Bleed The Wolves

Chapter 5: Luna and Lavender

Blood packs were evil things. He knew this now better than he'd ever learned it from his mother's table.

"They're the ones that have you under oath," he decided.

When Suzette looked up, the fear and hate in her eyes was gone. They were carved-out empty again. She shook her head.

"Who, dammit?"

She rubbed her temple, and in the tired lines of her, he sensed pity.

Thomas wasn't used to pity. He gave her his back when he couldn't hold those eyes. "Ridged Fang doesn't allow blood rites."

The quiet felt eternal.

"You've been gone from the mountains a long time, Thomas." That was definitely pity in her voice, near bitter with a wistful sorrow.

"No," Thomas heard himself say.

One of the oldest, wildest blood rites invoked the ring finger of their mates for the mating ceremony. Some said the flesh was to be burned, but in the secret shadows as old as the mountains, people whispered—in the old rites, the finger was eaten.

Surely hers was burnt. Oh, God, please tell him it was burnt.

"Thomas." Her voice sounded far away. If it hadn't been so out of place after all these years, he might have missed it entirely. "Thomas, look at me."

Hell, if Ridged Fang had turned to blood, they might have performed the rite to take her finger themselves. He knew plenty of wolves that had fancied her—his brother Jude among them.

Thomas stretched his neck and heard a slight tear in the seam of his shirt. All of the fabric too tight, too close, too hot.

The pine smell of her found him, fresh and calming like an autumn breeze. He must have looked half-wild because she came to him. Her hand brushed his forearm.

She kept her head bent and throat subtly tilted at a bared angle out of habit, which only fuelled his fury. But her skin distracted him: warm now and alive, here and safe. Ridged Fang didn't have her. Neither did Sun's Dagger. He did—which unfolded a different sort of anxiety in his mind.

"Listen, because I can only say this once," she whispered. He hadn't realised she'd moved him to block the room's one-way window until her hand slipped from his arm. "There are games you don't need to play. Beasts you don't need to hunt. People you don't need to save. Do you hear?"

Thomas caught her hand as it fell to her side, his thumb trailing the place her ring finger should be. "Do you need saving, Suzette?"

She changed their grip to wrap her small fingers around his wrist. Her nails pressed crescent indents in his skin; hadn't she felt cold before?

"I'm not the –" she began, and though she opened her mouth, the sentence was clipped short. Her head twisted like a dog with a muzzle.

I'm held on my knees. Two of them dig their heels into my calves to keep me bent double on the tile. I pay attention only to the pressure on my shins, not the taste of blood in my mouth.

"Easy." Thomas supported her by the elbows; the image in his mind coursing through his body as sudden and bright as a camera flash. He shrugged it off to help her to the chair.

"Fool," she said, the word crumpled and sodden like paper in the rain. She sat and tugged at her collar to easier breathe. "The longer you're here, the more I hurt. Just go."

"Hurt?" Thomas rubbed his wrist where her hand had been. "What hurts?"

The door rattled with an open-handed knock. Thomas' whirled, not ready to forfeit her back to the breeding office. He stalked to the threshold as the door creaked open, that brawler wall of protection locking his muscles in place like armour.