My Panther Mate & Our Little Cub novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: Second Night

Hesper took Tuck to her den for the night, and this time she didn't make a joke about it.

She only squeezed my shoulder and said, "Be kind to him. He's a very big man with a very small heart, and it's cracked."

Then it was the two of us, and a broken door, and a fire.

Darek sat on the edge of the table with his shirt off and the fresh stitches black against his shoulder.

I stood in front of him with a damp cloth and wiped the dried blood from his chest.

"Tell me about Ila," I said. "The last year. Anything."

He was quiet so long I thought he'd refuse.

"She used to sing to him," he said at last. "When he was a baby. I'd come in from hunting and she'd be on the rug with him, singing something about a heron. After his first winter she stopped. She said she was tired. She said her head was full of wool."

"And you?"

"I thought it was grief. I thought, after the birth, some women." He shook his head. "I asked Corra. She said Ila had the wasting sickness, and she'd make something."

I waited.

He opened his mouth and closed it.

Whatever came next, he couldn't say it yet, and I could see him choosing silence.

I let him.

"I don't know what else I'll find," he said. "I don't know what I've done."

"You haven't done anything yet that you can't undo."

"You can't know that."

"No," I said, and put the cloth down. "But I know you came back for him, and for me, and you took a wolf apart in my kitchen."

"I'd do it again."

"I know."

I stepped between his knees.

He caught my face in both hands and looked at me.

Then kissed me, slowly.

I slid my hands over his bare chest, avoiding the stitches, and felt him shudder.

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