In Heat for My Stepbrother novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: The Knife

Liesel fights the killer in the dark and saves Judd, finds the generator cut, and the lights come on with her in a bloody white dress holding the blade.

The shape stopped at the foot of the bed.

I could see the blade now, a thin line of moonlight in a gloved hand.

He wasn't looking at me at all.

I was sitting in Judd's lap, and the man with the knife didn't know I was there.

Judd's chained arm jerked so hard the iron ring groaned in the wall.

"Who's there?" he snarled.

Nobody answered.

The knife came up.

My left hand was on the nightstand.

My fingers closed on the brass lamp before I'd decided anything.

I swung it with everything I had.

He hadn't seen me coming.

He hadn't smelled me coming.

Nobody ever did.

He came back fast, swinging blind at the place the sound had come from.

The blade missed my face and went into Judd instead.

I heard it go in.

Judd made a noise I will hear for the rest of my life.

I swung the lamp again and caught the man's arm, and the knife spun out of his hand.

It hit the floorboards somewhere by the window.

He didn't go after it.

He went out the window instead, one boot on the sill and gone, and the curtain blew back into the room.

I dropped the lamp.

"Judd."

He was sagging against the headboard with his free hand clamped on his chest.

Something hot and wet was running between his fingers.

"Liesel." His voice was thick. "Are you hurt?"

"You're the one bleeding, idiot."

I pushed his hand away and felt for the wound.

It ran across the left side of his chest, long and deep, and it was hissing faintly under my palms.

Silver.

The skin around it was burning.

I balled up the skirt of the white dress and pressed it down with both hands.

Judd swore through his teeth.

"Good," I said. "Keep swearing. It means you're alive."

"You hit him with my lamp."

"It was the closest thing."

"That lamp was my grandmother's."

"Then she can send me a bill."

He laughed, and it turned into a cough, and the blood came faster under my hands.

I leaned my whole weight on him.

The silk was soaked through in seconds.

"Stay with me," I said. "Talk."

"You came back," he said. "You were just down the hall, and you came back."

"Somebody had to lock your cuff."

Footsteps pounded in the corridor.

A flashlight beam swung through the door and hit me full in the face.

"Get off him."

Ket Stanwick filled the doorway, six feet of bleached hair and silver rings, and her eyes were already yellow.

"Ket," Judd said. "She saved my life. Somebody came in with a knife."

The flashlight dropped to his chest and the blood.

Ket crossed the room in two strides.

She didn't touch me.

She grabbed the chain, checked the cuff, and yanked it once to be sure it held.

Then she pulled a key on a cord out from under her shirt and stared at it.

"I'm late," she said hoarsely. "I know. I'm late."

That was when I understood.

The key around her neck.

The way she checked the lock before she looked at his face.

She wasn't his lover.

She was his chain-keeper.

For four years I'd hated her for the wrong thing.

"Keep the pressure on," Ket said to me. "Don't you dare let up."

"Now go get the Alpha. Tell him somebody's been in here."

"The generator should have caught," I said. "Thirty seconds. I wired it myself."

"Then go see why it didn't."

I got up.

My legs nearly went.

At the window, something glinted on the floorboards.

The knife.

I picked it up by the handle without thinking, because whoever had dropped it was still out there, and it was the only weapon in the room.

I went down the back stair in the dark with one hand on the wall.

The back door was hanging open on the cold.

The generator shed sat twenty yards out, and I ran it in my party shoes and kicked them off halfway.

The generator was running.

It just wasn't feeding anything.

I found my way to the transfer switch by feel.

Then I followed the feed cable down from it with my fingers.

Two feet from the wall, the cable stopped.

I felt the end.

Clean copper strands, splayed under my thumb.

Somebody had cut it straight through.

I stood there in my stocking feet with the knife in one hand and my thumb on the cut.

Somebody had planned the dark.

I ran back into the house to find Ozias.

The back corridor fed into the great hall, and the great hall was full of wolves.

I could hear them breathing all around me.

"Ozias!" I shouted. "Somebody stabbed Judd!"

Then every light in the packhouse came on at once.

The utility had come back.

Two hundred wolves were standing in the great hall, blinking in the light.

And every one of them was looking at me.

I looked down.

The white dress was red from the waist to the hem.

My hands were red to the wrists.

And in my right hand was a silver-edged knife, still wet.

Nobody moved.

Up on the little stage, my stepfather had gone gray.

My mother had both hands over her mouth.

Beside them, Wendell Varden set down his glass very carefully.

He looked at me with soft, sorry eyes.

"God," he said quietly, into the silence. "Nobody would ever smell her coming."

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