Page 3 of Wolves Bound by Desire

“How on earth could you think killing Jason would make things right!” She kneeled beside Gerald and held her hand to his chest. He felt so cold, too cold, deathly cold. While she and her father hadn’t always seen eye to eye—more like hardly ever—she and Gerald got along just fine.

“He… tried… save…”

“Sh, don’t waste your energy trying to talk.” Misti blinked back tears. Unable to look away from her pack member’s face, she barked, “Tell me what happened, and it better be the truth, or else I will kill you this time.”

Out of the upper portion of her vision, she spied Anders nod. “Like I said, I wanted to make things right. I thought about turning myself into your family. They would give me a quicker, more merciful death than my father would.”

“Not likely,” she said bitterly.

“Be that as it may, I hadn’t quite made up my mind. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to die yet when I came across the guard—”

“Jason,” she hissed.

“When I came across Jason,” Anders conceded. “I decided to try and tell him the truth.”

“The truth?” she asked, horrified. What all had the wolf shared?

“I told him that I had met you and fallen for you and wished to claim you. He listened to my words without saying anything back and then attacked me. I defended myself.”

“That’s… I…”

“Gerald overheard everything. He tried to break up our fighting, and Jason’s blade nicked him on the chest.”

Sure enough, Gerald’s shirt did seem to be the source of the blood, and she spied a tear. Through it, she could see blackened, upraised skin.

“Jason… poisoned…”

“Jason’s blade was poisoned tipped. When he refused to tell me of the antidote, my wolf took over, and I slew him where he stood. Since Gerald had done nothing wrong, I took him with me to try and find some medicinal herbs, but so far, nothing has helped.”

“I… ready… full life…”

“Gerald, don’t talk like that,” she commanded. “But… is his story true?”

Gerald weakly nodded.

While his story might be, what he had claimed might not be. “Fallen for me?” she scoffed. Although he had tried to claim her, that much was true.

Anders shrugged. “It might be one way to prevent war.”

“War is coming.” Could he be that naïve? “And you might be the cause of it.”

“The last thing I want is war.”

“We don’t always get what we want.” Gerald’s hand in hers slackened, his grip weakening. “There is nothing else you can do for him?”

“I have tried all of the herbs and flowers that I know of. I didn’t think it was wise to bring him to a hospital.”

“You should have,” she snapped, but he had a good reason for avoiding them. The world at large remained ignorant of werewolves, but the chances that the tests a hospital would run might reveal abnormalities their technicians could not explain and would want to develop further meant hospitals and doctors were places werewolves avoided. “If Jason used poison, he must have kept the antidote nearby. You never should have moved him.”

“I did what I thought was best.”

“You thought wrong,” she said stubbornly, but really, what else could Anders have done? As a Shadowed Star, he would have been killed had he been discovered.

Ignoring her, Anders kneeled beside Gerald. “Would you like something to eat or drink?”

Compassion. Or was it only an act? Anders was intelligent, and she could not bring herself to trust him. Even so, she found her gaze wandering over his naked body that glistened with sweat from the exertion of their battle. Trust or not, she still craved his touch.

Embarrassed and ashamed, she glanced away.

---