A mulchy leaf is stuck to my paw, clinging like a parole officer who knows exactly what I did. What I caused.
“She fell because of me.”
The words land in my chest like another nail hammered into a coffin already full of my fuckups.
Buff huffs.“No shit.”
A nerve jumps in my jaw. I bare my teeth before I can stop myself. Even though I accept the blame, it pisses me off that he calls me out on it.
“I wasn’t asking for commentary.”
Froggy is pacing now, each turn hacking at the silence between us, his tail twitching like it wants to choose violence.“What did you think was going to happen when you chased the fucking horse?”
Heat flashes under my fur; anger, guilt, shame, all tangle together.
“The horse was spooked because of us,”I bite out.“I wasn’t going to leave her to fate.”
I bend to nose the leaf off my paw, not because it’s bothering me, but because I need an excuse to hide my expression.
“God knows what the horse would’ve done in its panic. As it is, it threw her pretty fucking hard.”
Too hard.
Hard enough that the sound is still rattling around inside my ribcage, refusing to settle.
Hard enough that my instincts are still bristling, snarling for a do-over I’ll never get. I squeeze my eyes shut against the memory of her body pitching forward, the thud when she hit the ground. My stomach twists, but I straighten.
Froggy snaps,“And? So fucking what? Since when do you care about humans?”
I whip my head toward him, a low growl scraping up my throat.“What do you mean since when? This is the first time anything like this has ever happened.”My voice drops low, tight.“It could’ve been Maggie.”
“But it wasn’t,”he fires back.“It was a stranger.”
Buff snorts, shaking his head.“None of this makes sense.”
He’s right. It doesn’t make sense.
Not now, when my pulse is still thrashing like I’m the one who hit the ground.
Not then, when every instinct screamed for me to save her even though I didn’t know her name.
Not during any second of it, when something in her scent, something raw and hurting and powerful, spiked straight through the noise in my head and made me move without thinking.
None of this makes sense.
And that’s the part that scares me the most.
Froggy thrusts his muzzle toward me, way too close.“You almost blew our cover. You almost got seen. You almost?—”
“She couldn’t see me.”
The words rip out of me, edged in something I don’t want to name and coated with anger because she can’t see and for some unknown reason that doesn’t sit right with me.
Everything stops. Ever seen a confused wolf? Yeah. Me neither. Until now.
Froggy’s eyebrows bunch together, a ridiculous little scrunch that would’ve been hysterical if my insides weren’t still twisted from the fall, from the sound she made hitting the ground, from all the ways I fucked this up.
“What do you mean?”he snaps.“She was stroking you like a fucking cat.”
