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At long last, Ransom was gone, Gunner’s underlings had settled in for the night, and I was alone with my never-to-be mate. Without Kira present to necessitate the keeping up of appearances, he drew me not toward my cottage but toward his own residence...a home that was considerably larger than it had been the last time I’d walked through its doors.
“This is Kira’s room,” I guessed, turning an awestruck circle within the addition that Gunner had created on the far side of his living room. There were fox ledges on the walls for playing in fur form, a glass-fronted cabinet full of yearned-for magic-trick paraphernalia, a full-size desk for schoolwork, and of course the mandatory canopied princess bed.
“Mm hm,” Gunner answered, hovering so close to my body I could feel his heat without our skin ever touching. The alpha’s restraint was doing crazy things to my thermal-regulation system...and his subsequent words were like a bucket of cold water poured over my head. “Where is my favorite teenager anyway?”
This was the beginning of the questions I couldn’t answer...well, that I couldn’t answer without losing the few hours I’d hoped to spend in Gunner’s arms. So, rather than lying to a wolf who could detect prevarication through pure instinct, I curled my finger through his belt loop and drew him away from the teenager’s paradise and toward the adult bedroom at the other end of his home.
“Come to bed,” I murmured, plucking at his sleeve as he hesitated in the doorway then recoiling as my finger slipped across an open wound and came away bloody. His current pain was my fault...and I’d just made it even worse.
To my surprise, Gunner didn’t wince at being poked in the middle of a red and angry laceration. Instead, he chuckled, grabbing my hand and replacing it around his wrist.
“I’m not so broken I can’t welcome you home properly,” he told me, using one hand to fumble at buttons that nonetheless obeyed his command with alacrity.
It was finally happening, the moment I’d been craving for weeks. So why did my heart hurt when Gunner paused before continuing, speaking a sentiment we hadn’t yet shared aloud?
“I love you.”
Three words. Three arrows piercing lungs and stomach and head as certainly as if they’d been made of wood and steel and murderous intention. I froze, unable to answer as the reality of my choice became thoroughly clear.
Because this was what I’d be losing when I returned to my grandmother tomorrow. Sure, Sakurako was an old woman. Eventually, she’d die and leave me to make my own choices. But even though becoming her apprentice wasn’t a life sentence, I’d never again be someone Gunner looked at so warmly. Not after being molded by my grandmother’s iron will.
I couldn’t bear the thought of the alpha’s disappointment upon seeing what I was fated to turn into. And I couldn’t risk harming pack mates who had already lost so much at a kitsune’s hand.
So once I left this home, I’d never again see Atwood clan central. Instead, I’d trust the alpha who might have been my mate to raise my sister. And I’d treat his memory as a spark of fire to warm an increasingly frigid heart.
Eventually, I’d be just like my grandmother. Eventually I’d stop caring. If I was lucky, I might even begin to forget.
My face must have broadcast this tumult of emotions because Gunner’s caresses turned platonic and soothing, his huge hand cupping my chin. “I don’t expect an answer,” he told me, incorrectly interpreting my lack of a reply as a continuation of my ongoing independence battle. “I’m just happy to have you beside me. I’m so grateful that you’re here.”
And I was here. For an hour or two—the most I could spare from Sakurako’s timeline. I shivered as the full force of the future brushed up against me. And Gunner, always attuned to my emotions, provided yet another opening for me to get weighty secrets off my chest.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
Gunner was willing to ignore the demands of our flesh and hash out the argument that still simmered unresolved between us. But I wasn’t. Not when any explanation would leave me without the single memory I ached to carry with me back into the snow.
“Tomorrow,” I answered, brushing my lips against Gunner’s. But those final words were a lie, because in the morning I intended to be gone.
***
I WOKE IN GUNNER’S arms an uncountable number of hours later, my heart pounding with fear that I’d overslept. I hadn’t meant to close my eyes at all, actually. Had intended to wait out Gunner’s exhaustion then leave once he was deeply asleep.
Only, I’d been the one to wear myself out and descend into slumber. I’d been the one to snuggle into his safe harbor and forget about the impending storm.
Now, as I gently disentangled myself from the werewolf I’d once thought would be my life partner, I powered up my cell phone and sent Elle the long-awaited text. “Bring Yuki and Oyo. We’re going.”
“Are you sure?” she countered immediately, clearly wide awake and waiting for me.
“Be ready in five minutes,” was my only answer. Of course I wasn’t sure...but I’d do whatever had to be done.
It wasn’t as late as I’d thought, however. So I slipped into the kitchen, found a pen and pad of paper, and sat down to explain myself to the mate I was leaving behind.
Because it wasn’t fair to leave Gunner dangling. Wasn’t fair to make him think I was rejecting our mating through anything other than a desperate bid to save my sister’s last few years of childhood. The only way to even the scales a smidgeon was to tell the truth so he could find another female to fill the hole in his pack and his heart.
“I need to explain,” I started. Scratched that out and tried another opening: “It isn’t because of you that I’m doing this....”
Okay, that was so trite as to be depressing. Gunner deserved to understand how I really felt. And this time when I pushed my pen’s point into the paper, the words finally began to flow.
“I have to leave for the sake of my sister,” I started. “But in my heart, you will always be my mate....”
Only, rather than finishing my explanation, the pen streaked a crazy line across the paper. Then it fell out of nerveless fingers as our mate bond clicked into place with the force of a tractor trailer hitting a pedestrian on a crosswalk.
For an instant, my vision dimmed, my ears rang, and I lost all track of reality. “You implied I had to say the words,” I moaned in protest.
Wait, had I sent that emoting down the mate bond? Had Gunner felt the contact even though he slept?
I gasped, trying to regain enough breath to rush out of the house without looking backwards. I couldn’t afford to be bogged down in explanations with Kira’s future on the line. Plus, if Gunner understood what I was planning, he’d never let me go....
But my legs crumpled beneath me and I ended up leaning against the counter instead of sprinting away out the door. All I could do was beg silently: “Stay where you are. Stay safe,” as wooden legs gradually carried me through the kitchen at the speed of a beer-soaked garden snail. One step after the other, from counter to counter to cabinet to door.
There. I was walking almost normally again even though the pain in my stomach was so intense I would have thrown up if I’d bothered eating before I slept. This I could handle. Being mated then leaving my mate forever wasn’t so horrible....
And as if the thought had called agony back into existence, I doubled up over a spear of pain as intense as a sword slicing into my gut.
Gut wounds are usually fatal, I thought vaguely. Then, more clearly—Ten hours is all I have left.
I refused to leave Kira to our grandmother’s mercy. So I straightened, looked down at a stomach I’d thought would be bleeding but wasn’t. Finding no wound evident, I opened the door and walked out into the night.