Page 40 of Ruthless Bond

The drive south is silent. Four wolves in an SUV, the heater off because we don’t need it, the windows cracked because we’re reading the air. The city thins as we pass through Pullman and into Roseland, the buildings lower, the streetlights sparser, the night opening up around us. I can feel the wolf rising as we get closer, the shift pressing against my skin from the inside, my senses sharpening until I can hear a dog barking six blocks away and smell the lake from three miles out.

Roman’s eyes flick toward my hands.

“No steel?”

I know what he means.

“This isn’t a message.”

His expression changes.

“No,” he says. “I suppose it isn’t.”

The old knuckles are locked in my desk.

Tonight isn’t Voronov business conducted for human eyes.

Tonight is pack business.

We park two blocks from the house. We walk the rest. Four men moving through the dark, and any human who saw us would see four figures in dark clothing. Nothing remarkable.

The house is dark. I can hear four heartbeats inside. Two on the main floor, two upstairs. All sleeping. The rhythms are slow and deep, the unmistakable cadence of unconsciousness.

I look at Roman. He looks at me. Decades of brotherhood and rivalry and complicated love pass between us in a single glance, and then I nod and we move.

It takes less than two minutes.

Fast. Efficient. Final.

When it’s done, four men who drove up from Gary to test our borders are no longer a problem, and the house is quiet again.

Lex handles the cleanup. He’s methodical about it, precise, a wolf who understands that the aftermath is as important as the act. Roman and I leave him to it and drive back toward the city.

I’m running hot. The violence has kicked the wolf into a higher gear, and the shift is pressing against my skin with an urgency that tells me I need to let it happen or I’m going to lose control in a context I can’t afford. I tell Roman to drop me at the compound instead of my building.

“Going for a run?” he asks.

“Going for a hunt.”

He drops me at the gate. I walk through the grounds to the back acreage, the fenced property that the pack uses for runs, five thousand acres of wooded land that backs up against the forest preserve. The air is cold, below freezing, and I can see my breath clouding white in front of me as I strip off my clothes and fold them on the bench by the tree line.

I shift.

The pain of it is brief, a full-body convulsion that lasts maybe two seconds, and then I’m through. Four legs instead of two. A body that’s lower to the ground and four times as strong and covered in black fur that’s thick enough to make the cold irrelevant. My vision changes. Darkness sharpens instead of deepening, movement separating itself from shadow until the forest becomes layers of shape and motion.

I run.

My hearing opens. In human form, I can hear a conversation across a crowded room. In wolf form, I can hear a deer’s heartbeat. The forest is alive with sound: the creak of branches adjusting to the cold, the rustle of small creatures in the leaf litter, the distant low hum of the expressway that forms the southern boundary of our territory. And underneath all of it, the silence. The deep silence of a forest at night, the sound of the world breathing when it thinks no one is listening.

This is the thing that no human will ever understand about what we are. The shift isn’t a curse. It isn’t a loss of control. It’s the opposite. In wolf form, everything that’s complicated becomes simple. The politics, the territory disputes, the federal investigation, the mate bond that’s eating me alive from the inside, all of it falls away, and what’s left is the purest version of what I am. A wolf in the woods. Muscle and instinct and the cold air filling lungs that are built for exactly this.

My paws hit the frozen ground and the impact travels up through my legs and into my shoulders and I am fast. Faster than anything in these woods, faster than the deer I can smell bedded down in the thicket a quarter mile north. Faster than the wind that carries their scent to me across the dark. I weave through the trees at a speed that would be reckless if I didn’t know this land the way I know the inside of my own chest. Every root, every dip, every fallen trunk. I’ve been running these woods for decades.

I hunt. Not because I need to eat, but because the hunting instinct, the chase, the pursuit, the moment of impact, is the only thing that comes close to satisfying the need that’s been building in me for weeks. I catch the deer’s scent and I track her through the trees. She’s bedded in a stand of oaks, her body curled against the cold, her heartbeat slow with sleep. I circle downwind, patient, methodical, closing the distance in increments so small that the night itself doesn’t notice me moving.

When I’m close enough to see the fog of her breath in the air, I stop. I gather myself. And then I move.

The kill is clean. Fast. My jaws close around her throat and the force is precise enough to end it in seconds. No suffering. No struggle beyond the first startled lurch of her body and the brief, wild acceleration of her heart before it stops. I hold her until she’s still and then I let her down gently onto the frozen ground, and the taste of blood in my mouth triggers a rush of satisfaction that floods through my nervous system and quiets the wolf in a way that nothing else has managed.