Page 24 of Bound to the Wolf
She left Reece to stand there and sniff the room—or whatever it was werewolves did—and backed up three steps to start tracing her fingers along the wall. That was the plan, anyway. But she seemed to cross some sort of invisible barrier, and a burning pain started in her wrists and immediately shot up her arms and down her chest.
It was like plunging both arms into boiling water; the heat seared through muscle and bone, locking every joint rigid, and then it hit her sternum like a fist punching inward, collapsing her breath into a single strangled gasp. So quick and unexpected that she screamed. Her knees buckled, and she fell to the floor.
Chapter
Ten
Reece rushed toward Delainey without a thought. She seemed to cross some sort of barrier, and her yelling stopped as if it had never happened. He reached for her, but she swatted his hand away.
“I’m fine. Get away from me.” She was on her knees, one palm flat against the warped floorboards.
He didn’t move back. He felt strange. His wolf was close to the surface in a way that it almost never was. He had control of that other form; he was the master, his wolf was under his command, but right now the balance felt off.
His senses were sharper. The room was dark, but to his eyes it may as well have been illuminated by moonlight. Every grain in the rough-hewn planks was visible to him, every rusty nail head, the dark seams of packed earth between the boards.
The walls were unpainted pine gone silver with age, and in the far corner a section of the ceiling sagged where water damage had softened the wood. His instincts were screaming at him, and when he homed in on Delainey, they said: Protect. Take. Mine.
He burrowed down and curled his fists until his fingers pricked his palm, his claws peeking out from what should have been human fingers. He had to look down to confirm he wasn’t partially shifted.
Somewhere in his rational brain he knew this wasn’t normal, but the rational part of his brain was not in control right now.
In the dim light, Delainey had gone a little gray, though he didn’t know if that was from whatever had just caused her to cry out in pain, or whatever had caused them to end up in this room in the first place.
Sweat beaded on her brow. She wiped it away with the back of her hand, then scowled at the large bracelet on her wrist. The metal was nearly as wide as her hand, its tarnished green edges pressing dull indentations into the skin above her wrist bones. She hadn’t been wearing those when they were taken. He remembered that. There was one on her other wrist too, and when he looked down at his own hands, he saw matching jewelry.
“What is this?” The words were hard to get out, like his tongue didn’t fit into his mouth. He reached up and ran his hand from his forehead down over his nose and mouth, trying to feel if he had grown a snout like he sometimes did in his partially shifted form, then ran it over his jaw.
No, it all felt human.
His jaw was square and rough with a day’s worth of stubble; the freckles on his cheekbones invisible to his own fingers, but the bones beneath them hard and familiar. This was just more of his wolf taking the reins, making words feel foreign, like he was trying to translate them from another language and speak underwater at the same time.
Delainey curled her arms up like she was doing a bicep curl, or a Wonder Woman pose, and flashed the manacles at him.
“This is magic bullshit,” she said, turning the cuffs so the etchings caught what little light filtered through the wall. The symbols carved into the brass were dense and overlapping.
“None I’ve ever seen,” he managed, his voice coming out lower and rougher than it should have, more growl than speech, trying to rack his brain for anything like it. Had he learned… the thought trailed off.
“Yeah, one of us is the expert here.” She wiped dust off her backside, and Reece’s eyes snagged on the curve of it.
His wolf growled in satisfaction, and he had to clamp back the urge to reach out and touch.
No, that would be bad.
She might actually kill him for that. The man was trying to say something, to insist they stay away from this witch, but the wolf didn’t care what the stupid man had to think. Reece liked the smell of her.
Roses and fire, tantalizing even under dust and mildew.
He took a step closer. Too close, he knew, and inside her personal space. He was a full head taller than her, broad enough that his shadow swallowed hers, and at this distance he could see the dust caught in the tight spirals of her curls and the small scratch along her jawline where the floorboards had scraped her skin.
Delainey glared at him, irritation washing over her face as she tilted her chin up to scowl. “Step back.” She planted one foot behind her, squaring her stance, her weight shifting onto her back leg like a fighter bracing for impact.
Reece couldn’t do it. His wolf refused, and he held his ground.
“Last warning!”
He didn’t move.
Delainey held up one of her manacled hands and flicked her fingers at him like she was shooing him away. A wave of magicrammed into him and sent him flying across the room. The force was like being hit center-mass by a battering ram, it caught him under the ribs and lifted his boots clean off the floorboards, his arms wheeling uselessly as his body traveled the full eight feet of the room in less than a second and a wave of excruciating pain crashed through him before he hit the wall.
