Wolf at the Door (Wolf Winter #3) - T.A. Moore Page 0,87

I hand myself over, it would buy us time. And if they were going to kill me, they’d have done it already.”

Gregor took his hand back and flexed his fingers. It still hurt, but the sharp sting of raw meat had faded to tenderness and itchiness.

“No.”

Nick narrowed his eyes. “You can’t just keep saying no.”

“I disagree.” Gregor caught the nape of Nick’s neck and pulled him in to plant a kiss on his forehead. “Stay here. I won’t let Rose take you again. So, turn yourself in? You’ll get us both killed.”

That warning finally sank in. Nick made a reluctant sound of agreement and stepped back, out of the way. He hunched down into his quilted jacket, nose tucked into the collar despite the reek, as Gregor manhandled the door open. The water from the lake had frozen on the door, a thick rime that worked its way into the seams and cracks. Gregor put his shoulder to it and shoved. It creaked—a low, ground-out sound that hooked some atavistic “get off the ice” reaction in the pit of Gregor’s stomach—and held. He stepped away and put his back into the next shove.

The impact made his bruised collarbones ache, but it broke the frozen seal and the door cracked open. Chunks of broken ice dropped onto the ground outside.

“At least take my boots,” Nick said.

“You need them more.”

“I can sit on the boat.”

Gregor kicked a last chunk of ice out the door. “They’d just get in my way.

“Like me,” Nick said. The frustration and self-hatred in his voice was familiar. And the fear. “If I weren’t blind, I could help. I could—”

“Maybe,” Gregor said. “And if I still had my wolf, I’d have killed Rose in the Sannocks’ graveyard, and she’d have never touched you again. What you’ve lost is like the cold, Nick, you’ve got to learn not to mind it.”

A hoarse chuckle—and maybe Nick couldn’t hear the bird anymore, but Gregor could in the rough edges of the laugh—made Gregor look over his shoulder. He raised his eyebrows. Nick shrugged at the mute question.

“I can’t imagine you any more dangerous,” Nick admitted. “Even if you were a wolf.”

Gregor couldn’t help but preen at the compliment, even though he knew Nick wouldn’t say the same if he’d ever met him as a wolf.

“You’d have been terrified,” he said with a smirk.

Nick canted his head to the side so he could rub his jaw. “Maybe,” he admitted. “Gran’s stories never painted wolves in a good light—gluttons and killers, the Run-Away Man, all her monsters.”

“I guess we weren’t monster enough for her,” Gregor said as he put his shoulder to the door again. “So she had to make better ones. Stay here. I’m getting sick of having to track you down.”

He kicked the ice out of the way and squeezed through the gap. Frozen water curled up over the edge of the small loch, braced on icy fingers that dug into the gray slurry of churned-up snow. The water was gray, a scum of fresh-fallen snow on the surface that curdled as the wind stirred it up like stew.

“Jack has his wolf,” Nick said. “Had his wolf when Gran took him. It didn’t do him much good.”

Gregor breathed in. It was so cold that the air didn’t feel like something that should be in his lungs, and it eddied from his lips like smoke as he exhaled. Rose had skinned Jack to make monsters, stitched wolf skin and rank ink to curse-putrid flesh. Neither of them—the wolf or his shadow—had been good enough to end Rose.

“I was always better at being a wolf. Jack’s the better man,” he said. “Ironic. Close the door.”

WARM SPIT hit Gregor’s cheek and dripped down onto his shoulder. It was chased with guttural, ranted curse words as he pinned the woman up against a tree. Her lashes were scarred with the same blisters that puckered Nick’s eyelids, and the ripe smell of her hatred pulsed in the air like a heartbeat.

“They’ll flay you, and I’ll wear your skin for my winter coat,” she ranted, strings of bloody saliva strung between her lips. “I’ll see out the winter in your guts to keep me warm. They’ll make me a god! They’ve told me your secrets, whispered them in my ear at night! One day—”

Useless. Like the others.

Gregor dragged her off the tree and broke her neck. She fell silent midword, her inflamed eyes wide open and blind as snow filmed them. He set her down at the