Page 83 of Bound to the Wolf
She headed back to the highway, and they drove back to pack territory without saying a word.
Chapter
Thirty-Eight
She and Reece weren’t talking about the little excursion to go see Emerson.
Delainey wasn’t sure what had possessed the stalking trip, and she didn’t really want to interrogate that.
As far as she could tell, Emerson was telling the truth. He was in Hobson for some kind of business at the university, and he was trying to make himself useful by helping the coven break the tether.
Two days later, after one more phone call from Aya and Serena, they were still no closer.
But time in the cabin was good.
Those mornings she and Reece had shared before they became official now included cuddling and kisses. He already knew what kind of coffee she liked, which meant she didn’t even have to train him. Things with him were good, great even, but the cabin itself was starting to feel like a prison.
Nico and Elise had to be getting itchy to get their space back. It was getting a little ridiculous to expect that they could stay here indefinitely.
“I want to try and break the tether,” she told Reece one morning while the sun streamed through the windows in the kitchen.
Reece sat on one of the benches under the counter with a mug in his large hands. He looked wary. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
“We’ve been sitting here waiting for the others to figure this out and they haven’t figured out shit. We have to try something.”
“What did you have in mind?”
“A bit of spell work, maybe. Aya is the smartest witch I know but she can’t feel it like we can. I’m going to go deep inside and see if I can’t pry this thing apart with my own damn magic.”
Reece definitely didn’t like the sound of that, and he wasn’t trying to hide it. “We could try and outrun it again,” he said, setting his mug down on the counter with a dull thud.
“When we tried that last time we both almost had heart attacks.”
He shrugged. “Yeah, but I swear I felt like it was going to snap if I just made it a few more feet.”
She didn’t want to suffer the pain that came from testing the length of the tether, and she didn’t want to risk Reece dropping dead from a heart attack. But he wasn’t wrong.
She had felt the exact same thing. It couldn’t hurt to try, as long as they were careful and didn’t have heart attacks, a thing they could definitely prevent by just willing it away.
They went outside but didn’t head for the woods. There was no need. There was plenty of green space around the cottage. On either side of the gravel driveway, the grass was thick and uncut, damp with morning dew that soaked immediately through Delainey’s sneakers.
She got up on her tiptoes and kissed Reece’s nose.
“Race you,” she said, and then she turned around and took off running, leaving him to make a noise about her cheating before he went running in the other direction.
A tree blurred past her. She felt the wind on her face, and it was exhilarating for about three seconds before she could feel the tether start to stretch as they passed the bounds of the safe limit.
It started as a tingling warmth in her sternum, almost pleasant, the way a muscle felt right before a cramp, and then it wasn’t pleasant at all. She felt the pain in her chest and tried to pretend it was just uncomfortable, but a blaze of agony washed over her.
It was like someone had driven a hook between her ribs and yanked, the invisible line pulling tight and then pulling harder, and her vision whited out at the edges as every nerve from her collarbone to her navel screamed.
Between one stride and the next, Delainey’s legs gave out, her palms and knees hitting the dirt. The impact sent a sharp sting up through her wrists and kneecaps, gravel and grass pressing into her skin hard enough to leave marks.
“No,” she gasped. She tasted something copper in her mouth, and her world narrowed to pinprick vision in front of her.
Her heartbeat was so loud in her ears that she couldn’t hear anything else.
It felt like her soul was being torn out of her.
