Chapter 6
"It looks good on you," he whispered. "Better than it ever looked on my father."
"Your elders are probably plotting to slip hemlock into my morning tea because of it," I said, trying to ignore the way my heart hammered against my ribs. "Donald looked like he wanted to flay me alive."
"Let him try," Merrick growled, the darkness in his tone sending a delicious shiver down my spine. "I’d mount his pelt on the south gate before the sun set."
He reached out, his calloused fingertips lightly brushing a stray lock of dark hair away from my cheek. The contact was electric. A jolt of pure energy arced between our skin, singing through the dormant threads of our mate bond.
My breath caught. My inner wolf pressed against my ribs, desperate to lean into his touch, to bare her throat to this massive, beautiful monster who looked at me as if I were the only living thing in the world.
"Sit," I said, forcing a clinical firmness into my voice that I didn't truly feel. "The fever will spike again if we don't begin the meridian flush."
Merrick complied without a fight, sitting on the edge of the wide, fur-draped mattress.
I knelt between his parted knees, pulling the bowl of warm water and the clean linen cloths toward me.
Now that I was this close, the true toll of the day was obvious. Dark circles bruised the hollows beneath his eyes. Over the left side of his chest, directly above his heart, the black geometric knot had darkened, its microscopic tendrils pulsing with a sluggish, sickening violet undertone.
I dipped a linen cloth into the cedar water and began to wipe away the thin sheen of cold sweat across his collarbones.
As my fingers moved across his bronze skin, my gaze fell on three thick, jagged scars running diagonally across his right shoulder. They weren't battle wounds from swords or spears.
They were claw marks. Deep, savage gouges made by a frantic, rabid beast.
Merrick caught me looking. His jaw tightened slightly, his hand coming up to gently cover mine where it rested over his chest.
"Keith did that," Merrick said quietly, his voice heavy with a grief that broke my heart. "Two moons ago. When the rot took his mind."
I froze, the damp cloth resting against his skin. "Your elder?"
Merrick nodded slowly, staring into the flickering flames of the hearth.
"He was my father’s battle-brother," he whispered, each word dragged up from a place of profound pain. "He taught me how to hold an axe when I was seven winters old. He was the one who placed the Alpha mantle on my shoulders when my father fell in the border wars. And three weeks ago... he looked at me with eyes full of black sludge, snarled like a mangy cur, and tried to rip my windpipe out."
Merrick’s fingers tightened over mine, pressing my palm directly against the writhing black knot over his heart.
"I had to break his neck with my bare hands, Rielle," he rasped, his voice cracking with raw emotion. "I had to listen to his bones snap while he screamed curses at me. And three days later, Vance turned. Then Corin. Their bodies... they liquefied from the inside out, bubbling into black bile before we could even dig the graves."
He looked back at me, and what I saw in the eyes of the most feared Alpha in the northern territories took my breath away.
It wasn't fear of death. It was the terrifying, agonizing fear of becoming a monster.
"I won't do that to my people," Merrick said, his voice dropping into a desperate, iron-clad vow. "I won't let this rot steal my mind and turn me into a beast that slaughters my own pack."
He reached down to his hip, unbuckling a narrow leather sheath I hadn't noticed before. He drew out a slender, eight-inch dagger.
The blade gleamed with a cold, ethereal blue-white light. Pure, forged silver. The pommel was carved into the shape of a wolf’s skull.
He pressed the hilt into my trembling fingers.
"Merrick, no—"
"Take it," he commanded, closing his large hand over mine, forcing my fingers around the cold silver hilt. "If the flushing fails... if you see the midnight black take my sclera and my mind begins to slip... you do not run. You do not call for Garrick. You drive this blade straight through the center of that knot."
"I won't kill you," I whispered, tears of fierce, rebellious anger burning behind my eyelids. "I am a healer. I came here to save your life, not end it."
"And if you can't save my life, you save my honor!" Merrick snarled softly, leaning forward until our foreheads almost touched. His breath was hot and sweet against my lips. "I would rather die ten thousand deaths by your hand, my mate, than live for one second as the rabid dog that destroyed this pack."
The word hung in the air between us like a physical blow.
*My mate.*
He had never spoken it aloud. We had danced around the edge of it for weeks—in the desperate touches, in the way our wolves cried out across the stone halls, in the possessive fury in his eyes whenever another male drew near. But hearing it spoken, raw and unyielding in the quiet of his bedchamber, shattered the last remnants of my clinical detachment.
"I won't let it come to that," I swore, my voice trembling with an intensity that matched his own.
I set the silver dagger onto the table with a sharp clatter. I took his face in both of my hands, feeling the rough stubble of his jaw, the heat of his skin, the unyielding strength of a man who carried an entire realm on his shoulders.
"You listen to me, Merrick of Onyx Ridge," I murmured, staring directly into his volcanic amber eyes. "I didn't survive five winters in the rogue wastes to lose the only home I've ever found to a cowardly assassin's poison. You are not going to turn feral. You are not going to break. Because your life does not belong to this rot. It belongs to me."
A ragged, shuddering breath escaped his lips.
Before I could pull away, his arms wrapped around my waist like bands of forged steel, lifting me effortlessly off my knees and pulling me up onto the bed, dragging me flush against his chest.
His mouth crashed down on mine.
It wasn't a tentative, gentle touch. It was a starving, desperate claim.
His lips were hot, firm, and demanding, parting mine with a possessive groan that vibrated deep in his massive chest. The mate bond exploded between us like lightning striking dry timber. A brilliant, golden rush of pure, unfettered heat roared through my veins, singing through every nerve ending, drowning out the fear, the exhaustion, the cold stones of the mountain fortress.
I buried my hands in his thick, dark hair, pulling him closer, opening up to the fierce taste of him—pine needles, copper, and the wild, untamable soul of a direwolf.
His hands gripped my hips, lifting me until I was straddling his lap, my thighs pressed tight against his flanks. The primal power of him was terrifying and exquisite all at once. He held me as if I were the most precious, fragile thing in existence, yet with a strength that could have crushed the life from my lungs.
