Page 38 of Bound to the Wolf
“It’s been months,” Reece stepped over a fallen branch without breaking stride, his boots finding solid ground on the other side with the ease of someone who’d spent half his lifemoving through woods like these. “As far as I know, he’s gone. I don’t even know if he’s still alive. Dawson would kill him if he showed up in Iron Runner territory again.”
Delainey ran her fingers over the bark of a tree as they passed. “Do you think we’re in Iron Runner territory?”
That wouldn’t be great. If the Iron Runners had captured them, that would be a catastrophe. But if someone else was using their vast territory without their knowledge, it might not be the worst outcome if they could find pack members and explain their plight.
Reece tipped his head back and breathed in deep. “It doesn’t smell like any pack territory,” he turned in a slow half-circle, nostrils flaring, the tendons in his neck visible as he worked through whatever catalogue of scents his wolf was sorting. “But we can’t be sure. And even if it was Austin, why would he take us?”
That was a good question. Delainey didn’t answer, instead turning it around in her mind.
Nico and Elise were the ones who were dating, not her and Reece. She refused to think about last night at all. If someone had a problem with witches and werewolves talking to one another, that was a complication on an entirely different level. And it wasn’t just Austin LaSalle who had issues with witches and werewolves; Elise’s own parents had come to town and made their displeasure known.
She wasn’t about to accusethemof kidnapping her and Reece.
Delainey trudged through the forest and wished she had any idea why someone would do this. Somewhere ahead and to the left, she caught the faint sound of moving water, not the tiny stream from their camp, but something wider, a steady rush that carried through the trees. Reece had already angled toward it without saying a word.
Once she got home, she was going to figure it out.
Chapter
Seventeen
Time sort of faded.
Delainey let Reece take the lead. He was the wolf out of the two of them; maybe he had secret road-sensing powers. She wasn’t questioning it. She was tired and hungry, magically shackled to a man she had let finger her in the woods. She was out of questions and too tired to do anything but trudge forward.
Reece moved a few paces ahead of her at the full length of the manacles’ leash, his broad shoulders cutting a path through the underbrush, the torn sleeve of his shirt flapping loose against his bicep with every stride.
Between one step and the next, the trees disappeared, and a road showed up like magic. Not the magic she performed.
More like a miracle.
It was a simple two-lane highway with gravel on the shoulder and dark asphalt with a faded dotted yellow line down the center. The pavement was cracked in places, and she spotted a pothole large enough to possibly be considered a swimming pool in some counties.
But it was a road, and a road meant cars, and cars meant home. Eventually.
No guardrails lined the edges, and the gravel shoulder was barely two feet wide before the ground dropped off into a shallow drainage ditch choked with weeds and runoff.
She and Reece didn’t need to say a word before they started walking down the shoulder. She didn’t know if he chose their direction on purpose, but they kept moving, walking and walking and walking. They must have walked for an hour without spotting a single car. She might have been worried about the state of disrepair, taken it as a sign no one traveled this path and no one cared to fix it, but that was just the reality of the American highway system.
After another fifteen minutes, Reece froze and stared down the road ahead.
“A car?” Delainey asked.
“Some kind of vehicle,” Reece said without turning, his chin lifted and his nostrils flaring as he tested the air.
They stopped and waited for it to come to them. It was a gigantic truck on lifted wheels that looked like it might eat small children for fun. The thing sat high enough off the ground that Delainey could have crawled under the chassis without ducking, its chrome bumper caked in dried mud and a row of aftermarket light bars mounted across the roof.
Reece stuck his thumb out, the universal sign of hitchhiking, and the truck slowed for a moment. Delainey saw it had those fake exhaust smokestacks coming out of the back of the cab. She wasn’t sure this was exactly the truck she wanted to crawl into, but the driver got one look at them and sped off. A gust of hot exhaust and grit peppered Delainey’s shins as the truck accelerated, and the rumble of its engine faded long after the taillights disappeared around the curve.
Well, crap. She didn’t want him either.
“It’s fine,” she said out loud, not sure if she was reassuring herself or Reece. “There will be other cars.”
There were. Two more passed them, one slowing down, the other nearly running them off the road. Was there something off about them?
They were covered in dirt, and when Delainey looked at Reece, his eyes were still glowing yellow, though humans could easily explain something like that away. She really hoped it wasn’t that they were seeing a black woman with dirty clothes coming out of the woods trying to flag down cars and being all racist about it, because that would not be a kind thing for her neighbors to be.
Reece’s shirt was also torn, and his hair was just as wild as hers. His dark red waves were matted on one side where he’d slept on the ground, and there was a smear of dried blood across his collarbone where his shirt gaped open. They might have looked like two extras from a horror movie, so she wasn’t sure she could blame anyone for not stopping.
