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Razor sharp claws.
Fear.
How many nights had she stayed awake in her bed? Too scared to sleep because she’d been afraid he’d come back?
“What did he do?”
“Used his claws to...cut away my clothes.” She paced away from him. The guy had been so fast. She’d been stunned, terrified. “I knew what he was going to do.” Her chin rose. “Buthedidn’t know how strong I could be. I fought the bastard.” The stupid scar. In one way, she was like other wolves. Her wounds always left a mark on her body. Her flesh healed, but it didn’t forget. Her hand dropped to hover over the rough ridge. “I got my own swipes in, but he got his, too.”
Jude jumped from the bed, caught her shoulders, and hauled her close. “Erin...did he?—”
“I got away.”Run, run.The words had been driving her for so long. “Ran naked and bloody down the street. I was afraid he’d chase after me, but he had his own wounds.” Her lip curved in a smile she knew wasn’t pretty.
She’d snagged a pair of sweats and a T-shirt off a clothesline down the street. Sweet Mrs. Sara Copeland—still doing her laundry the old fashioned way.
“I had already planned to leave Lillian before that night. After the attack, I never went back to my house.” A different hotel every night. Always looking over her shoulder. “The cops there couldn’t help me. What were they going to do against a shifter?”
“Ican help you,” he told her, his fingers tight around her.
“I know.” She didn’t doubt his strength. “Night Watch was made for hunting guys like him.”
“Made for putting them down.”
Oh, but his eyes were bright and he was still holding her, staring at her with need and worry in that gaze.
Tell it all.“He’s after me because he thinks I’m his mate.” Shifters and their mates. For some of their kind, a primal, instinctual thing.
“He’s fucking wrong.”
Was he? “He’s like me, Jude. A hybrid.” And the voice from her nightmares whispered through her mind. “We’re the same. Not weaker, stronger. They don’t have a fucking clue.”
“So? There arethousandsof hybrids in the world. He can go pick one of them for his mate.”
The bastard’s voice kept playing in her head.“Knew we were meant for each other, from the first moment I saw you.”His weight had shoved her into the mattress.
A light shake from Jude. “Erin.”
It was hard to swallow over the fist in her throat. “He’s a hybrid, but he can still shift. I know because I saw him change once.” Deliberate. Everything with that asshole was deliberate.
“Yeah?” He shook his head. “So what’d the freak turn into? A bear? Coyote? A?—”
“He’s a wolf.”
She caught the slight widening of his eyes.
A wolf shifter. One of the strongest and the most dangerous of the shifters. And, unfortunately, one known to sometimes cross the line that led into the realm of thepsychotic.
But Jude shook his head. “Doesn’t change a thing for me. You really think I’m afraid of some mangy wolf?”
No. She didn’t think he feared much. Perhaps he should. “You know what they say about wolf shifters. They can recognize their mates?—”
“Not at first sight, it can take time to?—”
“He said I was his mate.” Her hand rose between them. Flattened over his heart. “A wolf shifter only gets one true mate.”
Broken.
“And for him, seems like I’m…it.”
