Huntress

Chapter 65

When Ajax left, Ryder opted to pull up a chair beside me. He didn't reach out for me, but I was still able to see the swelling around his knuckles, some of them cracked and bleeding. And I could see the little knife sitting on a reel of wire, looking mercifully clean.

But the smell was the same in here. The feel of the air on my skin was enough to make me want to be sick. I knew this place so well, even if my mind wouldn't recall how.

"You're lucky that she's here," Ryder rumbled, his voice a dangerous timber I had never heard before. "I'm not about to believe any of this bullshit about you not knowing what's really going on."

Milo limply swayed from the ropes. His head was dangling forward, but I could see the occasional drop of something that splattered red over the cement floor. He let out a hacking cough before he lifted his head, moving as if his bones were made of concrete. I wanted to gasp in horror all over again. Blood streaming out of a clearly broken nose, eyes so swollen they could hardly open, teeth coated in blood when he grimaced. "And you are so unlucky that she's here. Now she gets to see you like you for what you really are: a coward." Strong words for someone who looked like a summer's breeze would kill him.

Ryder snorted from beside me, but I caught the way that his hand twitched. "Right. I'm the coward. You're the one hiding behind all your little hunters, perching in tree so I can wait for a werewolf to stroll by and shoot them when they aren't looking."

"This isn't about hunting," Milo corrected. His legs gave out from under him, his arms jerking hard behind his back. A strangled noise left his mouth before he could right himself again. "This is about her. it's about Georgia."

"Leave her out of this," Ryder snarled.

"She's already in this, you idiot."

My gaze followed the lines of Milo's body. With every angle I took in, I felt more and more ill. I could feel the phantom pain spinning up my arms, squeezing between my shoulder blades. I didn't know how long he had been like this, but I knew that even two seconds was too long. His legs must have been screaming for a break, but if his knees buckled even an inch, his arms were be jerked behind him hard enough to make him dizzy.

But the pain and discomfort that must have been ripping through him, wasn't enough to keep him quiet. "You are pathetic. And you are afraid, no matter what you say. You can look me in the face and tell me that you're doing this for her, but we both know that it's not true. Because you dumped her on my driveway. And where did you go?"

"I left to keep her safe!" Ryder defended.

"You left her because you were fucking scared! If you cared about keeping her safe, you would have left her as soon as you understood a single thing about werewolf drain."

"I didn't want her to get worse! We thought that she would be safe since we are mates!"

"You left her alone, Ryder. And you didn't go off to research labs, you didn't spend your nights in a library trying to find answers, did you?"

"I'm not going to argue with you," Ryder hissed. "I went through something awful. I won't apologize for how I acted through it. you don't understand because you're human and you don't want a mate. But when I lost her, I lost everything."

"Right, of course. So, it's completely fine that you left Georgia, your mate, on my driveway. She lost everything too, you fucking loser. And when she wasn't able to speak for herself, you turned around and ran into the woods to lick your wounds. I fed her every day. I bathed her. I brushed her hair and her teeth and washed her face. I was the one who took her to her parents' funeral. And when the staff at the care facility reported her missing, I turned over every rock that I could to find her. until I figured that she was here. With the very people who have hurt her in the first place."