Control. I lost it tonight.
Tonight, my teeth went through my own jaw to get out, and I put them in a woman’s neck.
And then the alpha knot.Jesus…I’ve kept that locked down since a catastrophic date with Livvy Hartley in the back of my pickup when I was nineteen. The night I learned I carried the gene. I never lost control again.
Until now.
I bend over. Hands on my knees. The grass blurs.
She tastes so good,my wolf offers, helpful as a cat bringing in a dead rat.
“Shut up.”
She tastes like ours.
“Shut up!” My voice goes flat across the clearing. Somewhere, something small in the underbrush decides to be somewhere else. Leaves rattle and go still.
I straighten up. Drag the back of my wrist across my mouth. It comes away dark.
She’s north.
I can feel it. Maybe five miles out. Moving. Her anger hits me like it’s my own. It has a color. I don’t know how to describe that, except that it’s red, it’s hers, and it’s about me.
Under the red, something else. Something warm. Content, almost drowsy. Her wolf.
Her wolf wants me.
Her woman wants me dead.
I laugh. It comes out once, short, ugly, and I bite down on it.
“What a monumental fuck-up,” I mutter. Which is just about the biggest understatement I’ve ever made.
I turn toward the ridge and start walking.
The night air is cool on the parts of me that aren’t bleeding. I’ll deal with the cuts later. Nothing on me is going to kill me in the next hour.
Ridley is in the seep, knee-deep in the wet green, tearing up mouthfuls of that lush grass that only grows where water comes up through the earth. She lifts her head when she catches me coming down. Ears go flat. Nostrils work. I watch her decide.
Then the ears come up. Not friendly. Just:oh, you.
“I know,” I say. “I stink.”
My wolf doesn’t think so. He wants to soak in that scent till it becomes part of our skin.
I lead Ridley up out of the seep. The saddle is still cinched. Tack’s dry. I put a foot in the stirrup and swing up, and the leather sticks to bare skin in a way that makes me grit my teeth. Nothing to be done about it. No way in hell I’m going back to that cabin to fetch my gear. I click my tongue, and Ridley picks her way onto the trail.
She sets her own pace. I let her. My hands find the reins without my asking. Years of muscle memory.
Halfway down the ridge, the pull shifts.
She’s moved farther. The tug in that direction aches. Not pain. Absence. A wrongness in the space where she should be.
“Bullshit, Forrester, she should be nowhere near you.”
Ridley’s ear swivels back to me. Swivels forward again.
She should be under us in the grass,my wolf says,warm.