Page 146 of The Lure of Wolves and Whispers
My nerves prickle with every boom of thunder outside, over-heated and charged like lightning waiting for release. I can’t just wait here—not with everyone I care about out there, fighting.
Finn, probably.
Him…definitely.
I need to find them. I need to be there, helping.
I rip the chamber door open, faint light from the hall beyond spilling across my boots, then snaking up my legs with an eerie flicker of the candles.
A cloaked figure waits there, hand raised as if just about to knock.
Black hair, and green eyes that go molten the moment they find mine.
Wolf.
“You’re alive,” he breathes out, a wild light in his eyes.
I don’t answer. I don’t have the breath left for it.
Instinct takes over, the same wild look in his eyes lighting a fire in my blood, and I surge up to close the space between us.
THIRTY-SIX
Old Ones, the taste of him is everything.
Everything I crave, everything I need.
Everything.
Our mouths collide, and he kisses me like I’m the answer to all the questions we’ve never had the time to ask—as if there’s nothing else outside these four walls.
Wolf’s hands knot in the hair at the back of my neck and pull me closer into him. My fingers fist the fabric of his shirt to bring him closer too, his hard chest heating against me.
“Fuck,” Wolf groans against my neck, working kisses down the sensitive path of skin along my jaw to where my pulse flutters. The thrum of my beating heart drowns out everything else, everything but the sound of his breath catching rough in his throat. “How are you alive?”
One of his hands grabs hungrily at the flesh of my hip. The other comes up to cup my face, and he pulls back just enough to search my eyes. The fire in his gaze burns away the ice that’s been frozen beneath my skin since this battle began.
I nip at his lip, drawing a low sound at the back of his throat that sets my blood on fire anew. “Your surprise isn’t a compliment.”
“Wasn’t meant to be one,” he murmurs against the soft skin where my neck meets my ear. Wolf’s thumb strokes along mycheekbones, something almost tender stirring in his eyes. “Fuck, Maeve.Howare you alive?” he asks again.
Because I killed people.
Because even if I’ve scrubbed it off, my hands are covered in blood.
I can’t think about any of that. I can’t think about the Assay, about the lives that I took, about the blood or the mages or the attack.
Aboutanyof it.
I rip my gaze away from his, pressing my eyes closed against the memories.
A callused thumb strokes again along my cheek, both of Wolf’s palms cupping my face with impossible tenderness, like he’s afraid I might fall apart.
“Maeve,”he says softly, and when I look back at him, his green eyes are a tempest—and the only safe port from the chaos raging inside me.
There’s chaos in his gaze too.
And if the gathering storm finds us, I want to go down knowing I’ve held nothing back.
