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Chris crouched in front of her. She could feel the heat coming off him, could smell pine, sweat, cedar smoke from the great hall. His hand stayed on her shoulder, heavy, still.

“Who was that?” His voice was controlled, barely. “Sloane, who the hell was that?”

She lifted her head. Met his eyes. They were blue, bright with a fury she’d never expected to see aimed at anyone on her behalf.

She swallowed against the swelling. It hurt enough to make her eyes water.

“It was nobody,” she said. The word came out broken, half-voiced, scraped over damaged tissue. “It’s none of your business. Get out.”

Chris Williams did not get out.

Chapter 3 - Chris

He hadn’t meant to come this way.

The path to the eastern edge of the compound split at the old maintenance shed, left toward the patrol route, right toward the cluster of residences that thinned out as the tree line thickened. Chris took the right fork without deciding to. His legs carried him, his wolf dragging him forward with a focus that had nothing to do with the speech he’d been rehearsing since he left the great hall.

The speech was good. Measured. He’d tell Sloane that the pairing was an error, that the magic had misfired, that he had no interest in being bound to anyone and certainly not to her. He’d be civil. Direct. He’d leave room for her to agree, because she would agree, because whatever Sloane Mercer was, she wasn’t the kind of woman who rolled over when someone told her she belonged to them.

He was halfway to her cottage before he registered the smell.

Tobacco. Stale, sharp, threaded through the pine and damp earth like a wire drawn through cloth. It didn’t belong here. Nobody in the pack smoked, and the compound’s air carried its own signature he’d been breathing for years. This was foreign. Old. Carried on a body that had been sweating long enough for the scent to bake into fabric.

His wolf stopped pulling and went rigid.

Chris slowed. The path narrowed between birch trunks, the ground soft with last night’s rain, and ahead he could see the cottage. The door was shut. The single window faced him, curtains drawn. Nothing moved.

But the tobacco smell was fresh.

He came off the path into the trees. Old habit, drilled into him during his first year of patrol work under Viktor, when the older wolf had spent three months beating every human instinct out of Chris’s movement patterns. He circled left. The undergrowth was thin here, the ground rocky, and he kept his weight on his toes as he approached the side wall.

He heard the voice before he reached the window.

Male, low, threatening. Chris pressed his shoulder against the cottage wall and edged toward the window. The curtain had a gap where the fabric bunched against the frame, an inch of visibility, enough.

The man was old. Lean, grey at the temples, he crouched in front of the cot where Sloane sat. His hand was around her throat.

Chris’s vision went white.

The color left the world. He lost the trees, the wall under his shoulder, the path behind him, the texture of the air in his lungs. Everything narrowed to the image in that window: Sloane’s face above the man’s fingers, her eyes half-closed, her mouth open, her arms limp at her sides while her body folded toward the lack of oxygen with the practiced stillness of someone who’d done this before.

His wolf hit the inside of his ribcage so hard his knees buckled.

He’d felt the animal before. Fifteen years of shifting, of learning the second self that lived beneath his skin, of negotiating with a creature that operated on instinct while Chris operated on patience. He knew his wolf. The wolf was protective, steady, ran warm when Caitlynn was near, ran watchful when Kahn needed backup, settled into a low idle during the hours Chris spent at the briefing table with his hands between his knees.

This was not that wolf.

This was a roar, a detonation. A sound inside his skull that obliterated every rational thought he’d carried to this cottage, replaced it with a single, screaming imperative that tasted of iron, of heat, of a fury he had no name for. Never before had he felt rage like this. Not him, who had built his entire adult life on the principle that steadiness was worth more than fury.

The bond. The mate bond, the one he’d been planning to refuse, the one he’d walked here to reject, detonated through his nervous system with enough force to rearrange his understanding of his own body. It reached into his chest, pulled, aimed straight at the woman behind that glass with a man’s hand on her throat. The pull was so violent, so total, that he stopped being the man who held doors open for people.

He hit the front door with his shoulder.

The frame splintered. The impact traveled through the wood into the stone wall. The sound was enormous in the tiny space, and he was through the doorway before the door had finished swinging. The cottage was ten feet across. He covered it in two strides.

The man’s hand came off Sloane’s throat. He turned, fast for his age, and Chris saw the face clearly: narrow jaw, hollow cheeks, grey-blue eyes that were already reading the situation with a speed that belonged to someone accustomed to calculating exits.

Chris grabbed him by the collar. The fabric bunched in his fist as he drove the man backward into the wall, pinned him there with one arm, and pulled his other hand back. The fist shook. Every tendon in his forearm stood out against the skin, the tremor visible, the effort of holding the punch almost more than the effort of throwing it would have been.