All Chapters of Knotting the Hunter: Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

DaxI take the last curve fast enough that the truck complains about it, and the wolf has been pacing the inside of my skull since the word body.'Someone left death at our fence. On our ground.'Working on it.'Find out who. Open their throat.'Working on that too. Let’s just find out first what exactly is going on.Noah's voice keeps coming through the phone, low, talking me through turns I've known all my life.He needs something to do while he waits.I don't stop him.My lights hit his truck.Then him.He's put himself between her and the road.I'm out and moving before the engine dies."Dax. Before you look, I need you to-"I look.My brain does the stupid thing brains do, where it refuses the whole picture and grabs one detail instead.The gap in her front teeth."No," I hear myself say."No, hang on. Hang on.""Dax.""I know her."My voice doesn't sound like mine."Noah, I know her. That's Mary. Mary Masterson, she's... she was..."Nothing else comes out.I've got a photo of th

Dax"Nobody crosses the fence line. Not for work, not for supplies, not to settle a bet. Nobody."Half the pack is standing in my yard and most of them started arguing before I finished the sentence."I've got a job in town, Alpha-""Call in sick.""For how long?""As long as it takes.""My sister's got a dentist appointment on Thursday-""Reschedule it. I'm not risking her life over a cleaning."That lands about as well as you'd expect.The yard goes loud again, everybody's problems talking over everybody else's, and I let it run for a few seconds.They'll settle faster if they get it out.Old Hennig hasn't said a word.He's leaning on the porch rail with his arms crossed, watching me the way he's watched me since I was a kid, and when I catch his eye he gives me one slow nod.That nod does more for the yard than anything I've said.Hennig buys it, so it must be real.The arguing drops to grumbling, and grumbling I can live with."A man is dead in town with his throat torn open," I t

NoahWalking alone down a murder path at midnight, wearing enough deer blood to season a butcher shop, waiting for a death omen to notice me.This is my life. I picked this.The plan is simple, which is what we said about the last plan too.I'm the easy prey.The thing hunts easy prey.Somewhere in the dark to my left there are three wolves moving without a sound, and I can't see any of them, which is the point, and I hate it, which is irrelevant.My earpiece is a burner phone on an open call in my chest pocket. Dax's voice comes through it barely above a breath."It's moving. Quarter mile to the west. Keep walking, gorgeous.""Don't call me gorgeous on an op.""Keep walking, extremely average-looking man."I'm going to kill him after I survive this.First one, then the other. I'm committed.The night is doing that thing where every sound is a monster.Branch.Water.My own stupid heart.And then all of it stops at once, every frog and cricket in the county going silent like somebody

NoahThere's a saying about not starting arguments you can't finish, and whoever coined it never had a naked Alpha pull them into a sixty-nine on gym mats mid-sentence, because I had a point to make and it's gone now.Everything's gone now.There's just his mouth sliding hot over me and his cock heavy on my tongue and the two of us making sounds into each other that the emergency lighting is lucky it can't hear.He sucks like he's settling the argument.Long and greedy, tongue working the underside, and every time his lips ride over the studs he hums like he found money, and the hum goes straight through me, and my hips try to chase his mouth and his forearm just pins them down.Casual.Insulting.Doing it while I've got my own mouth full of him, the weight and the salt and the small twitch he gives when I take him deep, the way his thighs go rigid under my hands every time I pull off slow with suction, like his whole body is bracing against how good it is.I'd gloat if my mouth wasn'

NoahPruitt sees it first, which he'll be reminding me about for the rest of both our lives, one word at a time."Line," he says, and stops walking.It's strung across the deer trail at chest height, pale in the flashlight, thick as a bootlace.I put the back of my knife against it and press. It gives about as much as a fence wire gives, then hums.Spider silk doesn't hum.Spider silk also doesn't anchor twenty feet up two separate spruces with the slack taken out like somebody rigged it on purpose."That's new," Pruitt says."That's a problem," I say, because apparently we’re taking turns stating the obvious.A quarter mile behind us, forty volunteers are walking a grid with whistles and good intentions, looking for Ryan Mercer, nineteen.His car's been sitting at the trailhead for two days, and we knew about it before the town did, because we always do.Which is why the two of us are out front in the dark, and somebody's uncle with a headlamp isn't.I cut the strand.It takes actual