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I stabbed him one more time, directly in the middle of the chest.

Ryder was dead.

I fell to the side, lying on my back on the ground next to him. His blood pooled around us. I couldn’t bring myself to care, couldn’t bring myself to feel.

A strange calmness washed over me, like I had finally relaxed for the first time since I had been taken to this forsaken castle.

Good fucking riddance.

Each breath burned my throat, no doubt from the tight grasp he’d had on me. That bastard really was going to kill me.

Beat you to it.

Hells.I had actually killed him. I wasn’t sure how long I laid there in the blood-soaked grass. Ten minutes? An hour?

All I knew was that by the time I stood up, my vision returned to normal.

Think, Huntyr. You can’t leave him here. You’re the first person they’ll assume killed him.

Well, he did have many enemies here. He wasn’t exactly likable. And for all they knew, I was still weak. A rat.

I pulled my blade from Ryder’s chest, avoiding looking at his face. I tried to wipe the blood away, but it only smeared against more of the wet substance. I was covered in it from head to toe.

Fucking hells.

Thankfully, nobody else would be awake at this hour. I left Ryder where he lay, jogging back toward the castle. I snuck through the halls in the shadows, as silent as I had ever been. Walking felt like a dream. Moving felt like floating. I wasn’t evenconfident that I had actually made it back to my room before I opened the door.

Wolf lay shirtless—again—in bed. I froze at the threshold, letting the door swing open.

He lazily glanced up at me before doing a double take. I wasn’t sure if it was the blood covering my body or the panic on my face that set him off, but he jumped to his feet and closed the distance between us in a second.

Wolf.This felt familiar. Felt real. Felt safe.

“Huntyr,” he said, pulling me by the arm and closing the door behind me. The sound of my name on his mouth was real. Intense. Intimate.

No, I was probably imagining it.

“He’s dead,” I breathed.

“Who’s dead? What in all hells happened?”

“I had to kill him,” I said, more to myself than to Wolf. “He was going to kill me if I didn’t.”

Wolf’s hands grazed my body, running down my torso, examining every inch of me. “This blood…”

“It’s Ryder’s.”

Wolf’s hands found my face, cradling me. I didn’t stop him. “Tell me what happened.”

So I did. I told him every detail, though most of my words came out rushed and chaotic. I told him about Ryder sneaking up on me, attacking me, touching me. Fuck, even thinking about his grimy hands on my body made me shiver.

By the time I got to the end, Wolf had gone still. Scarily still. Inhumanely still.

“Say something,” I begged, my voice broken and distant. Normally, I would put more effort into appearing put together. To appearing whole.

Not tonight. Not with him.

“He deserved to fucking die,” Wolf said finally. My eyes met his, a storm of unsaid words. “I should have ended him a long time ago for laying a hand on you.”