Page 10 of Pucking Feral: Part Two

Slowly.

Fighting every instinct that screams at me to keep them up, to hide, to protect her from the brain-melting horror she's about to see again. This time without the haze of adrenaline and panic keeping me from processing exactly what's happening.

But they drop.

Sunlight hits my exposed face.

Cherry blossoms drift between us.

One lands on what's left of my cheek.

And I wait for it.

The recoil. The horror. The scream.

The same fucking reaction everyone has.

Ivy's ocean eyes move across my face, taking in every horrible detail.

I see the exact moment it registers, when her pupils blow wide and she goes white as a ghost.

Her breath catches.

There it is.

The beginning of the end.

She shifts in my lap and I know—I fucking know—this is when she screams. When she runs from the thing pretending to be human.

Then her hand rises slowly toward my ruined face.

I flinch, ducking my head down and screwing my eyes shut, bracing for whatever comes next, which is never fucking good.

But her trembling fingers brush my hair back from my forehead, tucking the strands behind my ear with such impossible gentleness that I feel like I'm going to fucking die.

And she doesn't scream.

Chapter 2

Ivy

The edge of the damage I glimpsed before in the loft with Wraith, when his mask slipped, was just the beginning.

A shadow compared to the reality.

Wraith's lower face is… gone.

No lips or cheeks. The muscles of his jaw are visible, with no skin over them, only scars and a sliver of jawbone and even more scars where grafts didn't take, the scar over his right eye that tears at his lower lid slicing all the way down to his gumline, and a cut that appears to be from a glancing blade on the bridge of his nose.

An unfairly beautiful, masculine nose, considering all he has left of his lower face otherwise are…

Teeth.

All of them exposed, all sharpened to vicious points in a permanent scarred rictus grin that has my stupid feral omega hindbrain melting down.

PREDATOR, SUBMIT, BARE YOUR THROAT, it shrieks, like it doesn't realize this is our fucking scent match.

The one alpha I trust completely.