Page 44 of The Werewolf’s Wrong Mate

“I want my dad,” I said.

Ian looked toward the door, something dangerous moving through his expression. “Ronan will not allow that tonight.”

“Of course he won’t.”

“The humans cannot know.”

“I am human.”

His gaze came back to me. For a moment, he looked almost struck by that. As if, in the middle of poison and pack law and whatever his wolf had decided, he had forgotten the simplest part.

I was human.

I had a father on the other side of this resort who thought I had fallen. I had a sister whose dog I had chased because I was still stupid enough to love her through fury. I had a life. A messy, humiliating, ordinary life, and it was being peeled away from me by men discussing secrecy outside the door.

The fever dragged at me again. Ian’s hand tightened carefully, not holding me down this time. Holding on.

“You need to survive until dawn,” he said.

“Bossy.”

“Yes.”

“You always this charming after biting women?”

“No.”

“Good.”

My eyelids grew heavy and the room blurred.

Ian’s voice came through the dark, low and hard. “Cassie.”

“What?”

“Stay.”

I would have laughed if I could.

Of course.

Even dying, someone had instructions.

Chapter 7:

Containment Measures

Ian

Dawn should have ended it.

That was what every wolf outside the infirmary believed. They waited in the hall, in the stairwell, in the rooms above us, listening for the change in her breathing that would give them permission to turn last night into a tragedy with a sealed report. A human could not carry a true mark A human bitten in a claiming circle died before sunrise.

Those were not guesses. They were laws old enough to have graves under them.

Cassie Morgan should have been dead.

Instead, she lay beneath a white sheet with fever dampening her hair, black veins drawn thin around the bite at her shoulder, and a heartbeat that kept striking the room with a quiet, living defiance.