Page 53 of Wolf It Down, Knot Me Up

Grayson’s there too as Wolf steps aside, his hand cradling my jaw while he presses a kiss against my cheekbone, fire igniting beneath my skin. “Sweet dreams, little bird,” he murmurs. “Try not to dream about us too much.”

“Impossible,” I whisper, mostly to myself, but by their grins, I know they heard me.

Then, somehow, all three of them step back, even though I crave them right down to my bones. They stroll out, and once they’re gone, I’m grinning like a crazy person because is this happening to me?

As I reach the stairs, Ethan pokes his head out of the kitchen, drying his hands on a towel. He takes one look at my face and smiles. “Been a while since I’ve seen you grin like that.”

Heat creeps into my cheeks. “Is it that obvious?”

“To everybody.” He leans against the doorway. “Those idiots are good for you.”

My smile softens. “It feels like it, yet I keep waiting for something to go wrong.” I shrug helplessly.

Ethan frowns and exhales loudly. “Lucy, you already lost the impossible once.” He folds the towel over his shoulder. “Don’t punish yourself by losing this before it’s even had the chance to begin.”

I stand there quietly for a moment. “Yeah, I guess.”

“Get some sleep. Those boys aren’t going anywhere.”

I blow him a kiss and head upstairs.

Before long, I’m showered and burrowed beneath the huge quilt on my bed. I roll onto my side, smiling into the pillow, and the darkness slowly swallows the room as sleep takes me.

The next thing I know, I wake with a sharp gasp.

My arm is on fire. Pain tears out from the bite, racing up toward my shoulder. And I’m soaked between my thighs from arousal, which makes no sense. I cry out from the pain throbbing in my mark and clamp my hand over it. There’s heat pouring from my skin, and my stomach drops.

Something’s wrong with me.

It has to be the bond. We’ve left it incomplete for too long, and an open bond is vulnerable and can decay, exactly the way I’d been taught it could. Terror crashes through me because I did nothing about it and panicked about everything else.

I knew I shouldn’t have let myself hope. Please… don’t let this be the beginning of the end.

13

LUCY

“Are you kidding me?” I mutter, stumbling down the dark path in the woods, in the middle of the night. I’m in my robe and sneakers, one hand clamped over the burning bite. “How could I have been this stupid about my bond?”

Two kinds of misery are battling inside me, and I hate them both. Every heartbeat sends another bolt of pain spearing out from the bite and up my arm, while the ache low in my body leaves me trembling so hard I can’t think straight.

I couldn’t wake Ethan like this. Not drenched in sweat, barely able to string two words together, and my whole body broadcasting its craving for Alphas. I’d rather collapse on this trail than knock on his door, which, at the rate I’m going, is becoming a genuine possibility.

So I push myself toward the only place my body will let me go—to their cabin.

My foot catches on a root, and I stagger into a pine tree, palms scraping on the wood as another wave tears through me. A broken groan rips out of me as I fold over the trunk, my forehead thumping against the bark.

“I’m actually going to die out here, aren’t I?” I murmur to the tree.

The cabin can’t be more than a hundred feet away, so I push off the tree and keep going. What if I don’t make it? What if I collapse out here in the dark, and by the time the sun comes up, it’ll be too late, and the last thing I ever did was decide not to wake Ethan because I was embarrassed?

The cabin looms up out of the dark, one window lit, and I make it to the edge of the clearing before my legs give out. I drop to my knees in the cold dirt, and the cry that comes out of me has no joke left in it at all.

Then nothing. Just me on the ground, trying to breathe through the pain as I convulse, trying to find enough energy to call to them.

The cabin door suddenly explodes open. “Lucy!” Grayson charges off the porch like a tank, bare-chested, sweatpants slung low, and closes the distance in a heartbeat. He drops to his knees in front of me. “What happened? Did someone hurt you?”

I cry out as I shudder, tears spilling over. “The bite. Hurts. So much, and…” I can’t say the rest or mention the shameful, roaring, wanton desire. But I don’t have to, because his nostrils flare and his whole body goes rigid.