The lock clicks.
And then I hear it. Muffled through the walls, quiet like she’s trying to hide it, but unmistakable.
She’s crying.
My mate is crying, and I’m the one who made her cry.
My bear fights to break free, howling with grief and rage. Not at her. At me. At us. At what we’ve done to the one person in this world who was made for us.
He wants me to go to her. Break down the door. Hold her. Fix this.
I can’t. Breaking down more doors is what got us into this mess. She’s terrified of me. She thinks I’m a monster.
She’s not wrong.
I stand in the middle of my living room, hands shaking, listening to my fated mate cry herself to sleep thirty feet away. Every hitched breath guts me. Every muffled whimper. When the sounds fade, the emptiness is somehow worse.
I did this. I did all of this.
The cruel words. The crushed phone. The car doorripped off its hinges. The terror in her eyes when I threw her over my shoulder and carried her inside like some kind of caveman.
What the fuck is wrong with me?
My bear paces inside me, restless and anguished. He doesn’t have an answer either. He just knows that our mate is hurting and we can’t fix it. We can’t even get close to her without making it worse.
I sink onto the couch, my head in my hands, and try to think.
The storm howls outside. Snow batters the windows. We’re trapped here together for days, maybe longer. Days of her hiding in that room, flinching every time she hears my footsteps, crying herself to sleep while I sit out here and hate myself.
I can’t do this. I can’t just sit here and listen to her suffer.
I need to do something. I need to fix this. I need to prove that I’m not the monster she thinks I am, even if the evidence suggests otherwise.
My eyes land on the window. On the snow piling up outside. On the shape of her car, barely visible in the darkness, one door missing.
I know what I have to do.
The storm slams into me when I step outside.
Wind howls through the trees, snow thick enough to blind. Any human would be dead in minutes out here. But I’m a bear. The cold is nothing. The storm can’t hurt me, no matter how much I might deserve it.
Her car sits in the driveway, half-buried in white. I circle it slowly, taking in the damage I caused. The driver’s side door is gone, lying somewhere in the snow where I threw it.
I destroyed her only way out. Her only escape from me.
Now I’m going to fix it.
I bend down and grip the frame of the car, testing the weight. Substantial. Small, yes, but dense with metal and machinery. A normal man couldn’t budge it.
I’m not a normal man.
I lift.
My muscles scream in protest. My back strains, my legs burn, my arms tremble with the effort. But I get it up. I get it off the ground and settled against my shoulders, the frame digging into my flesh, the weight threatening to drive me to my knees.
I start walking.
The clan’s territory is five miles away. Five miles through a blizzard, carrying a car on my back, in the dead of night. It’s insane. It’s impossible.
