After My Mate Tried Killing Me

I picked up the last of the evidence from the safety deposit box a little before sunset.

The wire transfer receipts. The forged medical records. The wolfsbane invoices Elena had pulled from three different suppliers. All of it printed on paper now, tucked inside a plain manila envelope pressed against my chest.

I'd stopped at the bridal boutique on the way back. Kylie had insisted I be measured for a "proper" Luna gown for the alliance banquet next month. Another humiliation. I'd let the seamstress pin the fabric to my shoulders without a word, then walked out just as the streetlights flickered on.

The harbor was two blocks from where I'd parked my car.

I never made it.

They came out of the alley between the fish market and the shipping office. Three of them. I smelled the rogues before I saw them — that greasy, unwashed reek that scraped the back of my throat. My wolf snarled a warning, thin and reedy, and I turned to run.

Something hit me across the back of the skull.

I went down hard on the wet asphalt. The envelope skidded out of my arms into a puddle. A boot came down on my wrist. I heard my own bone crack before I felt it.

"Hold her."

Hands on my ankles. Hands on my shoulders. Then the cold burn of silver, wrapping tight around my wrists, my ankles, biting through the skin. The pain was immediate and enormous. My wolf shrieked and collapsed inside me, curling into a small, useless ball at the bottom of my ribs.

"Get the crate open."

I tried to scream. A gag went in. I tried to shift. The silver hissed against my skin and my wolf whimpered like a dying thing.

I saw the crate. Steel. Lined with more silver, dull and gray in the lamplight. Big enough to fit a body curled tight.

Big enough for me.

They lifted me. I thrashed once, twice, but my arms wouldn't answer. The silver had already burned deep. My skin was smoking. I could smell it.

The lid came down.

Dark. Complete, absolute dark.

I heard the locks click, one after another. Then the scrape of the crate being dragged across concrete. Then nothing but the sound of my own breath rattling in my chest.

And then — falling.

The impact when it hit the water knocked what little air I had out of my lungs. Then the cold came. It punched through the seams first, in thin freezing streams, filling the crate from the bottom up. Ice water crept over my ankles, my knees, my hips.

I thought about Elena. About the dossier in my desk drawer. About my mother.

I thought about Princeton.

I hadn't thought his name in years. It came now unbidden, the memory of a starving boy with huge dark eyes, standing at the edge of Moonveil territory in a jacket three sizes too big. I had bought him soup. I had put him in a foster pack. I had never seen him again.

The water reached my chest.

I'm sorry, I thought, though I didn't know who I was apologizing to. My wolf. My mother. The boy I fed once and forgot.

Myself.

The water reached my throat.

My scent — wildflower and cedar, what was left of it — leaked out of my burning skin and into the black harbor like blood.

Then the water closed over my face and there was nothing.

---

I woke up choking.

Something massive and warm was pressed against my mouth. Salt water came up out of my lungs in great heaving spasms, over and over, until I thought my ribs would crack. I couldn't see. I couldn't feel my hands. Something was roaring above me — no, not roaring. A voice. A voice saying words I couldn't hold onto.

"Breathe. Breathe, breathe, come on, please — breathe for me — "

I breathed.

Air tore into my chest like a knife. I coughed. Coughed again. My eyes cracked open.

A face hung above mine. Dark hair plastered flat against a jaw I didn't recognize. Eyes — impossible eyes — burning gold in the dark. The face of a man, but only barely; the bones underneath were wrong, sharper, longer, half-shifted and struggling to hold their shape.

His hands were on my face. His hands were burned raw, blistered black across the palms where the silver had eaten him. He was shaking. This enormous creature above me was shaking like a child.

"You're alive," he whispered. "You're alive, you're alive, oh Goddess — "

My wolf stirred somewhere at the very bottom of me. She lifted her head. She sniffed.

And then she made a sound I had never heard her make before. A small, broken, joyful whine.

*Mate,* she breathed. *Mate, mate, mate.*

I stared up at him. Water ran off his hair into my eyes.

"Princeton?" I rasped.

His face broke. Just — broke, the way ice breaks under too much weight. Something wet fell from his eyes onto my cheek.

"You remember me," he said.

A long, low growl rolled out of his chest. Not a threat. A vow. His arms slid under my shoulders and my knees and he lifted me like I weighed nothing at all. Something heavy and warm settled around me — his coat, still dry on the inside, smelling of smoke and rain and something deeper underneath, something my wolf pressed her face into and would not let go of.

Boots pounded down the dock. Voices. Orders being given in a language of pure authority.

"Move. Everybody move. Petra, the estate. Now."

He carried me toward the black cars waiting at the end of the pier. His arms did not loosen. His eyes did not leave my face.

"I've got you," he said, quiet, only for me. "I've got you. Nothing touches you again."

I closed my eyes against his chest and let the dark take me a second time.

This time it was warm.