raises an eyebrow. “Try.”
“I will.”
“Then do it.”
“I’m dead serious,” I growl, the wolf still close. But right now, that’s not as much help as it should be.
“Look, I got your message,” he says. “Things were done. Bad things. And that’s on me. It wasn’t a victimless crime. But if you think I’m going to sit around while you make holes in me, you’re wrong.” He gathers himself, about to keep moving.
“I told you to stop!”