Pure, annihilating terror.
My jaws closed around his chest. I felt his ribs collapse, felt my teeth puncture through muscle and cartilage, felt the hot, wet resistance of his heart as I tore it free.
He didn’t scream. By the time my teeth reached the organ, there was nothing left of him that could.
His body crumpled. I stood over the remains, chest heaving, blood dripping from my muzzle and pooling in the leaves. The heart sat in the dirt at my paws, still warm.
Silence filled the clearing behind me.
The shooter had gone. The only sounds were Percy’s labored breathing, the drip of blood from my fur, and the ragged pulse of three heartbeats that belonged to me.
I turned.
Mira stood at the edge of the clearing.
Percy was on the ground behind her, propped against a tree, Solomon pressing cloth against his wound. But Mira wasn’t looking at them.
She was looking at me.
My wolf form. Massive, black-furred. Muzzle soaked in the blood of the man who’d tormented her for two years, standing over his torn-open body with his heart cooling in the dirt.
I waited for the scream. The horror or the revulsion that any sane human would feel watching a creature tear a man apart with its teeth.
Her eyes locked onto mine. Storm gray meeting hers.
Blood onmyfur, blood onherhands.
Blood everywhere, and the distance between us vibrating with a bond that pulsed with her heartbeat.
She didn’t scream.
She didn’t run.
Mira stared at me, at the wolf, at the blood dripping from my jaw, and her eyes filled not with fear but with recognition. Thesame look she’d given me the forgotten night when she first saw me.
The look that said she’d seen this before, in a place she couldn’t remember, in a life someone had stolen.
Her lips moved. One word.
“Lucian.”
18
— • —
Mira
It happened too fast. One moment, we were in the town celebration.
Suddenly, there’s blood on my hands.
And Hudson, dragging me here in the woods followed by the wolf, massive and black-furred, tearing him apart with a violence that should have sent me running.
Instead, I’d looked into those storm-gray eyes and known.
Lucian.
The wolf was Lucian. And I wasn’t afraid. That probably said more about my mental state than I wanted to examine, but there wasn’t time for a breakdown.
