by Kamryn Hart
“Her wolf is fighting. I told her she needs to shift,” Gwen explained.
Max gently stole Ava’s hands from her face and spoke in a low voice, “It’s okay, Ava. You can shift. It’ll be better to right now. We’ll bandage up your fingers again later, okay?” Max’s wolf side was right there with him. He would change and protect her. “I’ll shift with you. It’ll be easy. We’ll figure this out together.”
Ava’s shallow breaths evened out some as she looked up into his eyes. Her eyes were wavering, shimmering back and forth in a quick succession. Sweat was dripping down her forehead. Max held her gaze, letting her know he was right there with her. He continued to hold her gaze even as he slowly backed away from her.
“Max,” Nick warned.
“Let him,” Gwen said quickly as she pointed down the tree line. “Howard, take the others farther away.”
Max heard the resounding crunch of snow as the wolves who were behind him took off. He took a steady breath. His wolf was calm. That familiar wild energy was there too, but it had direction. He was determined. He was going to help his Fated Mate. He wouldn’t lose his mind as a wolf. Not this time. His left inner thigh burned, but he ignored it. Now wasn’t the time to appreciate Ava’s perfect boner inducing body or to try and catch a glimpse of the Lunas Sigil she must have had. She needed him to stabilize her.
Max disrobed quickly and never took his eyes off Ava. Then he called to his wolf. For the first time, he wasn’t fighting his shift. It wasn’t painful either. It was quick, seamless. The sounds of his bones popping out of and into place to rearrange into his wolf were nothing but sounds. Fur sprouted from his skin and covered him in white. He was standing on four powerful paws. His ears were forward, aimed at Ava. His tail wagged slowly from side to side.
Ava’s eyes grew wide, and she screamed.
What was it? Max whipped around with a snarl on his curled back lips, expecting to see a predator, a grizzly emerging from Blue Forest perhaps. But there was nothing there other than the Awakened Wolves who were standing back and cowering at the sound of his mate’s screams. Howard stood alert, a big brown wolf ready to jump into action at any moment.
Max turned back to his Fated Mate to see her hugging herself and scrambling in the snow, backing up into Gwen who fought to hold her in place. Max’s ears drew back at the awful sound of her pain. It was something deep inside of her that was hurting. He whimpered and wagged his tail again, taking an experimental step forward.
Beautiful mate, I’m here. Why are you scared?
One step closer and his Ava grew more frantic.
“Ava!” Gwen exclaimed as she turned her around and hugged her to her chest holding her there while stroking her head. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”
Max lowered himself to his belly and whimpered again. Look at me. Ava wouldn’t turn away from Gwen’s hold. She sobbed into her shoulder and curled up more and more like she was an armadillo trying to hide from the world outside of her shell.
“Max, shift,” Nick commanded.
Nick wasn’t technically his Alpha since Max hadn’t pledged to him on a Full Moon like the official members of Blue Pack, but he had been living under his care for a couple months. His words held power. Max was cognizant. His wolf listened—not that he had much choice with Nick’s Alpha power pulsing through him. He shifted back into a human at a painful speed, ramped up by the Alpha’s command. Max was hunched over, his hands on his forehead.
“Ava,” he whispered her name, but he got no reaction from her.
He stood and grabbed his clothes, dressing in a hurry. “Ava,” he tried again as he walked up to her. He touched her bare shoulder, and she recoiled farther into Gwen, sobs wracking her body.
“Go,” Nick said. “Go, Max. We’ll take care of her.” His eyes were stuck on the intense yellow of his wolf. Each of his words were coated in power.
Max’s chest hurt. His head hurt. He felt like he was going to shatter into a million pieces like a china cup that had been dropped onto a patio’s rock floor. He couldn’t breathe. This was rejection of the worst kind. Not even Lizbeth’s betrayal did this to him. He was angry and hurt, but he must not have loved her like he thought. He met Ava only yesterday and his heart was shredding because of her rejection. What did he do wrong?
“Now!” Nick growled.
Turning his back on the confusing mess surrounding him, Max ran. He took off for the motel because he had nowhere else to go. If leaving was best for Ava, if never seeing him again was best for her, he would accept it—but he didn’t understand it.
His chest was burning with choked back sobs by the time he made it back to the motel room. He went right to his bed, not bothering to take off his boots or anything else as he buried his face into his pillow. He tried not to look at Ava’s meager belongings on her own bed as he lay there with his eyes shut. He screamed into his pillow as he shook. His wolf was a wreck inside of him, snarling and wild. Confused. They were still on the same page. The wildness was showing through to his human side now. He wanted to break something, but he settled for screaming again instead. He had caused enough trouble. He didn’t need to go demolishing the place too.
When his throat was raw from all the screaming, he allowed himself to catch his breath. This time he did look at Ava’s bag. She brought so little with her, and this was the last he was going to see of her. He was sure of it. He didn’t know what he did wrong, but Ava wanted nothing to do with him back there. It happened as soon as she saw his wolf. He got it. He hated his wolf too. She’d never accept him with this monster inside of him.
All the progress he made with his wolf seemed to fade away in that moment. His wolf was a wild ball of fury he trapped in his chest. They were two separate parts that had no business pretending to be the same creature. Max wasn’t a wolf. He was a fucked-up human with little faith and little trust. He tried to be good, to follow God, to portray himself a certain way.
That must have been why he didn’t get along with his wolf. His wolf had no inhibitions. He had instincts. He was what he was. Max rejecting him was what made him wild.
Max groaned as the mark on his right inner thigh burned. He tried to ignore it as he buried his face farther into his pillow.
No, he couldn’t come unhinged again. He couldn’t let all of that progress go to waste.
“I accept you,” Max said as firmly as he could. His voice was broken from all the screaming, but the intent behind those words was clear. “I accept me,” he whispered. “Human, wolf. Sometimes calm, sometimes wild.”
His wolf settled some. He didn’t feel like he would explode from his chest in a burst of snapping teeth. It was back to the united feeling of loss, of hurt. He needed some time alone. He needed to cool off, but he couldn’t give up on Ava, not until he learned what he did wrong and made it up to her. He’d give her some time, and then he would take action. There would be no more running and no more hiding.
Ava was in agony. She gave in to peer pressure. She stripped off her clothes to let out her reckless wolf because everyone seemed to think that was the best thing to do when she started getting pains in her joints and they could sense her wolf on the surface. She went along with it even though she knew it wasn’t the solution. At least it was over. Gwen was helping her get dressed again. Ava wasn’t going to shift. It would make this disaster worse.
She couldn’t think. It was Max. Max was the White Wolf.
“You already got to the shifting part of the lesson?” a familiar voice called. “Damn. I was going to help with that.”
Ava looked around Gwen to see Willow striding toward them in knee-high boots. She had a big grin on her face until her eyes landed on Ava.
“What happened?” she asked, faltering.
“Max shifted perfectly. He was in control and everything. You should have seen him,” Gwen said.
“What?” Willow asked, her voice perfectly flat.
“You have perfect timing,” Nick told her. “Could you take Ava to your place for a
while? Maybe let her stay in your extra bedroom tonight.”
“Uh, sure.”
“Ava, I’m going to ask you about this later,” Nick said. “Or you can talk to Willow. Or Gwen. But someone. Okay?”
Ava didn’t reply. She wasn’t going to talk to anyone about this. She was going to leave. She was going to run and find Beatrice. Fate was too cruel. How could the wolf meant to kill her be so warm? How could she have been so blind? He could have killed her easily last night, but he hadn’t. She didn’t know what was going on, but she knew she didn’t want to die like that. She didn’t want someone who seemed to care about her to be the one to kill her. It was too painful. It was better to go back to Beatrice and incur her wrath. It was better for Beatrice to kill her. She preferred it.
“C’mon, Ava.” Willow grabbed Ava’s arm and held her close. “We’ll go to my place, and I’ll make you some hot chocolate. It’ll make you feel better.”
I have to leave.
Ava was nonrespondent, lost in her head, thinking about how she would leave this place without arousing suspicion. She didn’t have a car. She was dropped off here after hitchhiking with some woman who was passing by Moonwatch. It wouldn’t have mattered if she had a car anyway because Beatrice never taught her how to drive. The forest was likely her best bet, but if she went through the forest, she’d have to control her broken wolf and shift so she could clear this place faster.
“Well, if it isn’t the love of my life,” Derek called out to his mate when she and Ava arrived. He had a smug smile on his face. Unperturbed by the snow, he was covered in grease, supping up some big truck they had sitting in their driveway. He leaned against the hood of the truck. “Why you home so early, princess? And with a friend.” He raised a dark eyebrow. “How am I supposed to sweep you off your feet, take you to our bed, and fuck you into oblivion if we have a guest?”
Vulgar wolf. Not that Ava cared. Not that any of it mattered.
“Number one, babe, I don’t do grease,” Willow teased. “You’d have to take a shower first.”
“Or you could take one with me.”
“Go on inside,” Willow said as she gave Ava a gentle shove after unlinking their arms.
Ava walked with heavy steps up to the porch. She looked behind her to see Derek stalking Willow. Willow was on edge, smiling like the giddy school girls Ava used to see when she lived on the streets, waiting for him to pounce so she could run. She squealed when Derek made his move. She reacted a second too slow, and he caught her in his arms, getting her all kinds of dirty. She didn’t seem to mind despite what she told him about not doing grease. She turned around in his arms and gave him a devouring kiss. She kissed him like she hadn’t seen him in days.
“Okay, Derek,” she said breathlessly as she pulled away from their kiss. “I have a guest to take care of. It’s important. And now I’ll have to change my clothes.” So maybe Willow was a little irritated after all. There was static in the air that wasn’t entirely playful or sexual. It was something else. Unease, perhaps.
“Hmm,” Derek hummed as he nipped at her ear. “Fine.”
Before Willow turned around, Ava went inside the house like the wolf told her to. She had the power to get away from these wolves right now if she wanted to. Probably. But she didn’t want to cause a scene. She wanted to sneak away quietly. She plopped down onto a wood-framed couch. It was the same burgundy wood used everywhere in Moonwatch, complete with wolves carved into the armrests. She could feel the different grooves of the wolves’ fur coats underneath her palm. The attention to detail was astonishing.
Willow went into a room Ava assumed had to be the kitchen and Derek stood at the front door, watching Ava with bright green eyes. The few times she had seen him, he had never looked at her without his wolf just under his skin. He didn’t feel hostile exactly, but he seemed on edge.
A moment later, Willow returned with a steaming mug of hot chocolate with a perfect foamy top. Ava accepted the drink, but she didn’t take a sip. She held it between her cold hands, letting it warm them.
“What happened?” Willow asked as she twisted her fingers in the curls of her long white-blond hair. She seemed nervous, but her eyes were a deep brown. Her wolf wasn’t going to jump out at her like Derek’s was threatening to. However, the unrest clear in her nervous gesture told Ava that these wolves were much more suspicious of her than she had previously thought.
“Nothing happened,” Ava said as she stared at the mug of hot chocolate resting on her lap.
Derek came up behind his mate and wrapped his arms around her protectively. He rested his hands on her stomach and Willow placed her hands on top of his, soothing him some. Derek’s eyes refused to fade from that bright green, though.
“It didn’t look like nothing, and nobody there gave me an explanation,” Willow retorted. “Did Max do something to you?”
Ava’s mouth hung slightly open. She wasn’t sure how to answer that question. Max’s wolf looked exactly like the White Wolf in her dreams, down to his orange sunset colored eyes. He had been nothing but kind to her in the time she spent with him, but in her dreams, he hunted her, tore into her thigh, and then she always woke up before he finished the deed and killed her.
She looked at her fingers, curled around the ceramic mug. They were bandaged neatly and had never felt so good in a long time. There was a light throbbing, but the ointment and bandages worked. She hadn’t picked at her fingers once since Max put them on this morning. Yeah, it was only into the afternoon hours, early evening, but that was a damn record for her.
Max was doing terrible things to her, lulling her into a sense of security until he decided to go wild and bury his teeth into her flesh like a rabid dog.
“I want to get my things from the motel room,” Ava said suddenly. “I can’t stay with Max anymore.”
Willow frowned. “Okay, I’ll come and help.”
“It’s fine. I only have one bag.”
“Okay, then I’ll get your bag. You don’t want to see Max right now anyway, do you? You can stay in our extra bedroom. We have one open until Derek is ready to give me a pup.” She tilted her head back to look up at her mate, but he avoided her gaze. “Until then, might as well give the damn thing some use, right? I’ve got an air-mattress you can sleep on.”
Ava nodded slowly. “Thanks.” She wanted to grab her bag so she had an excuse and a few minutes to disappear, but Willow’s house was pretty close to Blue Forest, the best place she could go to disappear, so she would probably find a way to sneak out without any wolves seeing her while Willow went for her bag. Her only obstacle would be Derek then. She had her burner phone in her coat pocket, so she didn’t technically need anything from her bag.
“I’ll show you your room first,” Willow said cheerily. Derek let her go without a word and folded his arms as he leaned against a wall. He was being uncharacteristically quiet, and Ava didn’t like the way he was looking at her. Wolf eyes. Wolf hunter.
She shuddered.
“C’mon,” Willow called as she disappeared down the hall.
Ava ducked her head as she passed Derek, hot chocolate still in hand, and followed behind Willow. The room she led her to was a decent size. It looked like it was being used for storage currently since all it had inside of it were some odds and ends.
Willow pointed to the closet. “Air-mattress is in there.” She opened the burgundy doors concealing the closet’s contents. It was as full as it could be. Obviously, Willow preferred not to see the clutter that could have been spread throughout the room instead. It surprised Ava to see a small collection of baby things at the forefront of everything inside, like she had just started picking them up. Willow wanted a baby badly.
Letting out an almost embarrassed laugh as her pale cheeks colored lightly, Willow said, “Yeah, I know it’s ridiculous. It’s a recent obsession to ease the ache since Derek won’t talk to me about…” She cleared her throat. “Anyway, forget that. Derek is the best mate ever. I wouldn’t trade him for anythi
ng.” She dug inside and pulled out a boxed-up air-mattress. “Want me to get this set up?”
Ava shook her head. “I can do it.”
“Okie dokie.” Willow stood up straight and saluted. Her face was serious at first, but it morphed into a big grin. “I’ll be back in a jiffy.”
Willow shut the door when she left, giving Ava a moment alone. Sighing, Ava stared down at the mug of hot chocolate still warming her hands. It was cooling down, though. She placed the mug on the windowsill. If she opened the large window, she’d be able to slip through without a problem. The forest was in clear view.
Ava looked over her shoulder, expecting Derek to come barging in on her at any moment. She froze when her new wolf hearing picked up the tiniest squeak of floorboards. She heard a door shut. Water started running soon after. Derek was taking a shower. This was her chance.
As quietly as possible, Ava slid the window open. Her heart was pounding inside of her chest. She eased one leg outside of the window and then the other until she was sitting on the windowsill. Then she plopped down into the snow just a few feet below. She looked to her right and to her left, making sure the coast was clear, and she ran.
Running through snow was a chore, but she had to make it to the forest before she could shift. She was going to let the rabid animal out because she was much faster. It would be a fight to stay in control, but she was strong. She was a weapon.
The tree line came and went within a few minutes. Ava checked around her one more time, ensuring she hadn’t been followed. Everything was quiet. The forest was like a dead-zone in this winter weather. She couldn’t hear a single creature stirring.
She began stripping off her clothes. The cold got to her easily; the captured wolf didn’t help her much with that. She thought about carrying her clothes in her teeth but decided it wouldn’t be worth it. It would slow her down. She did take the small burner phone out of her pocket though. She would need this or else she wouldn’t find Beatrice easily. Ava didn’t know where she was staying, so she would have to stay out of sight until Beatrice checked in. The longest she would have to wait for Beatrice to contact her would be the following day. She could do this. Beatrice’s wrath would be easier to take. Maybe she’d finally see how broken Ava was and put her out of her misery like Ava hoped, because she couldn’t hurt these wolves. She wouldn’t.