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Chapter Sixteen
Willow
Fighting tears is my new job.
I fight tears as I coax Maxim into believing I’m not a dream.
I fight tears as I drag him onto my shoulders and force my overburdened body to carry him through the forest.
I fight tears as I push him off the cliff, then run and jump in after him, the terror I experience in those few seconds of free fall nearly enough to make me cry out as I hit the freezing cold water.
But some wise instinct within me reminds me to keep my mouth closed. I hold my breath as I plunge all the way to the bottom before pushing off the rocky riverbed and pulling hard toward the surface. The bag draped over my arms to form a makeshift backpack drags at me as I swim, but I don’t want to get rid of it unless I have to, unless I can’t manage it and pulling Maxim from the water at the same time.
I want the ancient North Star pack artifacts far away from people who would use them to do harm. And we might need the other supplies I found later, if we end up sleeping out in the forest tonight.
Though I’m praying harder than I’ve ever prayed for anything that we find our way to a city before then. If we’re still out here tonight, the chances that Bane’s solders will find us is surely close to one hundred percent.
The only way we’ve gotten this far is the element of surprise. As soon as they realize we’re gone, we’ll be the easiest of prey—one nearly lame wolf and an out of shape woman already trembling all over from exertion a mere ten minutes into her escape attempt.
I break the surface of the river with a soft gasp and scan the water around me, heart thumping hard with relief as I see Maxim slowly paddling toward the shore. The current is dragging him downstream as he swims and his snout is barely out of the water, but he’s moving on his own. It’s a good sign and gives me hope that he wasn’t as damaged as he appeared to be when I first dropped down into that wretched room.
As long as none of his wounds are life-threatening, shifting back and forth between his wolf form—staying wolf for at least a few hours each time—should help him recover fairly quickly.
His body, at least.
I’m not sure about his mind or heart.
If you’d asked me a few days ago if I would ever see Maxim Thorn so broken he couldn’t tell reality from fantasy or stop tears from streaming down his face, I would have snorted with laughter and called you a crazy person.
No matter how much Maxim needed to learn a lesson about empathy and respecting other people’s free will, he didn’t deserve anything close to what happened to him back there. No living thing deserves that.
Just thinking about it and that man who so calmly chatted with my sister after breaking a man’s bones, makes my skin burn with rage all over again as I climb up the bank and jog to help Maxim out of the river several yards down shore.
Good. Rage is good.
Rage gives me the strength to hoist a now even heavier, water-drenched Maxim onto my shoulders and stagger toward the road. “If we hear a car coming, can you shift?” I ask, my voice thin from locking my abdominal muscles as tight as I can. If I let them go for a second, I’m afraid the weight of Maxim will crush my spine.
He nods his head weakly in my peripheral vision.
“Good,” I say, trying to sound upbeat. “I have a couple thin blankets in the bag I can throw over us. They’re soaking wet, but they’ll hide enough to hopefully convince someone to stop and help us. We’ll tell them we were skinny dipping and got caught up in the current and dragged through some rapids.” I suck in a breath. “That should explain your injuries.”
Maxim whines dubiously low in his throat.
“Right. Probably not all your injuries, but you can keep your hands hidden beneath the blanket if the nails haven’t grown back yet,” I reply, wincing as I step on an especially sharp stone by the edge of the road. “Shoes would be nice right about now. Or paws. Once you can walk on your own, I’ll shift too, and we’ll be able to move faster.”
He doesn’t respond to that and after a beat I look over to see that he’s out cold again, his pretty amber eyes closed and his tongue hanging out of his damp muzzle. But he’s still breathing—I can feel his ribs moving in and out against my shoulders—so I try not to worry too much.
He’s probably still in terrible pain. Better for him to sleep, at least until there’s a reason for him to be awake.
Five or so miles and several dozen sharp stones jabbed into my already bleeding feet later, there’s still no reason to rouse my unconscious Alpha. There hasn’t been a sign of life at all so far—not a car or a house or a campsite, not so much as an empty beer bottle tossed carelessly into the ditch—and I’m back to fighting tears.
I can’t keep going like this. I’m just not strong enough.
The muscles in my shoulders are on fire, my spine is screaming, and my knees are insisting that if I don’t give them a rest soon, they’re going to snap in half in protest to these insane working conditions.
But I can’t stop. Surely Kelley has realized that I’m gone by now, and sent someone to look for me. Clearly, she and Bane are secretly at odds and working toward two different end games, but she has allies within the camp that she could send to drag us back without Bane being any the wiser.
Of course, even if that happens, it sounded like she’ll need a certain amount of cooperation from me to bring her plan to fruition. But I know better than to think I can simply refuse to go along with torturing Maxim and that will be that.
