Twenty Six

Nathan had left to get whatever Aiden had requested.

It was just me and Aiden now, and I was resting against his chest because sitting up on my own had stopped being an option somewhere in the last twenty minutes.

Death was lurking around me.

Sweat covered every part of me — my neck, my back, the inside of my palms — and the burning hadn't let up for a single second. If anything it had gotten quieter, and somehow that was worse than when it was screaming through me. Quiet meant it was settling in. Quiet meant it was winning.

My fingers had stopped responding properly. I noticed it the way you notice something small and strange — oh, my fingers aren't working anymore — like my body was already making decisions without consulting me. Already checking out before I was ready to leave it.

Yet I didn't want to die, I was fighting to stay alive at all cost.

I had faced pain before back at the pack. Training had been brutal in ways most wolves never experienced, because I had always known that without a wolf I had to be twice as hard, twice as prepared, twice as difficult to break. I knew what it felt like to push through something that wanted to stop you.

But this was different.

This wasn't pain you pushed through.

This was pain that was pushing back and dragging me to death.

"Nathan tells me you once saved Joshua," I said. My voice came out weak and thin and I hated the sound of it. I kept talking anyway because talking meant I was still here. "What happened?"

Aiden looked down at me. His expression was unreadable but his eyes held something that wasn't quite confusion — more like he was trying to figure out why a dying girl was asking questions.

"Do you pity him?"

"Hell no." I paused, waiting for my lungs to cooperate. "If I survive this I'm going to kill him myself. I just want to know his story. I've never heard of a werewolf bite this dangerous."

"Sure," Aiden said flatly. "And if you survive this, he is going to kill you again anyway, you are no match for him."

It was nothing but the truth and it hit me somewhere angry and hopeless simultaneously.

But I had no strength left to be angry so I just let it sit there.

"There was a dark time in my past when I was running from a ripper that wanted me dead," he said, and his voice had shifted into something more even, more careful, like he was measuring out exactly how much he was willing to give. "I met Nathan and saved his life. Together we chose to form a pack and take the ripper down. One of the people we saved along the way was Joshua, who had been captured by hunters. They made him what he is — a wolf injected with the venom of seven different packs. He was the only one who survived the process and that's what makes his bite so dangerous. We never found a cure for it." A pause. "End of story."

I opened my mouth to respond and a wave of pain detonated from my chest outward — massive, sudden, the kind that doesn't ask permission — and I coughed hard, and what came out of my mouth was black. Dark, a bad-smelling blood that tasted like metal and something worse underneath it, and even through the pain I registered how bad that was. Black blood meant the venom had reached somewhere deeper than before.

Death was close I guess.

But my mouth was still running. Apparently it hadn't gotten the message.

"You built a whole pack from nothing," I said when I could breathe again, and my voice came out smaller than I wanted. "Just you and Nathan and some people you pulled out of bad situations along the way."

He looked down at me like I'd said something unexpected. Like the observation had landed somewhere he hadn't left a door open for.

"Yes."

"That's—" I coughed again, tasted copper, kept going. "That's actually kind of incredible. Don't let it go to your head."

“Whatever, your words mean nothing to me. So keep your praise to yourself”

Something shifted at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. But adjacent to one.

"You're a really great storyteller," I said sarcastically, because I wasn't done yet and my mouth was apparently committed to this until the end. "And yet I find it incredibly hard to believe that you — *you* — were running from something called a ripper." I coughed again, harder this time, and pressed my hand to my chest. "What even is that?"

"Shut up," he said not in cruel way. Just direct. "You are dying. And your mouth still keeps moving."