“You can lower your claws.”
I lower my claws. I cannot lower my other hand; the one fisted in his collar won’t open. I am holding on to him like he’s a safety rope. Like he’s the only solid thing in the world. My face is pressed into the hollow where his shoulder meets his throat, and I am breathing in his scent—plus the smell of my own panic.
“What happened?” Lucas doesn’t release me, and I can tell his eyes are darting around, scanning for danger.
Tiny Violet is shouting my name from the phone on the ground where I must have dropped it.
Lucas bends down without letting go of me and picks up the phone. “Luna,” he says, and his voice is low and absolutely steady. “I have her. She’s safe.”
Violet says something I can’t hear. My ears are ringing.
“I will.” A pause. “You have my word.”
He ends the call. Slides the phone into his pocket. Then, both of his arms come around me properly, and he holds me the way I have wanted him to, from the hallway at Darius’s house all the way to this moment. I lean into his embrace because my legs are not working and because I cannot make myself care about pride right now.
Over my head, his voice drops an octave. “What were you doing in there?”
“I was on a call. I walked in without thinking. I didn’t even realize I was past the tree line.”
“Sienna.”
“I know.”
“I told you.”
“I know.”
His arms tighten around me. One hand comes up to the back of my head and stays there, warm and broad, fingers sliding into my hair.
“What were you running from?”
I shake my head against his chest. “Something was watching me. I could feel it before I saw it. Then, something snarled. I ran. It was chasing me.”
He is silent for a beat. I feel him glance out over the top of my head at the tree line. I feel his body go alert in a way that has nothing to do with me.
“Stay here.”
“No.”
“Sienna.”
“No.” I lift my head. My face must be a mess. I don’t care. “Whatever it was, it stopped chasing me the second I bumped into you. It’s gone. Don’t you dare leave me alone.”
His jaw works. His eyes flick to the forest, then back to me.
“Alright,” he murmurs. “Alright. I’m not leaving you. I’ll send my guards to investigate.”
He keeps one arm locked around my waist. With the other, he produces a phone from some pocket, thumbs a number, barks clipped orders.
“Perimeter sweep. Eastern stretch. Now.” He listens. “Full team. Track back along the tree line from the north service road.”
He pockets the phone.
“Come on,” he says. “You are not standing out here.”
He walks me across the lawn with his arm still around me. I do not protest. My feet are bare. There is a leaf stuck to the hem of my blouse. My heart has not yet remembered how to beat at a normal pace.
His office smells of him. Paper, ink, the faint smoke of the fire he keeps lit in the grate even now, in the middle of the warm afternoon. He steers me to the low couch against the wall, not the chair across from his desk. He leaves me there for thirty seconds, no longer, and comes back with a glass containing two fingers of amber liquid in the bottom.
