Page 98 of Bound By Roses

“Stop!” I shout at him and rush forward.

Quinn’s head snaps in my direction and red eyes settle on me.

‘Abby, don’t!’Fern shouts in my mind, but I block her out. I block them all out and leave myself wide open to Quinn, forcingthe love I have for him down what remains of our bond. He’ll feel me. I know he will.

“We don’t need to kill him. You don’t want this.”

His jaws snap, but the crimson in his stare dampens. My heart sinks when he shakes his head and the mangled flesh on his chest shakes with it. He blinks, and just for a moment, I see the gold in his gaze.

‘Make him shift.’Quinn’s voice flashes through my mind and I feel the urgency in that request. He’s fighting the dark version of himself and winning, but he can’t make the shift while Ty is still lost in the darkness.

I focus all my energy on the wolf still pinned in the sand. He snaps at Quinn’s foot, but just barely misses. Quinn might kill him if he loses himself again, but I trust that he won’t. Iknowthat he won’t. Because he’s Quinn. Just Quinn. Not the thing he calls a monster. Not the beast that once prowled the forest. He may have borrowed its strength to subdue Ty, but he’s still every bit the man I’ve fallen in love with over and over again.

“Come on, Ty,” I mutter through clenched teeth as I force my way through his mental walls. He’s a wolf, just like the rest of them, and that means I’m in control. “Let. Me. In.”

He whines and Quinn jumps back just in time for him to shift. Panicked eyes stare up at the wolf before him as he throws himself backwards. Despite the fight I just watched, Ty seems relatively unharmed, and I don’t think it has anything to do with his strength as a wolf. I think, even in that state, Quinn knew to hold back.

Quinn shifts on his own, and fuck the wound on his chest is worse than I thought. Four jagged lines slice deep, one of them cutting through the bottom of the golden rose that mirrors mine. “That’s better,” he says to Ty before he drops to a knee. Either too hurt or too tired to stay upright.

“What the fuck is happening to me?!” Ty screams.

I rush to Quinn’s side and drop down on the beach beside him. Rivers of red run down his abdomen, coating the skin in what I wish was paint, and I can’t decide if it’s better to press my hands against it or leave it alone until we can get to a healer.

“Get help!” I shout and hope Erwyn can hear me. Even if he can, who knows if he’ll care enough? He’s made it pretty obvious that he doesn’t like us.

Quinn touches a hand to mine, and then he stands. He’s unsteady, but not nearly as bad as he was a moment ago. “It’s just the shift. I’m fine.”

He’s literally covered in blood. Nothing about this is fine.

He takes a somewhat unbalanced step towards Ty and offers a hand. Thankfully Ty doesn’t take it because I’m not convinced Quinn can stay upright, never mind pull a grown man to his feet.

Ty tries to stand on his own, but his legs wobble more than Quinn’s. He doesn’t even come close to making it off the ground before stumbling back down into the sand.

“You’ll get used to that,” Quinn says, taking a step closer and offering his hand again. “Coming out of it like this is the hardest. When you’re notyou.”

Ty takes the hand this time, and Quinn somehow manages to pull him up. “I don’t understand what happened.” His eyes glaze over when he looks down at Quinn’s chest. “Did I do that?”

“You don’t remember?” I ask him. Not in reference to the fight, but everything that happened before. We talked about this. What he’d become—and he still agreed to let Quinn bite him.

“The last thing I remember…is him twisting a knife in my gut!” Ty points somewhere behind me and I don’t need to look to know that Erwyn is standing there.

“Perhaps I should have gone for the throat.”

“Enough!” I say to both of them. “No more knives. No more tearing each other apart. It’s over!”

“Calm down.” For a moment, I think Quinn is talking to me but his attention is entirely on Ty. “The memories will come back to you. It’s normal for things to be fuzzy right after a shift. Just breathe.”

There’s a moment of tension and then Ty’s vision seems to clear as he stares up at Quinn in shock. “You bit me.”

“Yes.”

“And… This is what happens.”

Quinn shakes his head. “You’ll learn to control yourself. I shouldn’t have left you alone. This is my fault.”

The man who is still very much a boy looks to me, and his eyes well with tears. “I don’t want to do this again. I don’t want to be that creature.”

Erwyn steps forward. “Then we kill you now.”

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