Captive of Wolves (Bound to the Fae #1) - Eva Chase Page 0,118
of those claws, the hulking wolf whose dark fur glints with that hazy light, whirls to face me at the rasp of the door.
That instant is all it takes for me to recognize it as Sylas—the scarred white eye reveals him at once. An instant is all I really have, because the next second his wolf has pitched toward me, barreling across the hall like a speeding Mack truck, a snarl tearing up his throat.
My spine stiffens, and panic blanks my mind. My hand gropes to heave the door shut again, but I’ve readied myself for this act well enough that the rest of me moves automatically. I resist the terrified impulse and tense my other hand. Sylas’s wolf hurtles toward me, faster with every stride, jaws yawning open—and I whip my arm forward.
The bloody rag flies through the air. The wolf lunges at it, close enough that the momentum of his charge ripples through the air and over my skin. His fangs snatch the cloth out of the air, the bloody folds falling into his open mouth.
He skids to a halt, claws scrabbling against the floor, so close that if I stretched, I could touch his thick fur from where I’m standing. I don’t, because I’m gasping and shaking, renewed tremors shooting through my limbs just at being this close to the beastly form.
The wolf shakes his huge head. He spits out the rag and looks up at me. And those eyes…
Those eyes are Sylas in every way, not just by the color and the scar. For the first time, I’m close enough to see him in the wolf. To realize that the other times I panicked, the other skirmishes I witnessed—it was always my men fighting for me. Not monsters, not even really animals. Except for this night with the full moon’s curse, they’ve always been themselves, just in a different skin.
Sylas hunches, and then all of him transforms into the man I’m used to, kneeling there on the floor. He’s wearing a simple short-sleeved shirt and loose slacks for tonight, barefoot, with the waves of his hair falling riotously around his face. Still, he looks every inch a lord.
“Talia,” he says, his voice so hoarse I suspect even saying my name took some effort. “You—what are you doing? I told you—”
I grip the side of the sliding door and stare right back at him with a flare of defiance that cuts through my dwindling fear. “You told me to stay in my room. I know. But I decided it mattered more to me to snap you out of the curse.” My throat closes up all over again, but this time it’s not out of terror. “You broke me out of a prison I never deserved to be in. Why can’t I do the same for you?”
That wildness trapped him in his wolfish body and the feral rage even more soundly than the bars of my cage had trapped me.
His mouth slants as if he wants to argue but can’t quite bring himself to. “We talked about this.”
“We talked about why it wouldn’t be safe for me to help the whole pack and why you didn’t want to ask me to help just you. You didn’t ask. This was totally my decision, made freely. And no one will know you came out of the wildness early, will they? Right now, every other fae in this realm is mad with it.”
He glances down at the crimson-splotched rag by his knee and then at the cloth wrapped around my thumb. “I could have hurt you.”
“But you didn’t. So there’s nothing to complain about.”
His lips twitch. I think that time he might have suppressed a smile. “I suppose this is what I get for stealing away a little scrap of a woman who’s got more mettle than anyone would give her credit for.”
The corners of my own mouth curl upward, and the last lingering traces of panic melt away. I set my hands on my hips. “Yes, it is. Now come on. You can help make sure I take care of August and Whitt without getting torn to bits.”
“Taking orders from a human,” Sylas mutters to himself, but he gets up, grabbing the rag as he does. He eyes the damp fabric. “I think this should do the trick, no more bloodletting on your part required. I doubt you needed half this much.”
“Well, I didn’t want to take any chances. And also, the knife slipped.” At the darkening of his eye,