Page 13

Everything hurt. My head throbbed, every limb ached, and there were several lines of burning pain in my midriff and across my shoulders. I supposed I should take it as a good sign: if I were dead, I probably wouldn’t feel this shitty.

Memory came back to me in wisps and half-formed pictures: the attack on the bridge—shackles placed on my bare ankles—a cavern full of jeering humans—out of nowhere, Ethan—the marriage—the mistake—then running, running, running.

I remembered the battle by the bridge, the fear that had shot through me when I saw the hunters converge on Ethan.

I remembered running forward, taking out the wolf who was going for his throat, and then nothing but pain.

Even the light as it filtered through the window hurt my eyes.

I opened them blearily, blinking in the morning sun.

We must have made it to Argent, because as shitty as I felt, I was at least in a bed, my wounds clean and bandaged, and I was wearing an oversized tee that had traces of Leo’s familiar cinnamon and sandalwood scent.

Leo himself was nowhere to be seen. Instead, Ethan was asleep in an easy chair at the foot of the bed, his head lolling to the side at an angle that must surely hurt his neck.

I was far too exhausted to sort through the myriad emotions that rushed through me at the sight; relief, anger, gratitude, and an awful sort of fondness all muddled in my brain like the world’s worst cocktail.

He was drooling ever so slightly, his mouth hanging open and his eyebrows drawn together in a frown even as he slept.

He looked vulnerable, and I couldn’t stand it.

“Good morning, sunshine,” I said, and he jolted upright. Rubbing his eyes and blinking blearily back at me, it took him a second to readjust.

“You’re awake.” An astute observation, I countered with one of my own:

“So are you.”

He nodded, standing up abruptly and reaching for a bottle on the nightstand.

“Good,” he said, his voice still low and sleep-rough. “Drink this. The witch said you needed to have it as soon as you woke up.”

Gingerly, I shuffled myself into a sitting position and reached out for the bottle—it was rough glass with a cork stopper, filled with a vaguely green liquid that didn’t look at all appetizing.

“I was kinda hoping for some coffee.”

“I’ll ask Leo. Someone will bring a cup with breakfast.”

“Hey,” I reached out to grip his wrist, shivering with misplaced desire as the bond surged, urgent, between us. “What happened?”

He snatched his arm back. I knew he’d felt that pull, too, but he’d decided to deal with it the way he dealt with everything else: by glaring at me.

“You ran off and got yourself kidnapped—” he started, and I pushed down my immediate flash of anger. We’d both been through it over the past couple of days. For once, I was willing to give him grace about his choice of words, and I cut him off before he could say anything further.

“After the fight,” I clarified. “How did you get us here?”

“I picked you up and carried you over the bridge,” he said, as if I were something he’d picked up at the market or the commissary. “You passed out just before we got to Argent, but Leo had a witch on hand to ensure you pulled through. Drink that.”

He pointed to the still-stoppered bottle in my hand, watching me like a hawk as I pulled out the cork and gave it a tentative sniff.

The liquid smelled strong, herbal, and bitter, making me wince.

I didn’t want it anywhere near my mouth, but if this witch had managed to keep me from dying, then I was sure she knew what she was doing.

The realization hit me like a truck: I really could have died. Suddenly, the hand holding the bottle was shaking, and I placed it back down on the nightstand next to me. It would only make a bad few days worse if I spilled my healing potion all over Leo’s clean sheets.

“Thanks for making sure I didn’t die,” I said. The words tumbled out before I could stop them, hideously earnest. Ethan must have been as embarrassed by it as I was because he only shrugged.

“I did what I had to.”

I waited for him to continue, but he didn’t. The tension stretched out between us, and I grasped for the only thing I knew that might mitigate my mortification: sarcasm.

“It was pretty cool of you to jump in and save my life when I thought I could fight six guys at once, Julia,” I said, affecting a terrible, low, grumbly voice. “Thanks for saving our asses with your cool magic after I lost my shit at the crucial moment, Julia.”

I hadn’t really expected him to laugh. I knew better than to expect him to laugh at any of my jokes, ever. It still hurt when he snapped back at me,

“You shouldn’t have done it.”

“What, save your life?” I was clinging to the last scrap of my teasing smile. “Someone got up on the wrong side of the chair this morning.”

“You shouldn’t have stormed off in the middle of the fucking night, alone,” he said. His hands were balled into fists at his sides as he loomed over me, stormy and demanding.

“Ah, that.”

“Did you even think for a second how stupid that was?” he continued. “We all knew Arbor was rounding up stray females.”

I had no response for him. I had no defense for what I’d done, besides that I’d simply had no other option. I hated how much I had to crane my neck to meet his eye from my sickbed. It had taken him all of two minutes since waking up to make me feel small and weak and awful: it must be a new record.

“Tell me what the hell else I was supposed to do,” I said, hating that my voice came out breathy and trembling. If he noticed I was upset, he didn’t show it, merely continued lecturing me as though I was an unruly child who had stayed up past her bedtime.

“You were supposed to come back to the house and let me take you home in the morning.”

“After you knotted me and left me alone in the dark?” I shot back. Anger was beginning to course through my veins, and I was so grateful for it. “I was just supposed to come down to breakfast and joke around with the guys and let you drive me home?”

“Yes,” he said, stone-faced. I couldn’t stand that he was trying to answer with just one word to escape this situation, but if he wasn’t going to speak, then he was going to get a piece of my mind.

“I’m not one of your flings, Ethan. You can’t make me feel stupid and small and like I don’t deserve basic fucking decency,” I continued, and that must have struck a nerve.

“You don’t know anything about—”

“About how you treat the women you fuck? I think I do.”

We could have been back beneath the old oak, half-naked and awkward in the dark. He could hardly look at me then, and he could hardly look at me now.

“That’s not—that was different, and you know it,” he said, and I was so done with him telling me what I did and didn’t know.

“How so?” I needled. “Please, wise Alpha, enlighten me.”

“None of those women ever expected anything from me. They were adult enough to know when sex is just sex. None of them ever claimed we were mates.”

I never wanted to hear the word mate again. Every time it came out of his mouth it was to deny the bond I could feel like another limb. Sure, it wasn’t a limb I wanted, but it was there all the same, and every fresh rejection was a fresh hurt.

“Trust me,” I said. “I regret bringing that up.”

“That’s what you regret?” he repeated, incredulous. “I regret this whole fucking mess.”

“Why did you even come after me, then?” I cried. I wanted this to be over, I wanted to stick the knife in and twist until it hurt too much for either of us to continue. “You clearly don’t want me, and it would’ve surely saved you a whole lot of hassle.”

“You know why I came after you,” Ethan insisted, and I could have screamed. I didn’t know anything about the way his mind worked; nothing about the sad, unbending metal clockwork of his mind was even close to comprehensible to me.

“Wouldn’t it be easier for you if I disappeared off to the mainland to live in a nice cage and never bothered you again?” I asked, just to see him flinch. “Wouldn’t it be easier than having to acknowledge you were ever weak?”

“Don’t joke about that,” he growled through gritted teeth.

“Oh, I am not joking.”

“You really think I want that?”

“Nothing you’ve said has ever indicated otherwise.”

Ethan lurched forward, his hands landing heavily on the bed on either side of my body, his face close to mine and his voice thick with Alpha authority.

“I risked my life, the safety of my whole Pack, to save you from your own stupid fucking decisions,” he hissed.

For all our disagreements over the years, he’d never tried to use his authority to shut me down, but he was trying now.

He wanted me to shut up, but I’d never done what he wanted me to.

It was hard to keep my head up, to not bow and submit, but he wasn’t my Alpha, he was my mate, and that made us equal.

“You just told me you regretted it,” I pointed out, and something that might have been remorse flickered across his expression. When he next spoke, the authority was gone, and he only sounded tired.

“You’re twisting my words, Julia. I didn’t say I regret saving you, only that I…”

I wanted him to say it. I wanted him to say that he regretted ever touching me. If he could say that, then perhaps he was right, perhaps we weren’t mates after all, perhaps I was still just a hopeless little girl, infatuated with her big brother’s best friend.

“You what?” I pressed.

“Drink your potion.”

“No. I want you to look me in the eye and tell me the truth.”

When Ethan met my gaze again, his expression was careful and blank. His voice was even and detached and far, far worse than his anger.

“I regret that my action led you to walk into danger,” he said. “I came after you because Caleb is my best friend, and he left you in my care. He loves you, and I couldn’t have lived with myself if I let you get hurt on my watch.”

It was as if a shutter had rolled down between us. There was nothing more to say.

“Right,” I choked, wrung out and hollow. “Of course.”

He nodded to the bottle, open and forgotten on my nightstand.

“Drink it.”

“Yes, Sir.” It barely even sounded sarcastic, and the corners of his mouth twitched down.

“I’ll go see about breakfast.”

He turned abruptly, and he was gone in the blink of an eye.

There was no slamming door, no heavy footsteps outside to give away the thunderstorm of an argument that we’d brought down between us.

The empty chair at the end of my bed, still rumpled from his occupancy, no doubt still warm, taunted me.

Every moment of tenderness, every apparent act of care, was all a simple matter of duty to him.

The bottle on my nightstand beckoned, and when I reached for it again, my hand was steady. I knocked the potion back in one quick swallow, its bitter flavor lingering on my tongue.