Page 64 of The Alpha’s Midnight Witch

They roll into the fence. The thing gets one long arm around his throat and drags, and he makes a sound I feel in my teeth.

Everything inside me goes white.

Not scared. I’m past scared. Somewhere on the other side of scared, where the air is very quiet and very still.

The iron side gate rips off its hinges.

It hangs there a full second with nothing under it. Then it fires across my yard like a thrown card and folds the creature in half against the fence.

The wolf is on it before it can come apart again.

Black smoke. A smell like a match lit in a graveyard. Then nothing but my own breathing and my side gate lying bent in the hydrangeas.

Sid sits on the patio step with his tail curled over his feet, entirely unbothered.

Well. That was overdue.

"Now you talk to me."

The wolf turns around.

He's enormous. Brown and beautiful, with blood along one shoulder in a color that doesn't belong to him. He takes two steps toward me. Then he stops, deliberately, out of reach.

Giving me room.

There's a scar through his left eyebrow.

Six months of seeing that scar. Six months of pretending I wasn't looking at it.

"Okay," I say. My voice comes out wrong. "Okay. So."

He lowers his head.

"Don't. Don't do the sad dog thing. That's cheating."

His ear flicks.

Then the air above him goes strange, heat shimmer off summer asphalt, and I get to watch bone and muscle rearrange themselves in a way I'm going to think about for the rest of my life.