or not, I’ll do whatever the fuck I want. I’m the reason that Presley was taken in the first place. So yeah, I’m going, and it’s going to be fine.”
“How?” he shouts, his sudden raised voice making me jump a little as I come to a stop in front of him. His face looks ragged, his expression crazed with worry. “How the hell can you say it’s all going to be fine when you almost just fucking died, Seneca?”
I think he expects me to shout right back at him, but instead, my face softens. Because beneath the shouted anger, that fear I felt before I blacked out is still there, tormenting him. We haven’t known each other for long in human standards, but we’re wolves, and that connection is implicit.
My hands come up to lie against his chest, my palms feeling the race of his heartbeat. “I know it’s all going to be okay, because you’ll be with me,” I tell him softly with an underlying edge of conviction. “I may be a little slow on the uptake sometimes,” I confess, “but it hasn’t taken me long to understand that when you’re with me, everything is always exactly as it should be. I trust you.”
A ragged breath comes out of him, and then he drops his forehead to mine. I feel all of the potent worry and suffocating fear that’s been tightening around him since the moment he found out Twin Rivers wolves snuck onto his territory.
“I’d tie you to this bed, but I have a feeling you’d somehow get out and come on your own anyway, and then my wolf would go crazy and not be able to concentrate,” he says on a growl.
“A fair prediction,” I nod against him, a small smirk playing on the corner of my lips.
He sighs and pulls away to look me in the eye. “You have to promise you’ll stay by my fucking side at all times, Seneca.”
“I promise.”
Tyran grumbles but relents. “Fine. But I swear to fuck if you do anything to put yourself in danger—”
“Yeah, yeah, you’ll spank my ass red,” I finish for him before standing up on my tiptoes to nibble just beneath his ear. “I’m still waiting for that, by the way,” I tease.
A pained groan escapes him as heat simmers in the depths of his eyes. “I’m still pissed you’re asking me to be okay with this. Don’t try to distract me with sex.”
I smile. “Why? Is it working?”
“A little, yeah,” he admits grudgingly.
When I laugh, Tyran shakes his head and then grabs my face, fusing his lips to mine. He devours my mouth, sweeping his tongue inside and turning my head just the way he wants me. Heat floods the juncture of my thighs, and a moan slips from my throat, but just when it’s getting hot and heavy, he pulls away.
At my noise of protest, he smirks. “You’ll get the rest of that after we get back safe and sound.”
“It’s a date,” I reply. “Now let’s go get Presley. And Tyran...” I start, my eyes hardening and the blood in my body heating with wrath. “I won’t be happy until Burke’s pieces are spread out on every corner of that territory, and his betas are nothing more than puddles of blood and pulp on the ground.”
He shakes his head as I turn to head for the bathroom. “You’re a savage little thing.”
“You like it,” I toss back over my shoulder.
Just before I close the door, I hear, “Yeah, I really fucking do.”
I handle my business in the bathroom and wash up, pull back my hair, and wrap my stomach to help support the still healing muscles and dull the sensitivity of my skin there. I peek quickly at my reflection in the mirror, the sectoral heterochromia of my eyes no longer a shock or cause for alarm. The first time I looked into my eyes, I thought they were a reflection of just how fucked up I was. Like they were a warning to everyone else around me of what I was capable of.
Now, I don’t see a warning, I see a promise. A promise of what I will do and the lengths I will go to protect myself and my new pack. My eyes are a reflection of how fucked up I am inside, but I no longer think that’s a bad thing. I’m rabid, and there’s not a damn thing wrong with that.
In such a short amount of time, Tyran and Ruin Falls