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My head jerks toward him, relief making me weak in the knees when I recognize the male standing there. Like the feral, he’s now shirtless. His boots are gone, too. He’s wearing a pair of black sweatpants. Considering he was wearing jeans when he went after the feral, he must have shifted during the fight, then dug for a shifter’s cache outside.
Most dominant shifters have them. A store of clothes that keep near their territory for unexpected shifts, West must have kept a spare pair of sweatpants outside.
After what happened with the feral, no way would he return to me bloody and naked. Not when he’s not sure how I would receive him.
Because he isn’t. That much is obvious.
I swallow roughly, taking a few unsteady steps toward him. “West.”
“Don’t.”
On my third step, I stop walking. He bit out that word with such venom, I flinch like I’ve been stung.
Once he’s sure that I’ll stay away from him, he enters the house. Purposely avoiding me, he goes straight for the kitchen. I hear the sink turn on. It’s hard to pick up the rushing water over the sound of my pounding heart, so hard that I don’t even realize that it’s off until he’s back in the front room again.
His hands are clean. It didn’t even stand out that they were bloody until I see that it’s gone. His hair is wet; so is the hollow of his throat. Scratches and gouges, bites and claws marks cover most of the bare skin in front of me. That’s something else I didn’t notice before. So happy to see that he was the winner, I didn’t care how he returned to me.
West obviously did. He’d gone straight to the kitchen to scrub. As I run my gaze over him, the injuries from the feral start to heal. He has one or two deeper gouges that might take a couple of minutes, but the rest are nearly gone by the time he’s looming in the doorway that leads to the front room from the kitchen.
Deciding that he only kept me away from him before because he was covered in the feral’s blood, I take a hesitant step toward him again.
I’m prepared this time. When West shakes his head, I stop instantly even as I murmur his name in a questioning tone.
I didn’t actually ask him a question. But West? He answers me anyway.
“You have to stay away from me. Don’t you understand, Helene? I’m too dangerous for you.”
Dangerous? He has to be kidding.
“You saved me—”
“From one feral,” he says. Claws jabbing into his bare chest, his grey eyes so dark, they’re almost black, he whispers, “Who will save you fromthisone?”
I said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m not afraid of Weston Reed, no matter how tenuous his hold on his other half gets.
For days now, I’ve had the same fear. That, after three years of my silent, constant rejection, I broke him. That he turned feral, and it’s all my fault.
I know better. Having come face to face with two feral shifters—one happily mated, the other aterror—my wolf was able to pick up on both the similarities and differences between them. It was instinctive. She did it all on her own, and it makes me absolutely sure that I know what I’m talking about when I tell West,
“You’re not a feral.”
“No,” he agrees. “If you saw what I did to him… after that he tried to do toyou… I’mworse.”
“You’re not—” I try again.
West jaw goes tight. “Lane, please. I’m barely holding onto my wolf as it is. I don’t want to hurt you.”
He wouldnever.“I know you. You’renothinglike that monster.”
West’s laugh is low and cold. “You sure about that?”
“You’re not feral, West.Hewas feral. You’re my wolf. My savior. My—”
Mate.
I don’t say the word. The fact that I swallow it, keeping it to myself… he knows. He knows and, fisting his hands at his side, hiding his claws, West hangs his head.
“I love you.” There’s something in the way he says it… so simply stated, like it’s an undeniable fact. “I want you so badly, and I know I shouldn’t. I know you won’t choose me. But you love me. You love me, and I cling to that because when I think of not loving you, I can see myself turning into a fucking feral, too.”
