Free To Right a Wrong by Abby Wood Page A

situation had turned. Someone was going to die, and he'd do whatever he had to do to make sure it wasn't Dani who paid.
    “Ethan…” Dani pulled her hands away and reached up to touch her forehead. Blood covered her fingers. “It’s not healing. It feels like my head’s burning up.”
    “I’m gonna kill the son of a bitch who did this, but we need to get you home.” He pulled her up and gathered her to his side. “I’ve got some ointment that’ll help.”
    “What is it? Why won’t it stop?”
    “It’ll be okay. The cuts aren’t deep, but he must have used a silver-coated knife to—”
    “What?” She clutched his shirt. “Am I scarred?”
    “No, little one.” Opening the back door, he peered to the left and right. “It’s safe. Let’s get you home.”
    A sense of viewing a dream world different than reality settled over Ethan, but his senses were finely tuned to the littlest observations. The air seemed stagnant, as if the world had stopped spinning on its axis. This wasn’t really happening. He wasn’t sitting in the car with his mate in pain, blood trickling down the side of her face.
    “Are you okay, little one?”
    Dani turned her head. “Why would Mr.
    Lehman do this to me?”
    “Because of me.” Ethan’s gaze traveled to her forehead. “He hurt you to scare me away from Drover.”
    She groaned. He imagined that the pain radiating over her forehead was torment.
    “You don’t know that. H-he seemed angry at me. He kept telling me I’d betrayed the pack and my parents would be ashamed of me. Oh God, Ethan. He hated me. It was nothing like I’d ever seen before. He…” She waved her hand in the air. “He wasn’t normal.”
    “Hold that thought, baby.” He pulled into the driveway, shut off the car, and opened the door.
    Racing around to the other side, he picked up Dani and whisked her into the house. He set her on the couch. “I’ll be right back.” In the zippered pouch of his duffle bag, he found the ointment his father always swore would work against injuries resulting from silver. He stood clutching the bottle, kicked the bag carrying his personal belongings back into the corner of the room and hoped that it would do the trick. The store owner obviously knew what he was doing when he cut his message over Dani’s forehead. The poison wasn’t enough to kill, but Ethan guessed the pain was worse than she was admitting.
    Ethan returned to the living room and sat on the coffee table facing Dani. “Dammit, I forgot a bandage.”
    She pointed toward the kitchen. “There are clean rags in the second drawer underneath the sink.”
    Disgusted at himself for taking so long and making her suffer further, he set the bottle on the table and opened a drawer. Grabbing a few hand towels, he turned.
    He could hear Dani leaving the room.
    “Dani?”
    He followed her scent into the bathroom and found her staring into the mirror. His chest tightened. He'd wanted to protect her from seeing her face. “Little one—”
    “Tell me the truth.” She shifted her gaze to his reflection, blinked hard to dispel the tears clouding her vision, and whispered, “Is this a message for me or you?”
    The red, raw carving still wept tears of blood.
    He studied her in the mirror, not daring to break eye contact. Keeping her in the dark wasn’t doing her any favors anymore. Against his better judgment, the game had turned from play to personal.
    Ethan turned her away from the mirror, tipped her face up, and opened the bottle, spilling some medicine onto a clean towel. He was surprised to find his hand shaking. “The hate between Greggoire and I goes back before you were born, little one. In fact, it goes back to my father’s days when he battled his cousin, Greggoire’s father, for the alpha position. It has always been this way.”
    She winced at the sting from the medicine, but let him continue dabbing the cuts. “This isn’t about the challenge, though. The fight for position was never meant to