Page 20 of Ravaged Wolf
He rips his teeth from my neck and roars. Warm blood splatters on my bare back. My blood.
The thrusting stops.
A terrible pressure swells inside me.
His knot.
Be still.
Be quiet.
It’ll be over soon.
The punishing grip disappears from my neck. The weight eases off my back.
It’s silent except for our ragged breathing, his and mine, and my wolf’s low whine, and his wolf’s anguished howl.
He backs off, just a little. His knot tugs against my battered flesh and stings. I whimper. He bends forward over me, his shadow falling across the moonlit ground where my cheek rests against the dirt. He wipes carefully at my face with the hem of his sweat-soaked maroon shirt, his hand shaking like an old man’s as he sops up snot and blood.
Pain shoots up my forearm from my wrist. I want to pull my arm out from under me, but I’m too scared.
Trevor lifts himself off my back again. The knot tugs, but this time, I smother the whimper of pain. Then, he leans over me again, and cradling my head with one hand to lift it, he slips his folded T-shirt under my face for a pillow.
I’m shaking, my teeth clattering, and my wrist throbs. There is something stuck inside me, and I’m too terrified to look up. If I close my eyes, maybe I could shut the whole thing out, but then I wouldn’t see danger coming, but it’s already come, hasn’t it? The worst is here, and there’s no way out.
He’s calmed down, and he’s not hurting me anymore, not much. It’s almost over. Soon.
My legs go numb, but I can still feel the knot stretching me. How am I going to run when I get free if I can’t feel my legs?
The question pounds over and over in my brain, insistent and critical and unsolvable, when his knot finally shrinks enough to slip out of me. He immediately scrambles backward, leaving me alone in a heap on the ground.
I can’t run.
I can’t even stand.
I don’t have the strength.
Let me, my wolf whispers as she struggles to her paws.
I grab the offer with both hands and gratefully let go. She limps forward, staggering through the border between us, taking our body for the first time even though she’s as battered and broken as I am. The second that her legs form, they buckle, and she collapses to the bloody, matted grass and clawed-up dirt I’d been lying in.
Trevor staggers forward, and as gently as he can with his wildly shaking hands, he picks up my wolf and cradles her in his arms like a bride. My wolf tucks her foreleg to her chest to keep it still, but the pain from my broken wrist still throbs with each step he takes.
My wolf feels my pain like her own, but her body doesn’t show my injuries—there is no chunk taken from her shoulder, no blood dripping from between her legs.
Trevor carries me what feels like forever, through the woods, along the fence that borders the Academy, across a muddy worksite with nothing but a poured foundation and concrete and rebar columns. The mud sucks at his boots.
He didn’t have to put them back on. He never took them off.
It’s not until he turns onto the main avenue that I get the courage to peer up at his face. My stomach lurches into my throat and sticks there, suffocating me, while he stares straight ahead.
His eyes are blue-gray again. There is dried blood caked in the corners of his mouth. Tears course down his cheeks.
He turns at the infirmary and carries me up the sidewalk, silent, his steps slow and careful. We aren’t even to the doors when there’s a shout, and then everything happens in fast-forward. A swarm of people emerge from the building, rush toward us, and skid to a halt when Trevor’s wolf lets outa howl so eerie and mad that the air instantly fills with a fog of fear and aggression.
The medics surround us in a semi-circle, hands raised, the males casting calculating looks at each other, while Trevor carefully lowers my wolf’s body to the ground and steps back. I look up, nursing my limp forearm, but he doesn’t even glance down.
“I hurt her,” he sobs.
