She Took Down the Rogue, Now He Can't Look Away novel · Chapter 1 of 3
Chapter 1: She Stands Over the Kill
Passion kills the rogue wolf alone and bleeding, Jamison finds her standing over the body, and after a charged exchange he carries her back to the lodge and pauses at the med room door with her answer left hanging.
The rogue hit me from the blind side before I heard him move.
The broken fern stem I'd been reading was still weeping sap when his weight slammed into my ribs and drove me face-first into the wet moss. My teeth snapped together. Blood filled my mouth.
He'd been waiting. Not running. The pressed tracks I'd followed into the clearing were a lie, a loop he'd walked twice to make the trail look fresh.
And I'd walked into it.
The gray mass of him rolled off me and circled, low to the ground, yellow eyes bright with something past hunger. Sixty pounds heavier than me at least. Maybe more. His muzzle was wet, and not from rain.
I pushed up to one knee. My side was already screaming where his claws had caught me on the way down. I could feel the tear in my jacket, the slow hot spread under it.
He wanted me to run.
The snow had started, fine and dry, drifting through the golden light that cut between the firs. It settled on his fur and melted. It settled on my hands and I felt every flake like a clock ticking.
Run, his stillness said. Give me the chase.
I shifted instead.
The change ripped through me in less than a breath. My wolf form poured out of my skin, black as polished obsidian, half a head smaller than every wolf on the team and twice as fast as any of them. The pain in my side sharpened, then dulled, then became something I could use.
He lunged.
I let him come.
His jaws went for my throat, all brute force and no geometry. I dropped under the line of his attack, felt his teeth graze the fur at my shoulder, and turned. My own momentum was nothing. His was everything. I used it.
My jaws closed on his foreleg and I pulled, not against him but across, and his weight did the work. He went down hard, snow spraying up around us, and I was on him before he could roll.
He snapped at my face. I took the bite on my flank instead, let him get his grip, let him think he was winning.
Then I drove him into the frozen ground and put my teeth around his throat.
He stopped fighting.
The forest had gone silent around us. No birds. No wind. Only the pulse hammering against my tongue, and the exact moment he understood that the smaller wolf had beaten him, that he was already dead and just waiting for the bite to finish it.
I finished it.
His blood was hot in my mouth, and then it was done, and the clearing was very quiet.
I stood over him. My chest heaved. Blood matted my black coat, some of it his, some of it mine. The snow kept falling, soft and indifferent.
Then the wind shifted, and I smelled pine and woodsmoke.
Jamison burst into the clearing in his wolf form, enormous and silver-grey, skidding to a halt at the edge of the trees. Behind him came the rest of the tracking party, four wolves I knew by their shapes, all of them stopping dead at the same moment.
They stared.
At the rogue. At me. At the blood on the snow.
Jamison shifted back first. The change came over him like a wave breaking, and then he was standing there in his dark wool coat and fitted black henley, his dark brown eyes wide and fixed on me with something I had never seen in them before.
'Passion?' he said.
My name. From him. In that voice, low and rough, like the word had been torn out of him before he could stop it.
I shifted back. The pain came with me, sharper now, and I was kneeling in the snow with my clothes torn and my side bleeding freely. My dark green flannel was ruined. My hands were shaking.
He took a step toward me.
I flinched.
I did not mean to. It just happened. My body remembered every cold dismissal, every report he had read without looking up, every time he had assigned me the worst patrols and called it good management.
He stopped.
The other wolves shifted back behind him, one by one, but none of them moved. They stood in a loose line at the edge of the trees, watching their Alpha watch me.
'You're bleeding,' Jamison said.
His voice was flat. Controlled. But his hands were already moving, stripping off his coat, then reaching for the hem of his black henley. He tore a strip from the bottom with one hard pull, the sound of it loud in the quiet.
I watched him do it and felt something turn over in my chest.
The bare strip of his stomach showed for one second before the coat fell back over it. A line of muscle. Dark hair below his navel. A scar I'd never seen, pale across his ribs.
Then he was crossing the clearing in three strides and dropping to his knees in the snow beside me. His hands found my side, pressing the strip of fabric against the wound, and I hissed through my teeth at the pressure.
'I told you I could handle myself,' I said.
'I know.'
His voice was lower now. Almost gentle. His hands stayed on me, steady and warm through the cold, and I could feel the heat of him even through the cloth.
'You didn't want me on this hunt,' I said. 'You made that clear.'
'I was wrong.'
He said it without looking away. No pause. No qualification. The words came out of him like he had been holding them for years and my blood on the snow had finally forced them loose.
'I've been wrong about you for a long time, Passion.'
Behind him, one of the trackers shifted his weight. Someone cleared their throat.
Jamison didn't blink.
'I'm going to carry you out,' he said.
'No.'
'That wasn't a request.'
'I can walk.'
'You can barely kneel.'
He was right. The blood was still coming, slower now under the pressure of his hands, but I could feel the edges of the wound pulling with every breath. My legs were shaking. The cold was starting to sink in past the adrenaline.
But I didn't want his arms around me. I didn't want to be carried out of this clearing like something he had to manage.
I wanted to walk out on my own feet and let the blood trail speak for me.
'Passion.'
My name, again. He said it like he was testing the weight of it.
'If you carry me in there,' I said, 'you're not leaving.'
I didn't know I was going to say it until it was out. My voice was raw, and the words hung in the cold air between us, and I didn't take them back.
His eyes dropped to my mouth. Then back to my eyes.
He didn't argue. He just slid one arm under my knees and the other around my back, and then he lifted me, and I was too tired and too hurt to do anything but let him.
My head fell against his shoulder. He smelled like pine resin and woodsmoke, like the forest after a fire, and his arms were solid around me.
My hand found the collar of his coat. I gripped it and held on.
The pack formed up around us without a word. A protective circle. A silent escort.
Nobody spoke on the walk back. The snow fell through the trees, and Jamison carried me, and his thumb moved in a slow circle against my hip through the torn fabric of my jeans.
I told myself it was just the cold.
I tried to blame the blood loss.
But my body knew better. My body had gone warm everywhere he touched, and the warmth had nothing to do with the fever starting at the edges of the wound.
I looked at him. The snow had soaked through his coat at the shoulders. His henley clung to his chest where my blood had seeped into it, the fabric dark and wet, and I could see the pulse moving in his throat above the collar.
I wanted to put my mouth there.
The thought came through me sharp and specific, and I didn't push it away. I let it sit in my chest, hot and honest, while he carried me through the trees.
He carried me all the way to the med room at the edge of the lodge. The door was closed. The light above it was on, a yellow glow against the blue dark.
'I can stand now,' I said.
He didn't put me down.
His arm stayed around my waist, my weight still against him, and he reached for the latch with his free hand.
I stopped telling him to let go.
He looked at my mouth.
Then his fingers closed around the latch.
'Do you want me to stay?' he asked.
He didn't turn. Didn't push the door open. The question came out low, rough, like he already knew the answer and needed to hear me say it anyway.
I looked at his throat. At the snow melting in his hair. At his hand on the latch, white-knuckled, waiting.
'Yes.'
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