We ride that final knife’s edge together, my movements gentling as I ease us down. My plan is to sink my teeth into her throat, to mark her as mine in the fragile afterglow of our shared climaxes.
My lips are skimming along her cheek, licking away the salt of the tears she shed when she came so violently it scared me, and my hands are spread wide and steady over her spine when Noa slumps bonelessly against me.
At first, I don’t understand what’s happening.
My arms tighten automatically, instinctively, adjusting to her weight as it goes slack in my hold. I tell myself this is exhaustion. That her body collapsed into the relief of being temporarily sated. Heats are a marathon, not a sprint, after all. They take everything an omega has to give and then keep asking for more until they’re wrung dry.
“Noa,” I murmur, my voice low and coaxing as my thumb traces a slow line along her vertebra. “Hey. Sweetheart?”
I expect a hum, a lazy sound,something.
She gives me nothing.
I shift her slightly, jostling her with more urgency this time, my chest tightening as something sharp begins to press in from the edges of my awareness.
“Noa,” I try again, firmer now. “Look at me.”
Her head lolls backward.
Not slowly. Not with resistance. It gives out completely, uncontrolled andwrong, her neck going slack in a way that makes my stomach drop through the fucking floor.
Panic slices through me like a thousand paper cuts, but I try to smother it before it can take me under. I can’t afford that. Not now. My entire focus narrows to the woman in my arms, to the way she’s too still, too heavy, as my wolf detonates inside my skull. He slams against the walls of my restraint with a ferocity I’ve never felt from him before, pure terror and fury tangled together, and I have to fight him down with everything I have just to stay human.
I pull her back just enough to see her face and slide one hand up, brushing the damp strands of dark hair away from her skin. My fingers are shaking. I tell myself it’s nothing. I tell myself she’s only passed out, that her body has simply given out from the strain of the initial waves of her heat.
The lie shatters into shards of glass the second I look at her.Reallylook at her.
This isn’t slumber or unconsciousness.
The color is draining from her before my eyes. Her skin pales, turning a sickly shade of gray, her plump, parted lips lose their usual hue of pink. I thought I understood fear where Noa was concerned, thought I experienced the worst of it when I was racing toward her without knowing if I’d get there in time to save her.
This is different.
Terror. In its purest form. That’s what this is.
I shake her again, harder now, my composure cracking. “Noa!” Her name tears out of me, stripped bare. There’s no point pretending at calm anymore. There’s no one here to protect us from it. “Wake up, baby!”
She doesn’t respond.
“No, no, no.No!” My whole body begins to shake as denial and panic war behind my ribs. Leaning her back against my arm, I press my ear to her bare chest and listen with a focus that borders on madness.
There’s nothing.
No heartbeat. No breath. No feeble sign of life.
Just stillness.
Too much stillness.
Death.
Noa is dead.
The word tries to settle in my mind, tries to become real, and I reject it violently. I refuse it. I’m not losing her. Not now. Not after everything it took to get her back. Not after she fought for so long to stay strong—strong enough to give me time to right my wrongs. She could have given up, many in her position probably would have, but not Noa.
“Noa, baby, wake up,” I plead, my voice breaking wide open. “Please. I’m right here.”
The sheer, visceral terror ripping through me makes my body release her, my knot deflating unnaturally fast. I lift her off my lap and it slips free without struggle, the sensation barely registering beneath the roar building in my ears. I lay her flat on the nest and scramble to my knees beside her, my stomach roiling at the way her head rolls toward me. Heavy and lifeless.
