Everyone Who Entered the Forbidden Room Wanted Me Dead novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: The Hunt

Bryn shifts for the first time in six years, shoves Tobias off Elias and runs to his cabin, where he tends her bruises, until her father walks in alone and threatens Tobias's life.

Tobias hit Elias in the chest and the two of them went down in the dry leaves.

Teeth snapped an inch from Elias's face.

He got a forearm under the wolf's jaw and held it off, and I saw the muscles in his arm shake.

The other hunters were already climbing back to their feet.

I had not shifted in six years.

My father had forbidden it, and my wolf had gone quiet and stayed quiet, and I had let her.

I looked at Tobias's flat green eyes, and I stopped asking permission.

The change tore through me from the spine outward.

My clothes split, my hands hit the ground as paws, and the pain in my throat turned to white heat.

My wolf came up out of the dark and she was glad.

She was bigger than I remembered.

I hit Tobias's shoulder with my own and threw him off Elias into the rock.

He yelped, hit hard, and lay winded.

I stood over him with my teeth bared and every instinct in me screaming not to bite.

He was my mate.

He had crushed my windpipe an hour ago, and I still could not.

"Go!" Elias shouted. He was on his feet with blood on his sleeve. "Bryn, go!"

He could not hear me whine, so I ran.

He ran beside me in his own body, faster than any man I had ever seen, and I did not ask how.

Behind us the hunters howled.

We ran four miles through the cedars, up a slope and down a creek bed, and every time I slowed Elias slapped my flank and pointed ahead.

The cabin sat under a granite shelf where no road reached it.

It was a one-room place with a stove, a bed, and a shelf of tools.

Elias shouldered the door open and I fell through it onto the boards.

I changed back, shaking and bare, with leaves in my hair.

He did not look.

He pulled his canvas jacket off a peg and held it out at arm's length, with his eyes on the wall.

I put it on.

It smelled like pine smoke and cold air.

"Sit," he said.

I sat on the bed.

He took a washcloth and a basin from the shelf and knelt in front of me, finally looking at my face, and I saw him go still.

The bruises on my throat were dark purple, in the shape of ten fingers.

"May I see?" he said.

I lifted my chin.

His thumb touched the line of my collarbone first, to steady me, and then moved up along the swelling with the wet cloth.

I felt every pass of it.

It was the first time anyone had touched me gently since Tobias had at the river.

My skin was too tender to flinch, and I told myself it was only shock that made my pulse go hard.

"Your arm," I said.

He had a long red gash from wrist to elbow where the hunter's teeth had raked it.

"It's closing," he said.

It was, already, thin and pink.

His own pulse beat visibly in his neck, and when my hand rose to take the cloth from him his breath stopped for half a heartbeat.

I decided that was the run.

He had run four miles at full speed, and a man's breath stops when he is tired.

"Why did you fight them?" I asked.

He watched my mouth for the end of the sentence.

"You asked me to go back," he said. "I didn't want to."

"That isn't an answer."

"It's the one I have."

He took the cloth back and wrung it out.

"Your father pays me to keep you inside the border," he said. "He didn't pay me to watch a man choke you."

"Then what's he going to say when you tell him you disobeyed?"

"I'm not going to tell him anything."

He stood, and the bed creaked as he turned to the stove.

I watched his back and wondered whether I could trust one word out of his mouth.

Then he went still all at once, and his hand dropped from the stove door.

He had felt it before I heard it.

A tread on the cabin step, slow and even.

Not a hunter's rush.

Not a pack.

One man, in no hurry at all.

I pulled the jacket tight at my throat.

Elias moved between me and the door.

It opened without a knock.

My father stood in the frame with the iron key at his neck and no guard at his back.

He took in the basin, the cloth, and the jacket on my shoulders in one calm look.

"You've had your run, Bryn," Declan Harlan said. "Come home now, or the boy dies for what he did."

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