Page 30 of Bound to the Wolf
She stiffened, realizing exactly whose arms she was in. The moment shattered. Delainey extricated herself from his embrace and didn’t look at him as she straightened her clothes and brushed off dirt from sleeping on the ground with no protection other than what they were wearing.
Dead leaves clung to the back of her jacket and the seat of her jeans. She picked a twig from the tangle of her curls and flicked it aside, then scrubbed her palms together to knock the grit from them. The scratch along her jawline from the shack’s floorboards had scabbed overnight into a thin dark line.
He might have tried to shift and sleep as a wolf; he could have offered her more warmth covered in fur, but that hadn’t occurred to him last night.
“I’m going on the other side of this tree,” Delainey told him, jabbing her thumb over her shoulder at a wide-trunked hickory about four feet behind them, “and you are going to stay right where you are and ignore any sounds. Got it?”
Reece suppressed a smile and nodded. Words were hard this morning, so he didn’t try to search for them.
His stomach growled, but he didn’t want to hunt for food. It was early, and they needed to find a way out of these woods and get back home as fast as they could.
Did anyone realize they were gone yet? He was sure the pack would be in an uproar.
How far away had Nico and Elise really been when the attack took place? Had they come rushing, or had they been too far to hear the disturbance?
Surely someone would have realized something was wrong when Reece didn’t check in and didn’t come home. He had to assume the same was true for Delainey.
A coven and a pack weren’t all that different when it came to the way your movements were monitored and your loved ones meddled. Knowing they were gone didn’t mean anyone would know where to look.
Delainey came back from around the tree, and he made no comment about what she might have been doing there.
“We need to move,” he said. He pushed himself to standing, his joints stiff from the night on the ground, and rolled his neck until something popped. The words were a struggle to get out, but she didn’t argue.
The fire had died during the night.
Delainey had risked her unstable magic to put up a protective ward circle around them; it had burned a hole into the forest floor in some places, but it seemed to have held. She broke the circle, and they left their camp. She found the same stream he had the night before and paused to dip her hands in the water to wash them, then cupped water in her palms and washed her face, then drank deep. Reece did the same.
The stream was barely two feet across, running over a bed of smooth gray stones and exposed tree roots; the water was clear enough to see every pebble at the bottom. It was ice-cold, and it ran fast enough to produce a low, constant murmur that had been background noise all night.
Then they took off walking again.
Delainey didn’t talk. Yesterday she hadn’t stopped thinking out loud, her theories, her plans, even complaining about blisters.
Now she was keeping whatever was going on in her head to herself. A part of him wanted to ask why, but his lips tingled with the memory of the kisses he had peppered on her neck, and he worried that was the reason.
Had his wolf ruined everything already?
The manacles were heavy on his wrists.
He wondered if he could shift and slip the bindings off that way, but wolf paws were not that much smaller than human hands. He had a feeling nothing would be that easy; something magical would prevent it.
Reece fucking hated magic.
He hated the way it crawled over his skin and defied logic. He hated the slimy smell of it, the way it took the rules of the world and threw them out.
It was never clean, never simple, and it didn’t play fair.
But he kept those thoughts to himself. His only ally right now was a very magical woman, and he didn’t feel the need to insult her skills or her arsenal, when those might be the thing necessary to their survival.
He hated to rely on magic, but he wasn’t a fool.
They had made it a good distance from their overnight camp when the scent of somethingwrongtickled his nose, and he froze. He took a couple more steps before the tingling of the cuffs must have warned her about the distance.
“What?” she asked. “Another bunny?”
“We’re not alone.” Before he had time to say anything more, two werewolves, one in human form, one wearing his wolf, burst from the trees and attacked.
The wolf came first, a lean brown shape exploding through a wall of trees, leaves and broken branches flying in its wake,already mid-lunge before its paws cleared the undergrowth. The one in human form was a half-step behind, a thick-necked man in dark tactical clothing, his boots chewing up the ground as he sprinted.
