Free RawHeat by Charlotte Stein Page B

in her body. And she couldn’t rub
her face against something on him, like his shoulder, because moving her head
made it trickle faster.
    So she just had to keep as still as her body would allow,
fearing every tremble and every slick slide of that one little drop…until
Connor turned his head—slowly, so slowly—and licked the blood from her face .
One long swipe, almost sensuous in spite of the situation, so tender and full
of a strange sort of caring.
    It made her think weird things—things that had started in
the room of screaming and tearing and blood. Things like you are my mate . You are my wolf, always.
    And then she opened her eyes and took in the suddenly empty
corridor below. Everything so still and silent, as though nothing had even
happened. No wolves had come and left a bloody mosaic of paw prints on the
dusty walls and floors. Connor hadn’t held her safe like this, while the beasts
made their way down to the living quarters.
    Though she couldn’t deny that she heard screaming after a
moment, somewhere off in the distance.
    Her stomach dropped as he slid them back down to the ground,
though mainly because of the speed at which he did everything. He didn’t even
stop long enough for her to catch her breath or check to see if anything was
coming. He simply set her down, grabbed her hand, and went for the door at the
end of the south corridor.
    Of course she saw wolves waiting for them in her mind’s eye,
before they’d gotten close. Nothing could be this easy, and even when it turned
out that way she couldn’t quite believe in it. Any moment, and something was
going to spring out to stop them. It didn’t even have to be a wolf—she’d have
settled for a desperate survivor, with a gun.
    But no one came. No survivors. No humans running for the
door. Just an eerie silence, and the great metal door before them.
    “Jesus, they planned this well,” she said, but he didn’t
answer. He looked high on something other than adrenaline and twice as anxious,
resorting to actions rather than words. He shoved her behind him before he
turned the two big wheels, metal grinding and creaking as though no one had
been outside for days. Weeks, maybe.
    It made her wonder what on earth had been going on. Had
things gotten so bad out there that scavenging runs and gunning runs and
movement between the undergrounds and the fortresses had stopped? She didn’t
know and by God it was too late to ask now.
    All she could do was hang on to his hand and plunge out into
the black beyond, so full of everything she’d experienced in the last few hours
that asking questions and finding answers seemed secondary.
    She was going outside, for the first time in her life.
Actually outside, where the air felt like a knife in her throat and everything
seemed dark and yet not, at the same time.
    Of course she’d seen pictures of the moon, and the stars,
but in reality they were so much more than she’d ever imagined. They glowed.
They made fingers of light come down on everything, and everything wasn’t what
she’d expected at all.
    Was the world all forest now? She knew trees when she saw
them, and they covered the landscape as far as the eye could see. They looked
like a maze, like a great living beast, and when he pulled her down some gentle
slope of soft stuff to the beginnings of this… thing , she tried to pull
back for a second.
    But he kept hold of her hand. And he stopped long enough to
look at her with eyes that seemed like his again—gray and stormy and full of a
suddenly sparking life.
    “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s this way—we’re safe if we go
this way.”
    And she believed him. She did. She believed him so much that
she let him lead her into this living, breathing place, not looking back for a
single second because God, she could hear people screaming now. She could hear
snarling and that tearing and even though she didn’t love a single one of them,
it was still terrible in its own way.
    Though there