Page 104 of Exiled Heir

I stared at him, surprised into laughing. “Should I charge extra for saving your life?”

“How about this. If you save my life, if you savebothof our lives, I promise you a very good bonus.” He wasn’t laughing, but the corners of his eyes crinkled, like he wanted to laugh, like he wanted to join me in my mild hysteria.

Cade leaned forward and pushed up on his toes so that his lips were millimeters from mine. “You’re going to shift. Right now. You’re going to save our lives because that’s who you are, because that’s who your wolf is.”

He kissed me, and there was the oxygen I needed—there was the air I needed to save me from drowning.

I hadn’t noticed that before Cade, I had already been underwater. Declan had wrapped chains around my ankles and thrown me into the ocean. And maybe after so long underwater, I had gotten used to it. Gotten used to giving up who I was, who my parents had raised me to be. Maybe I had even gotten used to being nothing more than someone who hurt people.

But Cade was offering me a chance to do something else. I could save him. I could save myself.

I kissed him back, sucking on his lips and pressing us together, chest to chest.

Something broke inside of me, shaken free, a rotten branch that was poisoning the tree it was attached to.

I stumbled back, holding up my hand when Cade moved forward, reaching out for me.

“Stay back,” I said.

I stared at him, keeping my eyes focused on his, waiting for the horror and the fear. I was a werewolf in his bedroom. This was what he had nightmares of.

But I didn’t dare to try and stop the shift, not now that it was happening. I managed to pull off my shirt, shove my pants and underwear down, and step out of them as I lurched around the room. It was more painful than the first time I had ever done it, the first time I had heard the wolf howl in my chest and answered by sacrificing my own flesh, my own blood, my own pain for it. I bit off a scream, forced to shut my eyes, and stumbled forward again, kneeling on the ground.

I took in great gasps of air, trying to fill my lungs, but nothing could fill them. I could taste blood in the back of my throat, and then… there.

My claws sprouted, digging into the soft carpet, slashing through it as I fisted my hands in pain.

My bones cracked and reformed, everything painful and overwhelming even as the world seemed to shift on its axis, coming back to rightness.

My senses, always slightly overwhelming in human form snapped into focus, every smell and sound available to me. I detected danger, and I shook my head hard, trying to dislodge whatever it was.

There was no conscious thought, no words, nothing except sensation and instinct. Consciousness came back slowly.

The threat I felt was Basil, squeezing tight around my neck in warning. Cade had pressed himself back against the wall, surrounding himself with magic. His eyes were wide, and his mouth was moving, but it took a moment for my wolf ears to make sense of the human words.

“Miles. Miles, can you hear me?”

The terror that permeated the room was sending me into high alert. Something was scaring my packmate. Something was scaring mymate.

I forced human thought between the instinct and the urge to do something.

Cade wasnotmy mate. He was not even my packmate. He was a job, and I was his employee, and that was all there was.

Still, I was scaring Cade. He was terrified of me. With great effort, I went down on my stomach, whining and tilting my head to the side. Slowly, Cade’s hand dropped, the magic around him swirling into his flesh.

He inched forward, each step jerky and forced. He extended his hand, and I raised my head to sniff it. As my breath touched his fingertips, he winced back.

Then, with slow movements, he reached forward and stroked along my face.

“There you are,” he said. “Miles, it is good to meet you.”

ChapterThirty-Three

Iwhuffed out a breath.

Cade inhaled sharply. He moved his hand to the nape of my neck. Scratching there for a moment, he said, “This is going to be a problem.”

There were no problems. My wolf was free, my soul was complete. The only problem right now was that I wasn’t already running in the woods, already free.