Chapter 6 – Tells

Dax

The thing's in pieces at our feet and my body's still waiting for round two.

I never come down off a kill clean. My blood's still up, ears still straining, every muscle still voting to hit something else.

I don’t think it’s a werewolf thing. It’s an adrenaline thing.

So when the wolf decides to change the subject, I'm in no shape to win the argument.

He worked the whole fight like a pro. No drama. Kill it, take it apart, done.

Now the thing is down, and he turns around, takes one long look at the hunter, and loses his entire fucking mind.

Ours, he says, like the last twenty minutes were a date. He held. He didn't run. Ours. Bite him. Claim him.

"He's a hunter."

A brave one.

"A dumb one. He knifed a corpse in the kidney and looked betrayed when it didn't drop."

Ours, says the wolf, who has never once been talked out of anything.

Great. Real productive. Glad we got into it.

Then I make my biggest mistake, which is breathing.

The wind shifts and I get a full pull of him, and the fight stripped all his careful armor off.

None of the steel and hatred and clean cold lying he usually wears.

Just sweat and adrenaline and the thing underneath that he keeps insisting is fear.

It is not fear.

I've had the real thing pointed at me plenty.

This is a whole different emotion.

Hot and embarrassed and wanting, cranked all the way up by twenty minutes of nearly dying, and it lands somewhere in me that doesn't keep notes or follow rules.

Ours, the wolf breathes, and I don't argue, which scares me worse than the corpse did.

"You're staring," Noah says curtly.

"You stink."

"You're naked."

"And?"

He's got no and.

There's a whole lecture loaded behind his teeth, and instead his eyes drop, half a second, before he drags them back up to my face like his own neck just sold him out.

The blush is faint. A human would miss it. I don't.

"Put something on, for god’s sake."

"My pants are confetti somewhere in those trees. Knock yourself out looking."

"I'm not looking for your pants."

"You don’t seem to be having any trouble looking at my dick."

"I did not."

"Hunter."

His name still lands, three weeks running, every single time.

"You absolutely did."

His jaw sets, that muscle going under the stubble, and the worst part of me reads it as a point on the board and immediately wants another.

So I take a step closer.

The smart play is to get behind the fence surrounding our complex, have a cold shower, and a long sit-down with myself about what I'm allowed to want.

I take the step instead.

He doesn't back up.

That's new.

Three weeks of him guarding his careful distance and tonight he plants his boots over a dead man and lifts his chin like he's daring me to try it.

Closer, the wolf orders.

No clowning left in him.

Take what's ours.

"This is a bad idea," I tell him.

Out loud. To his face. Genius move.

"What is?"

I don't answer. There's no version of that answer that doesn't set fire to my whole life.

His hand comes up to shove me away and lands flat on my chest, over my heart, because there's no shirt to grab.

He doesn't shove.

His hand just stays there, going nowhere, while everything in his face fights everything else in his face and loses.

That's the second his scent tears wide open.

No top note.

No story.

No lie.

Just want, loud enough he'd shoot me for smelling it.

I get a hand around the back of his neck.

Not soft. Nothing in either of us is soft right now.

My thumb is on the hinge of his jaw, his pulse slamming like he never left the fight, and maybe he didn't.

Maybe this is a new fight with different weapons.

He could drop me.

He wouldn’t be able to keep me down, but he could take me down for a few seconds.

He's strong, the ink makes him quick, he could put me on my back in the leaves and not break a sweat.

He grabs a fistful of my hair instead. Hard. Pulls on it like he's stuck between dragging me in and throwing me into a trunk, and honest to god, I couldn’t call it if my life depended on it.

I don't think he could either.

We stay suspended there.

A breath apart. Less.

There's grit on his jaw under my thumb.Dirt and worse off the thing we just killed.

 I press in anyway and feel his throat move when he swallows.

His skin's running hot. Too hot for a human, like the fight cooked him through and the heat's got nowhere left to go.

His breath's on my mouth.

My want's all over him now, snarled up with his, and the two together do something to my skull no woman ever managed, which is a problem for whatever version of me has to wake up tomorrow.

His grip tightens in my hair. Just slightly.

A test, or a dare, or him losing the same argument I'm losing.

The sting of it runs straight down my spine and I want to make a sound I have absolutely no intention of making in front of this man.

His eyes drop to my mouth.

Mine are already on his.

Now, the wolf roars. Now. He's asking. Ours. Take it. Do it, do it, DO IT.

I lean in.

He leans in.

Nobody decides it. It just starts, the last thread of air between us going to nothing, his breath snagging, every nerve I own coming up at once like he struck a match to me.

And then the pull hits.

Cold and low and fast, deep behind the ribs, and it has nothing to do with the hunter at all.

The pack.

They sensed the fight. Of course they did.

An Alpha goes down swinging out here and every one of them feels it like a hook dropped behind the breastbone, and right now Finn and whoever he grabbed are coming through these trees at a flat run to save me from whatever almost won.

Seconds. Not minutes.

And I'm naked, over a butchered corpse, lips a breath off a hunter's mouth.

There's no good way out of this. I take the bad one.

"Go,” I whisper fervently against his lips. It comes out in pieces.

He blinks like I hit him.

"Pack's coming. Go north, off the trail, away from the noise. Now. Move."

For one second he just looks at me, and there's a whole conversation sitting in it that I'll never have the guts to start.

Then the hunter mask slides back down over his face and he's gone, low and quiet into the black, like he was something I dreamed up.

The cold that pours into the space where he stood is worse than being caught in a blizzard.

I don't put a name on it. Not going looking for one.

NO, the wolf rips at the inside of me. Ours. You had him. You let him go. Bring him back. BRING HIM BACK.

"Shut up. Not now. Shut up."

I haul in a breath and try to build a face an Alpha would wear. Anything that doesn’t show what just almost happened.

There’s not enough time. I know it before I finish trying. The feelings roiling through me are too wild to pack up neatly in a few seconds.

The trees blow open and Finn's through first, half-shifted, teeth bared, ready to die for me, and pulls up to nothing because there's nothing left to fight.

Just me. Naked. Shaking. Stinking of dead things and dark magic and the hunter who's spent three weeks trying to put silver in my chest.

His nose works. Once. Twice.

And the Finn from the porch, the one with two beers and a dumb grin asking was the crossbow guy at least hot, that Finn isn't here.

This one's gone quiet.

His eyes track to the dark where Noah ran. Come back to me. Drop to the want he can smell soaked into every inch of me. Come back to me again.

"Tell me he ran because you put the fear of God in him," Finn says. No joke in it anywhere. "Tell me that's the story. That's what I'm smelling."

I don't say anything.

He’s my Beta and my best friend, he reads it in a heartbeat.

"...Right," he says, mostly to himself, and drags a hand down his face.

His head's already turning back toward the trees, toward the sound of the others closing in.

"Okay. They're maybe a minute out."

He looks at me like he's trying to find the guy he had a beer with an hour ago and coming up short.

"So you want to tell me what story we're selling them, Dax? Because right now, I've got nothing. First time in my life. Absolutely nothing."