Page 149

I hated this. I hated that I never caught a break, and when I did, it wasn’t going to last.

I mean, Wolf wasn’t going to last, right?

I sensed him behind me without having to turn. Before Moira, I would have cared. I would have fought to cover myself up, to stop him from seeing my mangled body, the scars on my back.

But I was too tired to keep those walls around my heart from crumbling.

“Huntress,” he whispered, barely loud enough for me to hear. “You’re crying.”

I didn’t bother fighting it. “It’s not the first time you’ve seen a woman cry.”

“No,” he said, closer this time, “but that doesn’t mean I like it.”

I tilted my head toward the water and let it fill my mouth.

“You don’t have to worry about me,” I answered after a few moments. “I can take care of myself.”

“I know you can,” he said.

I vaguely heard him stripping his own clothes off, vaguely sensed him entering the shower.

But when his soft hand fell onto my bare shoulder, I crumbled.

“Huntress,” he murmured, wrapping his hands around me from behind. “It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not okay. It’s the furthest damned thing from okay.”

One of his fingers began tracing the lines of my back, the many scars that all remained in different stages of healing.

And then his lips were on me, hot and healing, bringing me back to life. Pulling me away from the darkness I was mere seconds from slipping into. Wolf’s hands glided from myshoulders to my wrists, brushing the rest of the dried blood away with the water.

Then he moved to my back, doing the same.

He slowly spun me around, guiding me with the softest touch I had ever felt from him. He did not mention my red-rimmed eyes. He did not mention the light sobs.

He merely got to work wiping the blood from my chest, my stomach.

Wolf knelt to his knees before me, his black wings spanning across the wet ground as he ran his hands over my thighs, my knees, my calves. Normally, I would have loved to make a comment about how good he looked on his knees, but I could not bring a smile to my face. I could not force my body to laugh, not now.

But he knew that.

Nothing was more intimate than this: two war-riddled, broken creatures naked and exhausted, cleaning the blood from their ripped and bruised skin.

Still on his knees, Wolf looked up at me. Water pebbled on his thick eyelashes. “I meant what I said, Huntress. My heart bows to you and you alone.”

I sank to my knees with him, only for the first time realizing how completely naked I was. My entire body flushed against him and his hardness pressing into my thigh.

Tears still slid down my face, but hells. Wolf's hands were there, wiping the tears away, kissing the fiery trails of them.

Making me forget. Making mefeel.

“Wolf,” I breathed, letting him tip my head back to kiss my jaw, my neck.

“Hmm?” he hummed.

“I don’t want to go back to how life was,” I admitted. “I want to feel again.”

He pulled back and looked at me with dark, intense eyes. “Then let me help you,” he said.