Page 17 of Pucking Feral: Part Two

But I can already feel him slipping away again. The panic is too much. His blue eyes start to cloud over, that terrible vacant look creeping back in.

"Wraith," I whisper, my voice breaking.

Thunder crashes overhead, and I curl against his chest, purring desperately like maybe I can call him back with sound alone. His heartbeat is steady under my ear, but everything else about him feels hollow. Empty.

I curl against his massive frame, nuzzling into his neck, breathing in his dark mountain forest scent that's gone heavy with anguish. I rub my face against his scars, all of them, scent-marking him with renewed urgency.

This broken, beautiful alpha is mine, and I need the whole world to know it. I need it embedded in his skin so deep that everyone can smell me on him.

My alpha.

My mate.

Mine.

I don't know how long we sit there. Me clinging to his vacant form, rain hammering the tent, both of us soaked and shivering.

Time becomes meaningless when you're waiting for someone to come back from wherever trauma has taken them.

"Room for one more?"

I nearly jump out of my fucking skin.

Thane's in the tent entrance, soaked to the bone, dark brown hair dripping and plastered to his face. He looks simultaneously gravely worried and surprised, like he wasn't sure he'd find me alive.

"Holy shit," I choke out, yanking my messed-up skirt back into place automatically, running on instinct. "Get in here before you freeze to death. How did you even find us?"

Thane hesitates like he isn't sure how to answer that, then crawls into the tent with a huge duffel bag slung over one shoulder, immediately making the space feel even smaller.

Three bodies in this tiny tent is... cozy. And two of the bodies are huge, one substantially larger than even other alphas.

Thane peels his soaked shirt over his head with a grimace and tosses it into the corner of the tent. In the flickering green light, his tan muscle is covered in scars of his own. They're not nearly as extensive as Wraith's, but there are enough to show he's been through his own battles.

Then his nostrils flare. His head turns slowly, and those dark eyes drop straight to my bare leg.

"Ivy," he says quietly. "Who's bleeding?"

"Me. It's… it's fine." I tug my skirt further down, but I know he can smell it. I give up. "Okay. So I moved wrong. I caught myself on his teeth."

True. All of it.

"You… uh… you what?" Thane asks hoarsely, his eyes sliding to Wraith. To his bare face, his slack hands, the dried blood at the corner of his jaw.

He clenches his own jaw, then digs a small first aid kit out of the duffel and holds it out to me, muttering, "Not even gonna ask."

I could kiss him for that.

The bandages and his lack of questions.

"The pull," Thane says finally, grabbing a dry shirt from his duffel while I stick a couple of band-aids on the cuts. They're small, no big deal at all, but Wraith is still staring at them, catatonic, like he believes he maimed me.

"The... pull? Sorry, what?"

He pauses with the shirt halfway on, gesturing vaguely between us, then at Wraith's still form. "Pack bonds run deep, and not just because he’s my brother. When one of us is in distress—real distress, not just having a bad day—we feel it. Like a string tugging at your chest, telling you which direction to go."

I can feel it, too.

But I wait, listening.