Page 34 of The Fated Hunter Wolf

Rhys was on his back on the floor. Limbs splayed. Breathing fast but steady. The shock in his body hadn’t yet worn off. His pulse beat strongly. He wasn’t dying.

Good.

I hadn’t wanted to kill him, but there was no way I could let him look at me that way, like he was going to fix me. Much lessclaim me. I could not for one second allow him to think this bond was fated.

And yet, as he’d stood there looking at me with warm eyes, my wolf had gone quiet. No pacing. No snapping at my ribs like she usually did. She’d gone still the way a child hushes at the end of a great storm.

The bond had pulsed beneath my skin. Like a whisper in the dark. Familiar.

I swallowed hard and shut the thoughts down. Locked them behind the same mental doors I’d slammed closed so many times before.

I stepped over to him, silver shards crunching softly underfoot.

The air was thick with the metallic scent of blood and magic as I knelt beside him, the hard floor beneath my knees. Rhys’s breathing came in short bursts, hoarse and ragged. His shirt clung to him, blood-soaked. Crimson bloomed across the torn cotton like ink spilled on a map.

Alive. Unmoving.

The scent of his blood hit me again.

Shit.

My own blood cooled, a stilling that came from the part of me I’d inherited from older, darker bloodlines. It rose in me, that wretched legacy I could never leave behind.

Observe. Wait. Control.

I took one step forward, then stopped. The wind shifted. His scent shifted with it.

The silver had embedded itself just beneath the skin, a glittering constellation of punishment across his chest. He would be feeling heat, pressure, a dull throb that echoed into the marrow of his bones. Maybe I should have done it to myself, to help me stand up to the constant throbbing of our bond so Icould do what I had to do. Sever our bond forever, get him to reject me.

But this was working in my favor. I could make him hate me.

His eyes met mine.

“Going to finish me off?” he rasped.

“I’m going to undo the damage before you die from it,” I said quietly, and reached out.

I opened his shirt to remove the rest of the splinters of silver, and was met by the seeping series of slashes, the wounds I’d inflicted on him the night of the bonfire, which should have healed. My fingers hovered over the tiny silver pieces that encircled the slashes on his chest. I crouched at his side and waved my hands over his chest. First too close, then not close enough. A breath passed between us.

“You threw the silver,” he wheezed, his lips twitching in something like a smile. “But now you’re playing healer.”

“I didn’t throw it. I let it go.”

“Same thing.”

“No.” I met his gaze without flinching. “It isn’t. And you were threatening me.”

“Isthatwhat you thought I was doing? Threatening you?”

Threatening me with a bond to a soulless wolf.

I hovered my hand near his neck, the magic pulling a small piece of silver from the edge of his collarbone, but I let it cut a few layers of skin on its way back to form my ring. He sucked in a breath, his back arching just barely off the ground. My palm pressed into his sternum.

His heartbeat thundered under my touch.

“Don’t move,” I said.

“Don’t tease,” he shot back, then winced.