I spoke up. “Well, they’re in the West King’s territory now. Slade Stewart can pick up the pieces.”
Bronc’s grin was mean. “Shit, that’ll endear Iron Valor to another territory. I doubt they’ve even registered their presence, much less pledged fealty to Stewart. Maybe after we take down Greenbriar leadership, we can see if Rafe can make contact to let Stewart know that a pack in his territory tried to genocide the south’s strongest pack. That should get Stewart off his ass to get the remnants handled.”
Menace offered to send his healer and her team to help everyone heal faster so we’d be healed and ready to face Greenbriar when they strike.
Bronc agreed. He adjourned the meeting with a wave. The pack filed out, with a plan in place.
Chapter 26
Parker
It took forty minutes to peel the plastic from the new mattress. The box spring had arrived already dinged at one corner, but the driver dropped it on the porch like a ransom demand, and I had to drag it inside myself, sweating and cursing, a blood offering to the gods of moving day. Now the mattress loomed over the room like a cathedral step. The old one still reeked of bleach, ghost stains running the length of the thing, but Doc had insisted, so here I was, wrangling two-hundred-dollar sheets onto a slab of engineered foam.
Wrecker’s room, our room now, always looked wrong in daylight. The windows faced north, so even at noon the light skulked in like a thief, pale and watery, just enough to outline the shapes of his things and mine jostling for territory. Motorcycle magazines fought for space with my dog-eared paperbacks. His battered boots stood sentinel in the closet, next to my pile of “nice” shoes that mostly went unworn. The room was painted gray, a compromise between “masculine” and “not quite feminine,” but it only made the shadows more solid, a deeper blackness at the corners of the ceiling.
I made the bed, pulling the fitted sheet tight, then folding the top corners under with the precision of a funeral director. The blankets went next, then the comforter and pillows—three for him, two for me. The air was heavy, humid with the tang of latex and lingering Clorox. I opened a window and let the cold in, the wind so strong it shook the glass in the frame.
For a second, I thought about nothing at all. That was rare.
After the Greenbriar escape, after the shot of demon toxin and the blue-white fever, after the hallucinations and the days of bone-deep agony, the world had collapsed down to a small, hard core: the bed, the sheets, the cool air, the sound of the wind. I’d nearly died, orhaddied, more than once, and yet here I was, elbows deep in domestic chores, dreaming about the future.
I’d never thought much about angels or miracles—if I believed in things like that. But the explosion that sent me to my mother, where I saw her, standing by the lemon tree in our backyard—that seemed kind of like a miracle. I felt her brush my hair back and tell me it wasn’t my time yet. The circular scar behind my right ear, from where they checked on my brain swelling, still has a faint glow.Thatwas definitely something. The doctors said it was nothing; a side effect of head trauma. The truth was, it hummed every time I thought about her, or about the angel Archon, or about the impossible fact that Menace and I had both walked back out of the darkness when we should’ve stayed dead.
Call it fate or luck, or pure animal stubbornness. Call it what you want. I called it the angel’s mark, and when I pressed my hand to it, I felt something alive, like the wings of a moth fluttering just under the skin.
Rocket jolted me from my musings. My ugly little dog, who’d almost kicked it during the worst of the toxin, limped in on three legs with the fourth still bandaged, tongue lolling, eyes wild with joy and confusion. He ran full-tilt into the side of the bed, rebounded, and launched himself up next to me, scattering pillows everywhere.
I sat stunned for a second. I watched him circle, digging and turning, barking at nothing. He looked like hell—fur half-matted, scars running down his flank, the stink of hospital still all over him. He was perfect. I scooped him up, crushed him to my chest, and let the tears come.
“Hey, buddy,” I whispered, running my fingers through his matted fur. “You did it. You made it.” He licked my nose, then my chin, then howled like a coyote at the ceiling. I laughed until I hiccuped. My body still hurt in a dozen places, but my heart ached in a good way, a clean and tired way.
Rocket squirmed until I let him go. He patrolled the perimeter, sniffed at the closet, then came back and wedged himself against my hip, daring me to move him.
The house was quiet for once. No pounding boots, no raised voices echoed from the hallway. Just the wind outside and the sound of Rocket’s breathing, snorty and irregular, like he was still learning how to use his own lungs.
I sat on the edge of the bed, one hand buried in Rocket’s fur, and let myself go blank.
I felt him before I saw him. He filled the doorway, casually leaning against the jamb. My beautiful monster. Deadly and magnificent. He said nothing as he crossed the room. He just opened his arms, and I went to him like water poured into a gutter—inevitable, easy, desperate. I jumped into his arms, trusting he was strong enough to hold me. Clung to his neck, legs straddling his waist, nose pressed into the place where his shoulder met his throat. I inhaled him; salt and sweat, oak and citrus scent radiating from his skin. I trembled against him, unable to stop, and he stroked my back in small circles. He turned and sat on the bed.
The first kiss was an accident, a misfire; I meant to say his name, but our lips collided and it broke something between us. His hands tightened on my waist, then he kissed me like he needed to inhale me or else choke. I bit his lip, tasted copper, and he groaned, and the sound pierced through my body.
He twisted us down onto the mattress, the clean cotton wrinkling under our weight. His body was heavy, but not crushing—he bracketed himself over me, forearms locked to keep his weight from hurting me, but I wanted all of it. I wanted every bruise, every scar, every splinter of his presence to crush the part of me that had been hollowed out by Silas, by the drugs, by the blue light that marked me as something not quite human or wolf anymore.
I dug my nails into his back, hard. He hissed, but didn’t flinch.
“Don’t be gentle,” I said, voice already ragged. “I can take it.”
He pulled back to look at me, his eyes storm-gray, rimmed with the red of a man who hadn’t slept in weeks. “You sure?” he whispered. “You’re still healing. I thought—”
“So are you. I’m so fucking tired of being scared. Please.”
He shuddered, jaw clenching so tight I could hear his molars grind. “Wren,” he said, barely audible, “when you were gone—when I couldn’t feel you in the bond—it was like someone ripped out my soul. I would have burned the world to bring you back.”
I believed him. I closed my eyes and let that truth settle in the hollow behind my heart, where so much else had been scraped out.
He pressed his mouth to my collarbone, the bite just shy of bruising. He worshiped my skin as if mapping the return of a lost continent: lips to the hollow of my throat, the edge of my shoulder, down the line of my arm to the bandaged wrist. He traced the blue-tinged scar behind my ear with a trembling fingertip, and his breath hitched.
“Does it hurt?” he asked.
