“I do care, Carly,” Gideon growled through gritted teeth. “Quite a bit more than I should. Which is why I’m leaving you now. Any longer, and we would both wind up regretting it.”

“I’m glad you feel so fit to judge for both of us,” she snapped back. “But all things considered, I think I deserve to know exactly what I would wind up regretting. And why.”

Gideon hissed out a breath, shoved his hair back from his face. “It’s pointless.”

“No, what that is, is a cop-out. I let you in, Gideon,” she said firmly, never letting her gaze drop from his. “Not just into my home, but into my life. In,” she pressed a hand against her heart, feeling it beating surprisingly steady and true beneath her hand, “here. And I got to you too, or you wouldn’t be doing this, not this way. What are you afraid of, Gideon? What have you got to lose by laying it out for me now, before you leave me here to pick up the pieces?” He looked stricken, but she pressed on, knowing that if they didn’t do this now, if she just let him go quietly, she would regret it for the rest of her life. “I deserve a reason, Gideon. I deserve at least that. Because even though you’re walking away, it doesn’t change the fact that I’ve fallen in love with you.”

And that arrow, Carly saw, had struck its mark. The abused duffel hung from his hand, forgotten. He simply stood there, stock still, his eyes now brimming with some indefinable emotion that drove that knife into her heart so deeply that it nearly brought her to her knees. And she knew then that though he might never say it, that she would probably, in fact, never see him again after tonight, those feelings weren’t just hers alone.

Gideon loved her too.

She knew it with every fiber of her being. And she promised herself that, whatever happened, she would try to make that knowledge be enough.

Improbably, impossibly, those simple words seemed to have finally broken through the shield Gideon had put up. He left the bag on the floor and came to her, moving across the room and into her arms in only two of his long, quick strides. Carly’s heart lifted and sang as she opened her arms to pull him against her.

And then shattered when he kept himself apart, holding back from her embrace but cupping her face tenderly in his big, calloused hands. Hands that Carly knew to be far more gentle than anyone might ever guess. His eyes, soft, full of longing and regret, finally undid her. One rogue, unwanted tear finally escaped and slipped down her cheek. He rubbed it away with his thumb.

“I need you to go to your parents’ house and stay there once I’m gone.”

“Gideon …”

“No,” he said, and his tone was gentle but insistent. “I need you to do that for me. I need to know that you’re safe. My father has been taken.”

Her eyes widened. “God, Gideon.”

“I don’t know what’s going to happen anymore. I don’t know whether he’s dead or alive. But I have to find him. And then I have to kill the ones responsible for hurting him.”

Carly wanted to flinch, so matter-of-fact he was, almost casual, about the murder he was planning to commit. But she didn’t. Still, he must have seen it in her eyes.

“Ah, you start to see now, love. Our worlds, our laws … our people … are really very far apart. I’m capable of killing, Carly. And I’m capable of enjoying it, if the one I’m killing deserves it. You deserve a life without any violence or fear. Without some rough beast who can barely keep from sinking his teeth into you.”

Carly drew a shuddering breath. Gideon’s tone hadn’t changed, but there was a ferocity running beneath it that was slightly frightening. “If that’s the price for being with you …”

She stopped short as Gideon’s eyes flamed, as his lips peeled back in an angry snarl and he gripped her shoulders to shake her roughly. “The price for being with me is death, Carly. If I bite you, it will kill you. My own father killed my mother in just that way, for love. She wanted all of what he was, to be what he was. But she was so damned soft, and sweet. So human. And the Wolf he unleashed in her blood devoured her. Just as it would you.”

“But,” Carly protested frantically, “you wouldn’t have to … you don’t have to!”

“Perhaps, for a time. But I’m not strong enough, Carly. There would come a day when you would ask. It’s simply the way of things. And the Wolf in me wants you. So much I can barely stand it.” His hands tightened painfully on her upper arms, and Carly knew there would be bruises there tomorrow. Still, looking into the face of what most would consider a monster, she couldn’t be afraid.

“You’re hurting me,” she said softly, but he didn’t seem to hear her.

“Do you want to die, Carly? Am I worth so much to you, to give up everything?”

And he was pleading, Carly knew, for her to send him away, to free him, and herself, from the bleak future he’d just described. Loving him meant death. He had to be exaggerating. Didn’t he? Wasn’t love always supposed to find a way? She wanted to say this to him, to soothe him, to convince him that they could work it out. But with his words, and the bite of his hands into her flesh, a little pain now to warn her of unimaginable pain in the future, there was suddenly the faintest hint of doubt.

Carly hesitated.

And that, it seemed, was the answer he’d been looking for all along.

Gideon released her, closed his eyes as though girding himself in the final moments before a battle, and nodded once. “Stay safe for me, Carly, until I send word.” He turned from her then, seeming to take no more than an instant to retrieve his bag from the floor and move past her into the hallway.

All the things Carly wanted to say seemed caught in her throat, unable to escape, unlike the hot tears that now poured freely down her cheeks. She was watching him go, the one man she’d ever loved. The only man, she was sure, she would ever love like this. And all she could do was to stand there, paralyzed except for her tears, and let him leave, death an insidious, whispered echo that rang in her ears.

What kind of a choice did she have, if that was really all there was?

He turned once to look back at her, his anger gone, sadness hanging over him like a mantle. “Whatever you may think of me, Carly, please know …” He seemed to struggle with it for a moment. Carly felt the words she so desperately needed to hear hanging just out of her reach, nearly spoken. But in the end, whatever he’d thought to tell her, the words remained unsaid. Instead he simply gave her a lingering, broken look. And turned away.

Carly could only watch mutely, unable to give voice to any of the thousands of things she wanted to say to him. So she said nothing at all, only closed her eyes against the sight of him leaving. Seconds later, she heard the door open. Carly waited for it, the sound that signaled the end of their brief relationship, of the door closing on a future she had only just begun to imagine. She waited … but there was only silence, stretching out until she had to open her eyes again. A wild hope rose in her. Had he changed his mind, after all? Her feet moved with a will of their own to get her to the point where Gideon had all but decreed he was walking out of her life forever. Where he now stood with his back to her, door wide open, staring silent and still out into the darkness.

“Gideon,” she began, “I …”

She searched for something, anything to say that would hold him where he was, that would keep him from taking those final few steps out of her life. But the words died in her throat before she could begin to form them, strangled by an odd and thickening silence that had descended. She drew her arms around herself, trying to ward off the strange sense of foreboding that crackled up her spine.

It was still, so unnaturally silent and still, Carly thought with a shiver. She felt as though she’d walked into a scene frozen in time, she and Gideon bugs eternally trapped in amber. The tiny hairs rose along the back of her neck as the moments spun out, some primitive part of her alerting her to a danger she couldn’t begin to imagine.

Didn’t want to imagine.

Carly forced herself to speak again, desperately wanting Gideon to look at her, to reassure her that nothing was wrong. Except she knew damn well that wasn’t true. Everything was wrong. Her voice, when it came, was hardly more than a whisper.

“Gideon?”

Nothing, not a movement. And then it reached her, carried on a breath of arctic wind that was heavy with a wild and unfamiliar scent that had all of her instincts screaming run. It started low, a barely audible rumble that swelled and deepened until it seemed to fill up every corner of the night, drowning out even the increasingly panicked drumbeat of her own heart.

Growling.

Whether or not Gideon had heard her, it appeared that something lurking out in the blackness had.

Carly knew she must have made a sound then, some soft, choked sound as she struggled to make her body do what her brain cried out she must. Because Gideon finally spoke to her, his voice soft, low. Deadly. And instead of bringing her comfort, it sliced her to the bone.

“Shh,” he instructed softly, never turning. “Go back to your room, Carly. Shut the door and lock it behind you. Do you understand? No matter what, keep it locked. And if anything happens to me, go out the window. And run.”

A chill that had nothing to do with the frigid breeze blowing in from the night worked its way through her veins like ice water, freezing her in place. What was out there, waiting? What did he see?

“Do you understand?” he asked again, more forcefully this time, and Carly realized that something was happening to him, the bones beneath his skin shifting as the skin stretched over them began to ripple, to sprout fur. It was horrifying … and fascinating. Carly found herself unable to look away as claws sprouted from the tips of his fingers, as the force of what was happening to him began to rend his clothing in two and forced him, quickly, on all fours.

Her own voice was unfamiliar to her. “I … I understand. But Gideon …”

It was what she saw when he whipped his head back to face her, eyes that blazed a supernatural yellow above features that were no longer recognizably human, that finally shocked her into action. She managed one step back, then two as her mind grappled with the reality of what she was seeing.