She stared at it, then at me.
“I’m going to rip your balls off. You’ll come back after your little hunting trip and you’ll let me out of these and then eventually you’ll fall asleep snuggling me and thinking ‘Aww, she’s my happy little mate now’ and then you’ll wake up just as I fucking grab hold to tear them off!”
“I’ll look forward to that.” I cupped her face in both hands and kissed her, and she kissed me back despite every horrible thing her eyes continued to promise.
“How long?” she asked when I pulled away at last.
“Hopefully a few hours. It’s injured and leaving a trail. It won’t have gone far.”
“And if it comes here before you get back?”
“It won’t. After what you did to it, it’ll be holed up somewhere licking its wounds for a good while yet. I’ll find it before it moves.” I stroked her cheek with my thumb. “You hurt it badly, Katie. You gave me the advantage I needed.”
Her expression shifted at that, the anger thinning just enough to let something else show through. Not compliance. I didn’t know if she’d ever give me that. But trust, even if grudging.
“Come back,” she said.
“I will.”
“And enjoy your balls while you still have them.”
I kissed her forehead, then turned and walked through the side door and out into the compound’s small courtyard where the morning light was just beginning to warm the stucco walls.
I shifted, the wolf surging up and the man folding away, and then I was running, bounding down the flagstone path and through the iron gate and into the streets beyond, heading back toward the motel to pick up the trail of the thing that had dared to put its filthy claws on my mate.
CHAPTER 9
Katie
The first ten minutes after the gate clanged shut were pure, distilled fury.
I yanked on the cuff. The iron rail didn’t budge. I yanked again, harder, and the headboard creaked but held, because it obviously hated me. Silas had tested it before threading the cuff through, the efficient bastard. He’d sat on this bed with his come still warm inside me and he’d evaluated the strength of the headboard rail before chaining me to it.
I was going to kill him. I was going to find something sharp and I was going to remove his testicles from his body with surgical precision, and then I was going to mount them on the wall of his precious cabin next to whatever else a typical wolfman had hanging above his fireplace.
Would he still be able to fuck me so exquisitely without balls? We’d have to find out…
Focus, Katie.
I sat back against the headboard and surveyed the room.
My phone was on the nightstand, which was on theleftside of the bed, and I was cuffed to therightside of the headboard, because Silas was a sadistic asshole.
I reached for it anyway, stretching as far as I could manage. My fingers grazed the edge of the nightstand but got no closer.
“FUCK.”
The word bounced off the adobe walls and echoed back to me still sounding furious.
I lay back against the pillow and stared at the ceiling, conducting a thorough internal review of every decision I had made in the past few days that had led me to this moment: handcuffed to a bed in a safe house in Santa Fe, naked under a sheet, with the seed of a supernatural wolfman currently doing its level best to complete a primal mate bond while the man himself was off hunting an ancient demon coyote that wanted to breed me to death.
Law school had not prepared me for this.
I pulled on the cuff one more time, not because I thought it would work but because the motion felt productive.
It didn’t work.
I wondered what Silas was doing right now. Probably running through the foothills with his nose to the ground, tracking the skinwalker by the blood trail I’d created with a lamp and a chair. I hoped the trail was fresh. I hoped the skinwalker was still tucked away in some canyon licking its wounds, and I hoped Silas found it and tore it into little tiny pieces and then ate the pieces.
