The wolf's body coiled tighter. Not retreating—he had nowhere to retreat to, pressed against the rock as he was—but preparing. Muscles bunching beneath the ragged fur.
I stopped.
"I can feel you," I said softly. "The bond between us. It's faint, but it's there. You feel it too, don't you? Something that doesn't make sense. Something pulling at you."
Nothing. No response. Just those empty yellow eyes, fixed on me with predatory focus.
I crouched slowly, making myself smaller. Less threatening. The movement put me off-balance, vulnerable, but that was the point. I needed him to see me as something other than a threat.
"I know you're scared. I know you've been alone for so long that you've forgotten what it feels like to not be alone. But I'm here now. And I'm not going anywhere."
The wolf's head tilted. Just slightly, just for a moment—a flicker of something that might have been curiosity beneath the animal wariness.
I reached for the bond.
It was like trying to grasp smoke—there and not there, present but insubstantial. The partial connection I'd felt since my visions began was stronger now, closer to its source, but still frustratingly incomplete. I pushed against it gently, trying to send something through. Calm. Safety.I'm here. I see you.
The wolf flinched.
His whole body jerked like he'd been shocked, and the wariness in his eyes shifted to something else. Something worse.
Panic.
"Easy," I said quickly, raising my hands. "Easy, I'm sorry, that was too much—"
But it was too late.
The wolf exploded out of his crouch.
One moment he was pressed against the rock. The next he was airborne—a blur of fur and bared teeth, moving faster than anything that starved should be able to move. Coming straight at me.
"James, get back!"
I threw myself backward, arm reaching behind me to push him away from the attack. My hand connected with his chest just as my feet tangled, and then I was falling—falling onto him, my back hitting his chest, his arms coming up instinctively to catch me.
And then the wolf hit us.
The impact drove us both into the snow. James took the brunt of it, his body cushioning mine, but the wolf wasn't interested in him. Those yellow eyes were fixed on me—on the threat, on the intruder, on the thing that had touched his mind without permission.
Jaws snapped inches from my face. I got my arms up, trying to shield myself, and felt teeth close around my hand.
Pain.
White-hot, blinding, all-consuming pain. Teeth sinking through flesh, grinding against bone, tearing through nerves that screamed their damage directly into my brain. I heard myself cry out—or maybe that was James, his voice raw with fear and rage beneath me.
But I couldn't focus on the pain.
Because something else was happening.
The bond—the partial bond I'd been feeling for weeks, the faint thread connecting me to the feral wolf—tore open like a dam breaking. Sensation flooded through the point of contact, overwhelming and absolute. I felt him—not his thoughts, nothing so coherent as thoughts, but his existence. His fear and his hunger and his terrible, crushing loneliness.
And at the same time, my other hand was still pressed against James. Still touching him. Still connected through our bond.
Two points of contact. Two bonds. Two mates.
Something clicked into place.
Not clicked—ignited. The partial bonds that had been hovering incomplete suddenly found their missing piece. Energy surged through me like lightning, like fire, like nothing I had words for. It poured from James into me and from me into the wolf, a circuit completing after months of waiting.
