Page 13 of The Wolf's Appetite
Gods… fooking hell.
Nothing. But still I tried. I reached deep, searching for my Lycan’s presence that had always been part of me. My other half. An internal instinct that was a seventh sense.
I no longer had my Lycan power, his feral rage and protectiveness.
I called to him in my mind, but there was no answer back. My breathing grew rough, my chest tight.
Nothing but damn silence and a hollow ache.
For months now, I’d been wracking my brain trying to figure out why my wolf had gone silent after the injury. I knew many Lycans who’d gotten injured and never had their inner animal leave.
The scarring that covered me didn’t matter. My fleshcould’ve been torn to shreds, and I wouldn’t have cared as long as I still had my wolf.
Was it the trauma? Had I been weak and that’s why he’d turned his back on me? Or had something in that fight—something I hadn’t seen, hadn’t felt—broken us apart in a way that couldn’t be repaired?
I got down on my haunches and sank my fingers into the cool, damp earth. The rage built in me until I trembled from the force of it. My breaths came out in ragged gasps. I wanted to roar, to tear at the ground until my fingers bled and there was nothing left beneath me.
I stayed there, hunched over in the moonlight, fingers deep in the soil like I could root myself and find answers from the earth beneath me.
And instead of the voice of my wolf… instead of the connection I ached for…
All I could think about washer.
Aisling.
She calmed the storm brewing in me.
I pictured the soft flush of her cheeks when I got too close and it made her fidgety. I thought about the way her chest rose and fell too fast when she tried to act unaffected.
I inhaled, still able to smell the scent of her skin—clean linen and something wild underneath. Somethingfemaleand intoxicating.
Gods. What was wrong with me?
This wasn’t about her. It couldn’t be. She was just a distraction. A complication. She wasn’t my mate—my wolf would’ve known, would’ve made himself known androaredthe truth the first time we met.
Right?
She haunted me in the best—most frustrating—way.
Why did I want to go back inside and find her, bury my face in her hair, take her scent into my body until she marked me like I wanted to mark her?
A low growl left my chest at the thought of her covered in my claw and bite marks.
I was losing myself. And I didn’t know how to get back to who I was before.
I stayed in the woods so long my skin prickled from the cold, and my legs ached from crouching, and I realized one monumental thing.
The only thing filling the silence and void in me was…her.
8
LENNOX
By the time I returned to the estate, hours had passed, and the sky had paled at the edges, the first signs of dawn creeping over the horizon.
My body was exhausted from running, wishing all that time my animal would take the hint and rise.
But nothing.
