Page 6
Behind Chris, Sloane was making a sound. Gasping, choking, her body folding forward. He could hear it. He could feel it through the bond, the raw scrape of air through damaged tissue, and it took everything he had not to turn.
He held the man’s eyes. The grey-blue gaze flicked past Chris’s shoulder to Sloane, then back. Something shifted in the expression. Assessment. Decision.
The man twisted. His body dropped low, slipping beneath Chris’s grip with practiced speed. He hit the door frame at a sprint, cleared the porch in two strides. By the time Chris turned, he was at the tree line.
Chris spun. He could chase him. His wolf howled for it, every muscle firing toward the treeline where the underbrush was still shaking with the man’s retreat. But Sloane was bent double on the cot behind him, her hands on the edge, her shoulders heaving. The sound of her breathing was wrong, wet, labored in a way that meant her throat had been compressed hard enough to swell.
He let the man go.
He crossed the room and crouched in front of her. She flinched when he touched her shoulder, a full-body jolt that knocked her teeth together. The flinch went through him like a blade because people who flinched like that had been touched by hands that hurt. Had been touched so often by hands that hurt that the body stopped waiting for context and defaulted to retreat.
“It’s me.” His voice came out rough, cracked open, stripped of every careful tone he’d cultivated over a decade of being the calm one. “Sloane, it’s me. He’s gone.”
She couldn’t answer. Her throat was working, swallowing against something that wouldn’t go down, and he could see the marks already forming on her skin. Four distinct pressure points. A thumbprint low on the left. Fingerprints climbing the right side, spaced with the precision of someone who knew exactly where to squeeze.
His hands were shaking. He put one on her shoulder and left it there, heavy, still, because if he moved too fast she’d flinch again and the thought of that was unbearable.
“Who was that?”
She pulled air in. Let it scrape out. Her eyes were streaming, and he couldn’t tell if it was pain or oxygen deprivation or both.
“Sloane. Who the hell was that?”
She lifted her head. Her eyes met his, and they were hazel, lighter than he’d remembered, the color shifting between green and gold depending on the angle, and for a half-second the bond surged through his chest with a warmth so fierce it staggered him, which was the worst possible timing for a revelation, and he shoved it aside.
“Nobody.” The word came out broken. Half-voiced. Scraped over tissue that was already swelling. “Thank you. Now get out.”
“No.”
“Get out of my house, Chris.”
“Someone just had their hand around your throat; there is no way I’m leaving you now.”
“Thank you for the recap.”
“You weren’t fighting back.”
She swallowed visibly, and he watched the shutters come down, watched her face rearrange itself from pain to something harder, colder. The mask he’d seen her wear in the dining hall and the training yard and every room she’d occupied for the last two years. The mask was good. It would have fooled anyone who wasn’t kneeling three feet from her with the mate bond screaming in his ears.
“I’m still here, aren’t I?”
“You were being choked.”
She shrugged and pulled her shoulder out from under his hand with a deliberate, controlled movement. “Thank you for the intervention. You can go.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Sloane.”
“Chris.” She said his name like a door closing. “This isn’t your problem. I don’t need your help. Whatever hero impulse brought you out here, consider it fulfilled, and leave.”
He sat back on his heels. Looked at her. The marks on her throat were darkening. She held herself straight, shoulders back, chin level, the posture drilled into her by years of being the strongest she-wolf in the compound, and underneath that posture she was trembling with a fine, continuous vibration she couldn’t hide because the muscles in her arms were betraying her.
“It is my problem,” he said.
“No, it isn’t.”
