Page 72 of Marked By Moonlight

“Claire!” Panting, he skidded to a halt in the middle of the street. Indifferent to the setting sun warming his nude body, he stared blindly ahead. His hands sliced through his hair, clutching the shaggy locks at the back of his head until he came close to ripping them out by the roots. Throwing back his head, he hollered at the sky.

He fucked up.

Claire was gone. In the hands of a lycan who would put her through God knew what. And in five days, she would shift. She would kill and feed.

He ran his hands over his face roughly. Claire had been right last night. He should have simply let her pull the trigger. His own desire, his selfish need for her had stopped him, sentencing her to God knew how many lifetimes as a lycan—a veritable hell on earth. And if the day arrived when some other agent did what he failed to do and actually destroyed her—she would face an eternity of damnation.

The sound of his name came to him from far away. He turned to see Cooper standing on the curb, one hand pressed against his rapidly swelling split lip. “You’re naked, man.” With a grimace of disgust on his face, Cooper gestured to the house. “And bleeding. Come inside before your neighbors call the precinct.”

Gideon inspected his hand and numbly noted the blood trickling down his fingers to the street. Dropping his hand, he marched past Cooper, cutting through the lawn still warm from the day’s relentless sun. “Go to hell.”

Cooper followed. “You know, I’m the one who should be angry here.”

Gideon yanked the back door open and stalked inside, going straight for the bottle of whiskey on the pantry’s bottom shelf. “Put it in a letter.”

“How about putting some clothes on?”

Gideon glanced down at himself.

“Probably need stitches,” Cooper added, nodding to Gideon’s hand.

Unscrewing the cap, Gideon downed a mouthful of liquid fire and continued to ignore the man he felt like pummeling to the floor. It wasn’t Cooper’s fault, he reasoned. He had no one to blame except himself. He felt hollow, dead inside. The whiskey burned its way down his throat, warming his belly.

“So, that’s it?” Cooper crossed his arms. “You’re going to get shit-faced now?”

The disgust in Cooper’s voice was only a measure of what Gideon felt for himself. He wrenched a paper towel from the holder and wrapped it around his hand. It would have to do. He wasn’t taking his sorry ass to the emergency room.

Bottle in hand, he took the stairs two at a time, trying to ignore the fact that Cooper followed.

He snatched his jeans off the floor, feeling Cooper’s glare. “She wasn’t damned yet, hadn’t taken a life,” he snapped, sliding into his jeans.

“Doesn’t matter. You know that.”

“That’s how you see things. I disagree.”

“Since when?”

It was on the tip of his tongue to say since Claire, but he held back. He didn’t want Cooper to know he’d fallen for a lycan.

Yet it seemed Cooper had reached his own conclusions. “Since you tripped and fell into bed with her?”

He pinned Cooper with his gaze. “Careful, Cooper.”

Cooper stared at him for one long moment before rolling his eyes. “Shit. Even better. You’re in love with her.”

Gideon pulled his shirt over his head and stuck his arms through the sleeves in rough, angry movements, not bothering to answer. He didn’t know what to say. Didn’t know if it was true. Did he love Claire? It certainly explained why he couldn’t bring himself to kill her.

“Where are you going?” Cooper asked as Gideon tugged on his socks.

“To find her,” he answered simply.

“You need to get that hand stitched up,” Cooper repeated, his voice grudging, as if he hated to reveal that he cared.

Gideon glanced at his hand as he took another swig from the bottle. Blood already soaked the paper towel, but it didn’t matter. He’d live. Claire, on the other hand…

His gut clenched. “Your concern is touching, but I’ve got shit to do.”

“You mean find her?”

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