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It’s a retreat. I know it is, just like I know that I’m not moving away from him out of fear. This is Aleks, and despite the red rimming his pale eyes, I’m not afraid of him. He’d never hurt me.
No. I’m back up because, if I don’t, I’m about to fling myself into his arms. Based on the emotionless expression pulling his sculpted features in spite of his almost pleading tone, I’m not so sure he’d welcome me. He’s pulled in his vampiric aura, so I can’t even get a read on his emotions through that. All I have to go on is the red in his gaze, and the undeniable knowledge that I left him three days ago without a word.
Yeah. I don’t think Aleks is very happy with me.
But he’s here—and I have no idea how. Since throwing him to the ground and mounting him like my wolf wants me to do is currently out of the question, I settle on hugging my mid-section and asking in a quiet voice, “How did you find me?”
In Muncie, I never doubted that he knew where I was at any given moment. Between his patrollers keeping an eye on me, and his supe senses allowing him to track me down anywhere in his territory, no matter where I was, Aleks could find me.
But I’ve spent three nights running. Not once did I catch his aura closing in on me until he appeared in the woods surrounding the abandoned shack mere hours after I did, but he tracked me so unerringly, it’s almost like he has a tracker on me.
I don’t have a phone. I ditched mine in Muncie so that I wouldn’t be tempted to get into contact with him or Gem or Leigh and her mates; I could always find a way to call them later, but it wouldn’t be that easy. Even if I suspected that my vampire would use human tech to track me—and I never would, not in a million years—he couldn’t because all I have are the clothes in my duffel bag, my deck of cards, a little bit of cash, and that’s all.
I even left my fang behind… so how did he find me?
My tone does something to him. I’m not afraid, but even I’ll be the first to admit that I sounded like it. His expression softens and, before I know it, he’s closed the gap between us entirely. He glides right into the cabin, kicking the door closed behind him with a graceful move before he takes my chin in his hands.
I gasp. Up close, I notice the purple circles underlining his eyes. His fingers feel like icicles against my skin, but that’s not why I gasped. The only time I’ve ever seen Aleks this disheveled was a few days after he’d been the Wicked Wolf’s captive and he was thrown in the pit, half-starved and full of bullet holes, to fight a shifted wolf.
He looks like he ran just as long as I did, chasing me without feeding, though the blood that spatters the hem of his dirt-covered sweater tells me it wasn’t without some kind of fight. There’s a healing burn down one side of his face from where his super-strength sunscreen must have worn off.
And he went through all that to get to me.
“Oh, Aleks…” I whisper.
He strokes the height of my cheek with the side of his silky thumb, cutting me off. “Through our bond. I’ll always be able to find you, and I promise you this: I will always look.”
My heart skips a beat in my chest, but then I realize what he said:through our bond. Laying my hands over his, I gently push him away from me. I can’t deny that we have a bond between us, but without it being finalized, there’s no way he should be able to use it to follow after me.
So why did he say that?
He lets me put space between us again, though I can tell by the way he sucks in an unnecessary breath that it’s the last thing he wants to do.
I glance up at him. “We don’t have a bond that works like that.”
“Of course we do—”
“We never performed the Luna Ceremony,” I remind him. “So how could we?”
His cheeks go hollow, his eyes more red than green all of a sudden, as he says, “With a blood bond, that’s how.”
“What? We don’t have one of those, either!”
“Oh?” He arches an eyebrow. “And you’re sure of that?”
“Well, yes—”
“When you never even bothered to ask how it’s done?” Aleks says over me. Anger seeps into his accented voice, though he’s doing everything to keep from raising it. “When I discovered that my beloved was a shifter, I made it my mission to learn just how your kind make their bonds. But you didn’t.”
He’s not wrong. I never brought it up, but neither did he. I just assumed that, when he decided to bond me to him, he’d tell me how.
And now he wants me to believe he already has?When?
Something else ruffles my fur. Instead of admitting that he’s right, I go from hugging my middle to crossing my arms over my chest. “Which one?”
His expression goes guarded. “Wybaczcie?”
Excuse me?
