Chapter 20: The Yield

I stood on three legs with blood in my mouth and the pack screaming my name.

Braden backed off a step.

He had expected the whine, and I had given him a snarl.

His eyes went wide for one moment, and I saw the man behind them thinking: she never does this.

I had never done it.

That was the whole of what he knew about me.

He came at me fast, to finish it, and he did not drop his shoulder.

He had learned that much since the first pass.

But there was something else I knew, something he had never once noticed about himself.

I had put my teeth into his left hind leg at the start, and he had not stopped favoring it since.

He had never been badly hurt in a fight, and he did not know how to move around a wound.

He lunged, and I did not go right.

I went straight at him, low, under his jaws, and took the leg again in the same place.

My teeth met in the tendon.

He screamed.

It was an awful sound, and the whole pack heard it.

I did not let go.

I was a midwife, and I knew where bodies bend.

I threw my weight sideways and twisted.

His leg folded under him.

He went down on his side.

I climbed over him on my three good legs and put my full weight across his chest.

He thrashed.

He was bigger and heavier, and in one more heartbeat he would have thrown me clear.

But my jaw was at the side of his throat, and he knew it.

He stopped.

I held there, not biting, my teeth against his skin.

Under my muzzle his pulse ran fast and light.

I could feel him waiting for what I would do.

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