She didn't speak for hours. Not even when Judd had set her gently down on his bed. There was darkness swirling behind her open unblinking eyes and she didn't know how to handle it. She only moved when the black in her mind had begun to writhe. It had sunk into every corner of her body and brain until she couldn't handle it any longer. She couldn't stand it, laying back in the dark while something crawled all over her.
Suddenly, her breathing came out in heavy gasps, eyes wide as she tried to calm her raging heart. The room was even dark, almost as dark as her mind had been a moment before. At least the shadows linger in this place.
But there was a set of glowing eyes in the corner, reddish gold. Copper.
She closed her mouth and tried to swallow around what had corked itself in her throat. Fear? Resentment?
Contentment?
The eyes blinked once before shifting, going from a wolfs gaze to humans before slipping onto the bed beside her, gently, as if his presence would spook her. His warm hand pressed into her bare knee, scorching her skin enough to bring her back to reality.
"Neira," He said quietly, the word like a caress in the air between them. It was like his breath had taken on the form of a butterfly's wing.
After a moment she met his gaze. "Judd." It was clipped but still, only a whisper pushed out between her teeth in a quick short exhale.
He looked away from her, eyes pressing tightly closed. "I-," he trailed off before turning his eyes back to hers. "I didn't mean for you to find out like that."
He didn't mean for her to find out at all.
Everything from earlier came rushing back to her. The standoff in front of the cabin, the conversation exchanged, the man before he had turned into that - creature.
The conversation...
The other woman, the dead other woman.
And suddenly, like someone had flipped a switch, she was back in her own body. And angry.
He saw it as clear as if it was written on her pretty face, the fury. He pulled his hand away from her knee.
"What happened to her?" Neira asked as calmly as she could but he heard the bite in her words.
Judd sighed, knowing now he couldn't avoid it. Not now when Shade had ripped away the lid on an already boiling over pot.
"Her name was Kauri," Judd started rubbing a hand over his face with shaking fingers. "Her, Shade and I grew up together in the same pack. My fathers pack."
Neira started. They grew up together? She wasn't sure why but the whole concept felt alien. Like Judd and that thing shouldn't exist in the same universe.
"We were friends and I guess when Kauri first started to show signs of her cycle that's when things got tense. For a while, I thought she was going to ask Shade to be her mate but the thought of her being with someone else drove me mad. So when she did finally ask me I couldn't say no. She went into it earlier then everyone thought she would and she was with Shade when it hit her.
"When I got there he was holding her and-."
His face crumpled, and she watched as shadows darkened his expression. "When I finally got her away from him she was screaming, the pain was too much for her and I panicked. Shade was gone before I knew what I was doing, that I had marked her.
"She had been quiet after that, so still I thought she was injured or I had done something more. I carried her back to the out-camp within my father's territory to help her through the rest of the heat."
He swallowed then, eyes fixed on something on the floor she couldn't see. "I think I knew then that something was wrong. She spent two days not moving. I could feel through the mark that the pain was beating at her body, that she needed me but I couldn't touch her without knowing she was even aware it was me. Or even who I was. I just - couldn't.
"After those first two days, she went rabid, wild with it. The heat had been too much for her and she pushed it at me, she let all of that pent-up energy hit me and I couldn't control it. She wasn't herself and I didn't know what to do - I. The heat had been creeping up on me too and with Kauri the way she was I-
"In the end, the heat took over, and it was me who went too far. I don't remember it, I blacked out and when I came to she was dead - underneath of me."
Neira put the pieces together and the picture made her want to vomit.
He had marked her without her permission and she hadn't been able to handle it. It wasn't uncommon, but it didn't happen very often since the act of marking a female without her mark first was practically a crime. So he had lost control and snapped at the sight of Shade and marked his female, that in his mind, he had already claimed.
But wolves were territorial and aggressive and possessive and if Judd had seen Shade about to mark her... She couldn't see how he could have even tried to stop himself.
And she couldn't handle it, the alpha blooded mark. So her mind shut down and she spent two days inside her own head - her own body - unable to move. Unable to ask, scream or beg for help. Females died from the heat... she had never met another who had even lasted those initial two days other than herself. And in all that time Judd was under the heat as well, avoiding his marked female only because she wasn't able to give consent.
And then when she clawed her way back out and went crazy with the pain, he couldn't hold back enough to keep her alive. She had snapped and so had he. And he had killed her...
He was too strong for her like he would have been too strong for many. And she couldn't fight him off.
What a terrible way to die.
She covered her mouth.
A tear rolled down Judd's face, his face carved out of regret and hatred for no one but himself.
She tried to wrap her head around it. Tried and tried to understand what had been done but she just couldn't find a solution to this. He murdered a shewolf, during the heat...
"I can still see her face," Judd said quietly. "Sometimes I have dreams of what I did to her and I can't tell if they are real or not. The things I see Neira," he faded off shaking his head. "I can't stop seeing it."
"What happened after that?" she asked quietly trying to swallow down the bile in her throat.
"I ran," he said simply, "like a fucking coward. I denounced my claim on my father's title and ran. Kauri's father caught up to me a week later and challenged me. He said I ruined everything. His mate, Kauri's mother had died during childbirth."
"I'm guessing he didn't walk away from that fight and you did," Neira spat, her words coming out harsher than she intended.
"I almost let him kill me," Judd said, "but Sada had followed him out and jumped in front of me and I couldn't stop myself when he went at her for intervening."
So he had double the blood on his hands, a marked female that he murdered during her heat and that shewolf's father. What else could there possibly be?
She couldn't take anymore.
Neira crawled off the bed and slipped out of his room. She couldn't stay here with him, she had to think it all through. She had to get out of here.
He didn't stop her nor did he even try. Not when she fell down into her wolf pelt and padded into the tree line. She was careful this time, careful to remember what part of the forest she was trudging into and what would be the proper rout back. She couldn't sit in his cabin or any other right now. She had to be with the trees and the forest and the wild and get her head screwed back on straight.
She curled up under a pine, auburn tail curling around her body as a low whine left her throat.
From under the branches, she spied the familiar grayish shadow slipping through the dark night. After the encounter with the creature from earlier the shadows among these trees were nothing to her, rabbits in a world of demons.
So she watched it watch her, seeing the way it curled around the base of a tree, the way a tendril seemed to reach out toward her. It went on like that until finally a different kind of darkness closed up around her. This time it was calming, quiet.
Soft.