He cupped her face in his hands and kissed her with all his heart. Something unspooled deep in his chest in the shadows where his hellhound lurked, but it wasn’t a shadow; it was light, gleaming so brightly gold it put the sun to shame. It unfurled like a shoot pushing through the snow, one leaf then two then enough to spread through his veins until it found the same golden light in her lips, in her fingertips pressed against his skin, in the softness of her cheek and the determined line of her jaw beneath his palms. Her heart and his, bound together.
He gasped. Their lips parted, but the spell didn’t break. The shining light from the deepest part of his soul was still alight, a golden rope that connected him to the woman in his arms.
“Oh, wow,” she breathed, her eyelids fluttering. Her breath hitched, and emotions shimmered down the golden rope: wonder, confusion, a shiver of embarrassment. “I, uh. I didn’t expect that to happen so fast.”
That? Fleance was confused. He’d known he was her mate the moment he saw her; wasn’t that the way it was meant to work?
The golden light connecting them thrummed like a plucked guitar string. “Oh,” Fleance said out loud. That.
The golden rope. A bond. The mate bond.
“Also, have to admit I thought it would be more, uh, metaphorical?” The mate bond twanged again. She laughed, delight burbling out of her like water from a fountain. “Holy… wow.”
Her eyes focused on his. They were as bright as her voice, her laughter, the light that connected them. Flecks of gold sparkled in warm brown, like slices of sunlight cutting through the canopy to dance on the forest floor.
“I’m Sheena,” she said.
“Flea—Fleance.” He caught himself just in time and gave his full name, not the embarrassing nickname.
She smiled. “Hi.”
“Hi.”
There was more he should be saying. He knew that the same way he vaguely remembered there was something he should have said earlier, before the kiss that broke his world into before her and the rest of his life.
The smoke… his hellhound whispered. Fleance could have hit himself. He was standing around like a stunned fish while buildings burned all around him—and his mate. He had to get her out of here.
“I can’t believe this is happening.” Sheena pulled her hands away from his shoulders but kept them resting on his chest, as though she couldn’t bear to stop touching him. He understood. He didn’t want to lose her touch, either, the way her waist molded to his hand, the punch-drunk wonder of her body so close to his. “I thought my sheep had really lost it this time. Or I had. I thought I saw…” She shook her head. “But my sheep said there wasn’t anything. I must have breathed in too much smoke.” She half-smiled, as though she was trying to convince herself.
He wanted to get lost in her eyes, the tentative quirk at the corner of her lips, the almost tangible need to think that everything was fine, everything was normal, no problems here.
No. What he wanted didn’t matter. What his hellhound wanted didn’t matter now, either. What mattered was that he had chased the shadows in his mind to this remote, abandoned community, and although Parker’s signature was clear in the burning buildings, he couldn’t sense the other hellhound anywhere. No scent or sound or sight of the man who’d once controlled his life. And nothing supernatural, either. No ghost of the old chain around his soul, dragging him back.
And his mate had just said—
“You thought you saw something?” A trickle of foreboding made its way down Fleance’s spine.
“It—” She shrugged, and even without the mate bond he could have seen her thoughts on her face: No, that’s crazy, it can’t have happened, there’s nothing wrong…
The hairs on the backs of his arms rose. Inside him, his hellhound jumped to high alert.
“We need to get out of here.” He wrapped one arm protectively around Sheena and hurried back up the road towards the least on-fire part of the subdivision. *What did you see?*
*Nothing.*
Fleance clenched his jaw. The word had arrived in his head accompanied by a tremble of fear.
He hadn’t been able to sense Parker. He’d been glad not to feel any remnant of the control the man once had over him. It had put one of his fears to rest: that Parker would still somehow be able to control him, despite the fact that Caine had taken over the pack.
He’d been a fool. Without the pack sense, Parker could make himself as untraceable to Fleance as he was to any other human or shifter. How could he protect anyone from a threat he couldn’t even sense?
The same way the people I hurt couldn’t do anything against me.
Sheena stiffened in his arms and for one horrible moment, he thought he’d let his thoughts reach her mind. Then he saw her attention wasn’t on him.
“The motorway’s back that way,” she said, pointing behind them.
“I took a—I won’t call it a shortcut,” he said. “My car’s this way.”
“Sweet. Wait, my phone—” She looked up towards the patchwork house that overlooked the rest of the community and fear flickered across her face. It was only momentary, and as quick as it had appeared it vanished, replaced by a strangely frantic determination.
Or not so strange. Fleance tightened his arm around her.
“I left my phone at the house,” she said. Her voice was normal, but the mate bond screamed like a steel cable under pressure. “I should—”
“We’re getting out of here,” he reminded her.
“Without calling the fire brigade?”
He recognized her sudden stubbornness. When nothing else made sense, cling to the things that did. Fewer people called on emergency services than you might expect, when under attack by hellhounds, and those that did found that human cops and firefighters were less help than they might
