Every inch of my fucking body hurts, every muscle burns.
I have to be grateful for the adrenaline rush, though, and I should probably thank the god my mother prays to that this didn’t happen twenty-four hours ago. If it had, I’d be dead as a goddamn doornail and my alpha most likely would, too. Attacking while I was in heat would have been smart on their part if they’d have known it was happening.
I’ll take the fact that they didn’t as a small miracle.
Very small since I’m only about forty feet away from them when I hear the first bullet explode into a nearby tree.
It’s not much of a headstart but I’ll fucking take it. It’s better than none and being dead, that’s for fucking sure.
I push myself harder as I keep running, jumping over fallen trees and large bushes, ducking when I can behind something that might be able to hide me. I pull my gun from the waist and cock it, ready to fire as more shots whizz past me, getting closer and closer the further away from my cottage I get.
At minimum, I have six bastards following me and that’s only if they didn’t bother leaving anyone at my house, and they didn’t have more waiting in the trees.
I’ve outrun more than this before. Hell, I’ve been shot and running from at least double that during a rainstorm. While I know I can handle this based on history alone, there are two factors working against me right now.
I’m post-heat, which means I am not up to snuff physically. I can push through the pain, can force myself to keep going through that, but hardly eating anything other than fruit for the last week is definitely working against me. I can feel myself getting shaky and a little lightheaded, and that doesn’t really bode well for me.
The other thing? It’s starting to snow harder.
Visibility is dwindling and the terrain is more uneven, more unstable than it was when I started, and considering I haven’t exactly been out here very long, I might be fucked.
Then I remember something.
A thicket.
One a little more east that’s relatively secluded, and could hopefully provide cover for a little while even without all the foliage.
My alpha found it the first time he came out here. We’ve been back a couple of times but it isn’t necessarily significant in any other way. Unless, of course, it manages to save my ass during a shootout, then it’ll be as sacred as a fucking church to the Catholics.
Taking a hard left, I race toward the thicket, hopeful that it’s somehow going to be a life-changing location for me, and as soon as I see it, I breathe a sigh of relief.
Thank fuck.
Unfortunately, that relief only lasts a few seconds before I hear snow crunching under heavy boots behind me.
I raise my gun as I spin, ready to blow away whoever it is that’s trying to come up behind me but instead, I pause and squint through the blanket of snow falling from the sunny sky.
“Dimitri?” My shoulders sag as I drop my posture, so fucking glad to see my alpha standing across from me. “Thank god, I wasn’t sure I was going to make it?—”
“Don’t move,” he says as he levels his SIG at my face, his tone full of the same ice that floods my veins.
“D, what are you doing?” I take a step forward and he cocks his weapon, lifting his other hand to steady the shaking one.
“I said, don’t fucking move.”
Another step has him firing a warning shot at my feet and I freeze. “I don’t understand.”
“You don’t fucking have to.”
My heart starts pounding to a different rhythm, one that has it on the verge of breaking but I can’t stop it. Not when my alpha, my scent match, my bonded mate is standing maybe ten feet away from me with a gun pointed at my head while he acts like he doesn’t know who the fuck I am.
We’re best friends. Step-brothers. Confidants. He’s my fucking mate, for Christ’s sake.
We’ve been together for almost fifteen years. Longer if you count all the time we spent growing up together.
Dimitri was almost seven when I met him. I was only three but something inside my little malnourished heart knew we were going to be friends. I knew we were going to be something special. He did, too. He knew it, and he even learned how tohelp with my G-tube when I had to have it put in because of it. I was basically a fucking toddler and I couldn’t handle eating, not without throwing up after having next to nothing for so long, and I would have died if they didn’t put the feeding tube in, but it scared me. Dimitri is why I got over that fear.
He learned how to use it, how to help me eat in the only way I could, and he’d sit with me the entire time I was hooked up to it, either reading to me or playing with our toys. Dimitri never let me go through that alone and when I was finally healthy enough to actually eat and they removed it, he helped me relearn how to feed myself, too.
