Page 23

I was still awake when the weak light of morning began to filter through the window.

I had lain the whole night unsleeping, imagining that I could hear Ethan’s slow breathing through the wall.

I could have heard it in reality, could have spent the night with my head pillowed on his strong chest, but that would only have made everything worse.

How could I have dragged myself from his bed and stolen away?

I’d barely had the strength to pull myself out of his arms the previous evening.

It had felt so right, and for more than a moment, I had lost myself in the softness of his touch and the insistence of his kisses.

It had been almost impossible to remind myself that I was just another female he was willing to fuck, nothing more.

He’d said as much to my face: there was no danger he would fall for me.

The unfortunate reality was that I had fallen for him.

Sure, we were mates—no matter what he claimed, I was certain of that—but even if we weren’t, I’d still be in love with him.

It was oddly freeing to admit it, even just to myself: I was in love with Ethan fucking Cain.

I loved his weird dry sense of humor, his rigid moral code, and his chamomile tea.

I wanted to be his mate and the mother of his children, and I was both of those things; yet everything was still awful.

He didn’t want a mate. He didn’t want a family and didn’t seek any more responsibility than he already had. As wonderful as he was with the people of his Pack, I could see how the burden of responsibility weighed on his shoulders. He didn’t need any more of that.

Still, I couldn’t say that my decision was entirely altruistic.

I did not think only of relieving his burden, but of my own hard-won pride.

I was not going to beg for his attention; I was not going to plead for his love; I was not going to hang around until he grew bored of me.

I was not going to allow this child to grow up feeling like a burden.

If he wasn’t going to accept me as his mate, if he wasn’t going to love me and my child as we deserved, then I was going to leave him behind.

It was better this way. No confessions and no goodbyes.

Stripping off Ethan’s shirt should have been the easiest part, and yet I found my eyes filling with tears as I was briefly engulfed in his familiar scent.

Folding it carefully, I left it on the bed and fled the room before I could do something ridiculous and sentimental like take it with me.

Naked, I crept down the stairs, grateful that Ethan’s door was on my blind side, and I wouldn’t be tempted to glance in its direction.

A few more steps, and I would be out the door, shifted, and on my way home.

As much as the thought hurt, there was relief in it as well.

I might not be able to tell Caleb the whole truth, at least not yet, but I would tell Alyssa.

We would sit on my couch, have a glass of wine, and she would stroke my hair, allowing me to cry as much as I wanted.

I would have my family with me, and no matter how hard things became, I wouldn’t go through it alone.

Ethan would be alone when he woke, but I reminded myself that he preferred it that way.

Still, it would be cruel to leave him with nothing—I’d disappeared on him once before, and while he might not return my feelings, I knew he cared for me enough to worry.

Snatching Ethan’s to-do list pad off the table by the door—his neat little lists were so endearing, there was something wrong with me—I scrawled a quick note, sticking it to the back of the door before I slipped out into the morning.

It was warm enough that I barely felt chilled, despite my nakedness.

For a moment, I simply stood on Ethan’s porch, enjoying the dawn’s quiet.

The gentle pink and yellow light made the town look idyllic, and I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to wake up to such a sight every day.

I shook the thought away; that wasn’t the version of my life I got to live.

In this version, I was going home to Lapine to be with my family and a Pack that tolerated me.

Unable to endure my racing thoughts any longer, I shifted.

My thoughts as a wolf were simpler, more instinctual, which was both a blessing and a curse.

I might have stopped imagining a hundred different realities where I could be happy, but now that my wolf had control, it was much harder to leave.

She wanted to stay with her mate and didn’t understand why I would abandon him when he had been touching and kissing me just a few hours earlier.

She wanted to go back inside and crawl into bed with him, and she was not pleased to find out that this wasn’t an option.

I tried to concentrate on things I knew she liked: on being close to Caleb and Alyssa and the twins, on my soft, familiar bed, on the paths she’d worn through Lapine’s forests with her running.

Taking the first step away from Ethan’s home wasn’t easy, but I was nothing if not stubborn.

My wolf could fight me every step of the way, but I was going home.

It was only once I’d muscled her out of town and onto the long, straight road that led to the Lapine Bridge that she broke out into a proper run.

If there was one thing she and I always agreed on, it was the sheer joy of running flat out through an open field.

Soon enough, we wouldn’t be able to do this; once my baby was showing, my wolf would refuse to surface, and I’d be stuck as a human until the birth.

For now, I would take all the chances I got to run until I was breathless.

Would my baby feel the same? Once they reached the shifting age, would they itch to run the same way I did?

Would they possess magic like I did? Perhaps they would be more like their father, stoic and disciplined.

My wolf loved the thought of that, of proudly displaying a pup just like his sire.

However, my feelings were more complicated.

In my mind’s eye, I could see a little boy, brown-haired and grey-eyed, sitting silently at my kitchen table, studiously completing his schoolwork while I needled him to put it down and join me for a run outside.

On one hand, I longed for the reminder that my mate had once desired me, enough to plant his child in my womb; on the other, seeing the face of the man who had broken my heart staring back at me every day would be its own kind of torture.

I wasn’t getting answers to that question any time soon, though, so I focused on more immediate problems as the Lapine Bridge came into view.

What was I going to tell Caleb when I started to show?

He’d come down hard on any shifter who knocked up a female and then abandoned her—never mind that technically I was the one doing the abandoning—and I didn’t think he’d buy that I’d had a fling at the Solstice with some shifter whose name I didn’t know.

I was considering the viability of just refusing to say anything on the subject when a dark shape emerged from beneath the bridge, followed by another, and another, and another.

For a moment, I feared that I was about to be caught out by the Ferris patrols and marched back to Ethan with my tail between my legs, but then I caught their scent on the breeze, and I realized I was in far deeper trouble.

Smoke and booze and tobacco, undercut by that woodsy, earthy scent I had hoped I’d never smell again. In all my angst about Ethan, I’d forgotten the reason why we were in this situation to begin with: Arbor wasn’t done with us. They weren’t done with me.

The wolves before me looked hungry. They weren’t here to abduct me this time; they wanted my blood, and unless I could think of something fast, they were going to get it.

Against all my instincts, I shifted. I might be faster and stronger in my wolf form, but I still had no chance against three Arbor hunters, and I had yet to master magic as a wolf. At least in my human form, I had a shadow on my side.

It looked as though I had the element of surprise, too, because the hunters stopped in their tracks as I shifted.

It was certainly insane, on the face of things, but Arbor didn’t know about the new tricks I’d learned on Ensign.

Before they knew what had hit them, a shadow had twined around the back leg of the hunter on the left, and with a yank, he was dragged backward, disappearing off the edge of the land with a distant splash.

The other two looked at each other, uncertain how to proceed.

I could only pray they were neither smart nor dumb enough to simply rush me—I wouldn’t be able to take out both of them before they reached me—but luckily, they were erring on the side of caution, turning quickly in an attempt to catch any approaching shadow.

I could do this. I could get myself and my child over that bridge and back to safety.

I braced myself, ready for a second attack—and my heart sank as three more hunters emerged from beneath the bridge. How long would it take before they realized that I couldn’t take more than one at a time? Not long, I imagined.

Panicking, I decided to try the sheer power of intimidation. Arbor hated magic, but they also feared it. They’d seen a little of what I could do with the shadows now, and they were wary of my power. Did I have enough to convince them this was a fight they couldn’t win?

There was only one way to find out. Taking a breath that I could only pray wouldn’t be my last, I called on every shadow I could.

They crept toward me from the trees, stretching from the bridge to shroud every Arbor wolf in darkness before they advanced across the grass to hover just ahead of me, as though waiting for my orders.

The effort of it was enormous, but I reminded myself that I’d held them for longer when we’d crossed the Ensign Bridge.

I could do this. The hunters were still far enough away that they might not be able to see the sweat beading at my temples and the slight shaking of my limbs.

They were certainly looking intently at me, but none made any move to attack.

Nor, however, did they back off. I needed to raise the stakes.

It was a risk, such a risk, to close my eyes and turn the world entirely to shadow, but it was the only way to do what needed to be done.

I sensed a change in the Arbor wolves’ demeanor immediately: they stiffened, ready to spring forward, but I was faster.

I ripped a tendril of shadow away from the rest, commanding it to be tangible, to be sharp, to be deadly.

As the first hunter snarled and darted forward, I plunged the tendril of shadow into his chest, letting it rip through his underbelly before his legs gave out beneath him and his body hit the ground.

It had worked—fuck me, it had worked—but the shock of it, the violence, the sheer effort it had taken was too much for me, and I lost my grip. The shroud of shadow snapped back into its natural position, and this time, the Arbor hunters didn’t hesitate. They were coming straight for me.