“Who did you kill?”
I step past her and lay my mate gently on the bed, arranging her head on the pillow, pulling the thin blanket up over her body. Aiden stands by the window with his phone in his hand, confusion heavy on his face.
“No one.” I straighten and look down at my mate on the bed, watching the discoloration spread beneath her brown skin. “I need supplies to care for her. Ice, bandages, and clean water.”
“Whoa, hold on.” Aiden moves closer, hands raised. “Kojo, look at yourself. You’re barefoot in a blizzard, you’ve got blood on your shirt, and there’s a woman unconscious in your bed. You need to explain what happened before we do anything.”
“She is my fated mate.” I do not look away from her face. “Two men tried to assault her at a gas station. One pointed a gun at her head. A third man, a poacher, came out with a rifle.” My claws extend, piercing through the tips of my fingers. The pain grounds me, keeps me focused. “They will die for what they did. But not tonight. Tonight, I stay with her.”
Aiden looks at Kade, helpless, silently begging her to make sense of this. She watches me, sharp and knowing.
“That’s the way of the Bouda,” she says, walking over to the bed to study my unconscious mate. “Threaten their queen and the grudge never dies. Once they start hunting, nothing survivesand nothing gets left behind.” She glances back at me. “Isn’t that right, Kojo?”
“That is right.” I do not look away from the bed.
“And the poachers who killed your Matriarch?” Kade asks. The question sounds casual, but it is not. She is showing Aiden why I am this way. Why all Bouda are.
“One day I will find them, and I will make what happens to those men look merciful.”
She nods, satisfied, and turns to Aiden, who is staring at both of us like we have lost our minds.
“This is who he is,” she says. “Who his people have always been. The Bouda aren’t like the wolves or the lions. They don’t posture or threaten or hand out second chances. His mate was almost killed tonight. Those men are going to die. Not a question of if, only how much they suffer first.”
Aiden opens his mouth to argue, but nothing comes out. He looks at me, at the claws jutting from my fingertips, at whatever he reads in my eyes, and closes his mouth again.
I retract them and turn back to Kade. “I need supplies. Medicine and food for when she wakes. Things to make her comfortable.”
“Of course, Kojo.” Kade glances toward the window where the snow is still hammering down, and she teleports away.
Aiden exhales and drags a hand over his head. He starts to speak, probably another question I do not want to answer, but I am already moving. I pull the chair from the corner of the room and set it beside the bed, close enough to count her heartbeats. Close enough that if she wakes and tries to run, I will catch her before her feet touch the floor.
The bruise is spreading, darkening in real time, purple bleeding beneath brown skin and swelling her cheekbone until her left eye is nearly shut. The cut inside her mouth has stopped bleeding, but I can still smell it, copper and salt layered beneaththe rain-washed earth and wild honey that pours off her skin. My Bouda pushes forward at the scent, pressing against the walls of my head, straining toward the smell of home wrapped in the body of a woman who does not even know my name.
I reach out and press my palm to her forehead. Her skin is cool beneath my fingertips, too cool, and I pull the blanket higher around her shoulders. My thumb traces the edge of the damaged cheek without pressing. She does not stir.
Careful,my Bouda whispers.She is fragile. Human bones are not made to hit concrete at that speed.
I know because I watched it happen, and I was not fast enough.
Do not. She ran because she was afraid. You did not push her. That guilt is not yours.
I did not catch her either, and my Bouda goes quiet. There is nothing to say to that.
Kade returns in a curl of black smoke, plastic bag dangling from one hand, the logo of a twenty-four-hour pharmacy printed on the side. She sets it on the nightstand and pulls out ice packs, gauze, a bottle of ibuprofen, and a tube of something I do not recognize.
“Arnica gel,” she says, tossing it onto the bed. “For the swelling. Humans use it.”
She leans over the bed and studies my mate, tilting her head one way, then the other. The teasing leaves her.
“That cheekbone might be fractured.” Kade straightens and rolls up her sleeve. “Let me give her some of my blood. A few drops and she heals before she wakes. Nothing to explain in the morning.”
My Bouda erupts with a roar ofNObefore the last word leaves Kade’s mouth, surging forward so hard my vision flickers amber and my Ridge calcifies, the blades pressing into the back of the chair. A snarl rips from my throat, low and vicious,vibrating through the room hard enough to rattle the lamp on the nightstand.
Kade does not flinch. She raises an eyebrow like she has heard worse from bigger predators, and she has.
“No.” I force the word through clenched teeth, my claws sinking into the armrests of the chair. “No vampire blood in my mate. Not a single drop.”
“Kojo, it’s just…”
