Page 26 of Wolf Trial

“I’m telling you,” Leander said, continuing an earlier conversation. “They’re attacking humans, too. And not just Lunovan humans; I swear I saw a group of them in London the last time we were there.”

Lainsz grunted, his habitual response. “If you’re going to save her,” he told me, “you’d better be quick. But don’t expect me to explain it to the four packs.”

They wouldn’t be happy about this, but I couldn’t let an innocent woman die. My wolf wouldn’t let me.

“Guys,” Leander said, a softness to his voice—and his eyes. “What if she’s—”

“Don’t be fucking absurd,” Lainsz growled. “You and your goddamn daydreams.”

“It’s not a daydream. I swear, there are other heirs out there. Who’s to say she isn’t the lost princess?”

“Common sense?” Lainsz drawled, ripping the tie from his ponytail only to put it back up, his motions restless. As if he’d realised what I had: this woman was a victim of the slayer academy as much as any wolves they attacked. “Sanity? A basic fucking understanding of—”

Her heartbeat stuttered. We all heard it.

And I acted on impulse, following that feral instinct from my wolf and lifting her arm. Vampires were created with a bite, but wolves were made with a scratch. The nail of my forefinger sharpened, lengthened, pain burning at my nail bed as I made a partial shift. It was the same ability that had made my parents so proud they’d boasted to the entire pack that I was their future alpha. A few years later they kicked me out, disowned me, and said never to show my face there again.

I looked into Leander’s forest-dark eyes, then Lainsz’s piercing ice blue. No matter what either of them said, either scorn or dreams, when I locked eyes with them, they were in agreement with me. A woman was on the verge of death, and we would save her.

Even if the consequences would be brutal.

Her heart was slow, laboured, when I dragged the tip of my claw over the delicate skin of her forearm. Blood welled in a thin line, then dripped down her arm. I was far from a vampire, but my wolf wanted to lick up that line of blood, to taste the heart of her. I shook the sensation away and glanced up when Leander hurried into the kitchen, returning with a clean cloth to place against her cut.

It was the other wounds I watched. The bruises, the scrapes, the gouges in her arms and shoulders, and that brutal trauma in the back of her head. The fatal injury that would have taken her.

The small scrapes were the first to heal, repairing into fresh, bronze skin. Then the gouges, where rocks must have slashed into her skin. Her head was the final wound to heal, her hair still bloodied but the hole in her skull sealing over until all that remained was matted hair.

“When will she wake up?” Leander asked, kneeling beside the sofa again, gazing upon the unconscious woman as her heart startled and jumped. As wolf venom charged into her bloodstream. The mortal side of her would resist it, even as close to death as she’d been, but the venom would win. It always won.

“Not for hours,” I replied, forcing myself to stand even if I wanted to kneel there and watch her, even if my wolf let out a vicious snarl the moment she was out of sight.

“Wonder why they killed her,” Lainsz muttered, his arms crossed over his chest as he assessed her, as if her unconscious face held clues. “Guess we’ll find out when the pack bond locks in.”

Yeah, that was a complication. For years, it had always been the three of us. But being changed by the alpha of a pack automatically made you part of it, and the psychic bond would form between her and I, and link her into the equally beautiful and annoying bond with my packmates.

“I’ll get the spare room ready,” I murmured, excusing myself before my wolf encouraged me to do something insane, like brush hair off her forehead and press a kiss to the healed cut on her temple.

The moment I was out of sight, I shook my head roughly. What the fuck was up with my wolf? As a general rule, he was calm, rational, and didn’t get worked up like this unless our pack were threatened. Unless he thought saving the woman risked Lainsz and Leander…? No, he wanted me to save her, to change her. And under his loud insistence that we needed to go back downstairs right the hell now, there was a slow-uncoiling satisfaction.

He was glad I’d saved the woman.

“Verne!” Lainsz roared from downstairs before I could finish changing the sheets on the double bed in the small box room at the back of the cottage.

Panic struck my chest. I sprinted into the hall and down the stairs. “What is it?” I blurted. “Is she okay?”

I couldn’t say where the question came from, or why my immediate fear was for a stranger and not my packmates.

“She’s…”

I froze on the edge of the sitting room, struck by seeing Lainsz lost for words. I’d seen this only twice before—when his family rejected him, and when I built this pack for us—and it was such a rare sight that panic locked me in place.

“Our mate,” Leander finished in a whisper, awe widening his eyes. The woman was still unconscious, but I felt it now; the venom had worked into every part of her body, changing her from human to wolf. And the second I came close enough for her scent to hit my senses, it was like a punch to the face and a battering ram to my chest at the same time.

Sweet almond, like marzipan. A scent that affected me so severely, that made my wolf throw his head back and howl, that made the man in me want to fall to my knees… a scent that meant one thing and one thing alone. Leander was right.

She was our mate.

CHAPTER 16