The crack of the grizzly’s neck breaking echoed, obscenely loud in the sudden quiet. The dark grizzly form collapsed, already shrinking, shifting back into the handsome, cruel human shell of Bracken Emers, his empty eyes staring at the burning sky.
It was finally over.
The mate bond flooded with a stunned, breathless relief. Korrak’s own strength deserted him instantly. The shift back to human form was an agony of reversing momentum, and he landed on his knees in the snow, naked and bleeding, the deep gash across his ribs weeping crimson.
The world grayed at the edges. He was vaguely aware of Winslet dropping the bloody knife, her hands already on him, pressing hard against the wound.
“Korrak, look at me!”
Her voice was a whip-crack, fierce and steady. Her small hands were impossibly strong, applying pressure that made stars burst behind his eyes.
“Kol already has them,” she said, answering the question he couldn’t form. “They’re safe. I am not losing you. Do you hear me? Not today. Not ever.”
He tried to shake his head, tried to tell her to go, to check on her family, but the words wouldn’t come out.
“Save your breath for surviving,” she commanded, her tone brooking no argument. With a grunt of effort, she hauled his arm over her shoulders. “Stand up slowly.”
Somehow, through a haze of pain, he managed to get his feet under him. She half-dragged, half-carried him to the SUV Bracken had meant to steal her away in. Then she heaved him into the passenger seat, the leather instantly slick with his blood. She desperately ripped a strip from her own sweater, folded it, and pressed it back against his ribs with a force that made him gasp.
“Hold that. Don’t you dare let go.”
She slammed his door, sprinted to the driver’s side, and had the vehicle in motion before his head had settled against the headrest. The burning warehouse shrank in the side mirror as she aimed them toward the one place she knew had the proper medical supplies. The research outpost.
Korrak watched her through his fog. Her knuckles were white on the steering wheel, her jaw set, but her hands were steady. Through the bond, he felt the terror she was masterfully suppressing, and beneath it, a love so ferocious it burned brighter than the fire behind them.
A slow, bloody smile touched his lips.My perfect, lethal mate.
The world began to narrow, the pain receding into a strange, cold distance. The darkness at the edges of his vision crept inward.
“Winslet…” he managed.
“I said save your breath,” she snapped, but her eyes flicked to him, green and blazing. “You can tell me you love me when you’re not leaking all over Bracken’s car.”
He wanted to laugh. He wanted to tell her she was magnificent. He wanted to promise her a lifetime.
But the cold was rising, and the light was fading. The last thing he knew was the sound of her determined breathing and the feel of her love, a solid anchor in the void, before the darkness swallowed him whole.
TWENTY-THREE
WINSLET
The dying Arctic sun bled crimson across the ice as Winslet steered Bracken’s SUV toward the distant research outpost. One hand white-knuckled the steering wheel while the other was a permanent, desperate fixture against Korrak’s side, her palm and the ruined wool of her sweater slick and warm with his blood.
He was unconscious now beside her, his body leaning unnaturally against the passenger door. The powerful lines of his face were slack, and his skin was unusually pale. This stillness was wrong for a man whose presence filled every corner of the space he was in.
A cold, sharp-toothed fear chewed through her composure, louder than the engine’s grind. “Korrak,” she whispered. “You are not allowed to die. Not after I just found you.”
The mate bond was a faint, frayed thread in her chest, still there but terrifyingly muted. Every jolt of the vehicle over the ice felt like it might snap it. The outpost lights glimmered in the distance, a constellation of hope that seemed to recede with every mile.
Between one frantic glance at the road and another at his face, the memory flashed unbidden. The resistance of Bracken’sgrizzly hide giving way to the knife’s point, the jarring impact up her arm, and the wet, choked sound followed by the snapping of his neck that was his end. She braced for the guilt, for the nausea, for the moral collapse.
It didn’t come.
What settled in its place was a quiet certainty. It filled the hollows Bracken’s terror had left behind. She had been presented with a binary choice. Let that monster slaughter her mate or become the instrument of his destruction.
She had chosen without hesitation. She chose to protect her mate.
Within minutes, she skidded the SUV to a halt beside the outpost, the tires spraying a fan of ice. Before the engine died, she leaned on the horn, a long, blaring scream into the Arctic air.
