Page 16 of To Run with the Wild Hunt

"Would you feel it if you touched me?" I asked, regarding him through my lowered lashes.

Nuada's ears turned towards me in focus. "I would," he said, his voice dropping deeper.

Key huffed another sigh. I bent down and scratched him behind the ears, giving Nuada a view down my robe—but he turned away, looking out towards the garden again.

Well, fine. If he wasn't interested, I wasn't going to throw myself at him. "C'mon, Key," I said, lifting my foot to shift his head. "I want to go check out that chapel again."

His ears cocked. "Of course!" Keilain got to his feet and gave himself a shake, tail wagging. "Whatever you want, Lexi."

"Fare well," Nuada rumbled, not looking at me.

"You, too," I said, more out of politeness than anything else, and left.

Keilain pranced at my side, my hand on his shoulder and his body close enough that my leg touched his side with every step. It was harder every day to shake my frustration, but I made myself let it go. It wasn't Key's fault that Nuada was about as open as a sealed vault. There was no reason to punish one soulmate for the sins of the other.

We went to the chapel, Keilain playfully coming up with stories for the paintings on the wall and laughing when I tried to act them out. It brightened my afternoon, at least, and when we ambled to the dining room to eat what the servitors had made for us, I was almost content.

Though the hounds ate in the kennels, even the ones who knew how to talk or remembered being people, Key ate with me. I liked it that way. I had nothing to do with procuring or making anything he ate, but having him eat with me made me feel like I was providing for him, somehow. I'd never imagined I would like something like that, but I did. Key was mine – my devoted hound – and it pleased me to take care of him.

The days kept scrolling past. Even though the Ruined Palace was huge, it didn't take more than ten days to get a solid map of it in my head. I found more things to do, getting to know some of the other hounds a little and rearranging rooms to my liking, but the confinement itched at me more and more. I wasn't a tame girl. I liked adrenaline and action, whether that was obsessive research or active motion. Idleness didn't suit me.

But they were my soulmates. I couldn't leave without them. I kept circling back around to it. Key was my soulmate, and Nuada was my soulmate. That had to mean something—it had to mean more than this.

Didn't it?

Leashed

Nuada Silverhand

It had been eons since I had allowed anyone, even myself, to leash me. It went against my very being. I was no tame creature, nor a caged beast. I was wildness itself, the great Hunter of the Tuath Dé: untameable, uncageable, unchangeable. Every screaming instinct under my skin told me to give chase to the woman in my palace, and with great care, I set them all aside.

I was a predator, but Alexis Sharpe was not a doe to be run down and slung across my saddle as prey. She had chosen death instead of such a thing. It was one thing to hunt and kill. It was another entirely to claim from her the things I wanted in all their brutal glory.

If I was ever to have her, she would need to choose it. She would need to choose me.

I had no idea how to begin to convince her to want such a thing.

Though I'd given him the command to defend her from me, it burned me that every time Lexi came to my side she had Keilain at hers. It was wise. If she were alone – if we were alone – I wasn't sure I could hold back. She was so lovely, the lush curves of her body begging for the grip of hands and teeth, her full breasts the sort a man could lavish his attention on—or rut between. It was all I could do to keep myself still and calm when she was near. Sarcaryn's power had woken the stallion in me, and I wanted her, desperately.

The enforced distance and stillness chafed on me. My hounds were happy to loll about in the Ruined Palace, but their Master was not a restful creature. I yearned for motion. Yet I could not bear the thought of stepping into the true wilds of Faery and stepping out of Lexi's life. The streams of time were too changeable. The risk of leaving, of losing her forever, was far worse than merely being trapped.

So I remained leashed. I paced for hours like a restless beast, trying to burn off my instinctive need for movement, and I climbed to the heights and watched the birds fly like a hawk tied to the mews. I sat for hours in places where Lexi might come to find me, but away from her chosen paths, so that she might not startle like a doe at the sight of me and trigger my every hungry instinct. A sighthound cannot help but chase when his prey flees—and I was so much worse than even they.

It grew more difficult day by day. Lexi walked my floors and slept in my bed. Her scent settled into the air of the palace, so that sometimes I would step around a corner and find myself panting with need, the taste of her skin on my tongue and my cock so hard it ached. She came to me, from time to time, and never once asked for more.

I couldn't trust my senses around her. Sometimes the air sparkled with adrenaline or grew heavy with desire, but who was I to say that such things were more than the reaction of one body to the presence of another? Who was to say that they were not merely reflections of my own desires, brought into being by the power of the Hunt?

If we were animals, such a thing would be an invitation not to be denied. A bitch in heat does not deny the wolf when he has her neck in his teeth and his cock in her heat. The temptation to do exactly that snarled from inside me with every smile she gave me and every glimpse of her smooth skin, but she was no beast of the fields. She was a thinking being, one whose rights over herself were inviolable.

I struggled to remember that I, too, ought to act like a thinking being.

A footstep startled me from my reverie. My head came up, ears snapping towards the sound, and I caught sight of Lexi.

Alone.

That was so startling that my instincts settled, leaving me bewildered, defenseless before the arch look of challenge in her eyes. I blinked at her, my mouth slanting up. "Alexis Sharpe," I said, savoring the taste of her name. "I'm surprised to see you without your hound."

She lifted one shoulder in a shrug and sauntered towards me. "Keilain isn't always by my side, you know," she said. "He rambles on his own, or plays with the other hounds. I'm an independent girl. I don't need him to dance attendance on me."

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