Escaping Death
Chapter 36

Hunter

There are few things in life that a hot shower can’t make better. The dirt and blood has washed away and the aches in my muscles have been soothed, but the hole in my heart isn’t any smaller. Sol skipped breakfast, and rather than come down for lunch I heard her rummaging through each of our rooms upstairs. But the majority of the day has been spent listening to the rain beat angrily against the roof and windows.

I’ve tried to leave her to her own devices, but I can only resist checking in on her for so long. Besides, she has to eat at some point. Ever since we were pups, Sol would get so focused on a task or activity that she’d work or play straight through meals. She once went 72 hours without eating because she “didn’t have time” or she “forgot.”

Whether she likes it or not we’ve been hired to watch over her, to take care of her, until the threats against her are eliminated. So, if that means adding feeding her to our list of responsibilities then so be it.

I’m not the chef of our pack, that’s Dean despite how much we tease him otherwise, so it should come as no real surprise that I opt for take out. Pizza was such a rarity in the Grove that whenever Sol and I had the chance to sneak out we’d always get pizza. It was one of our guilty pleasures.

While my senses aren’t as good as Ace’s, or even Sol’s for that matter, being the son of a Beta affords me some increased sense of smell and hearing. That’s how I know Solana is trying her best to sneak down the stairs and snag some food without being seen. Unfortunately for her, her scent might as well be tattooed on my body. I’d recognize it from a mile away. Even her heat feels different from others, her warmth is distinct, the feel and sound of her flames is as unique as a fingerprint.

“You can’t avoid me forever, Sol.” I say to the seemingly empty living room.

“I’m not avoiding you,” She says flatly, unveiling herself next to the coffee table and grabbing a slice of pizza from the box. “I’m strategically circumventing your location.”

Her eyes flutter closed as she takes the first bite, reminding me of the way her face looked when we’d make love and I have to force myself to think about something else before I grow hard. She practically inhales the first slice and seconds later she’s reaching for another.

“You don’t have to stand there, you can sit down.” I say to Sol but all I get for it is a scoff and an eye roll.

“I gather your day with Calla was as joyful as ever?” More silence. More looking anywhere but my direction. For sisters, they’ve never been particularly close. They share certain things but Sol is too much like her mother, happier doing things on her own and preferring to suffer in silence.

“Are you okay?” What an empty question. None of us are “okay.” If we were, we wouldn’t have ended up here with the Dogs of War as a pack of lost and haunted kindred spirits waging a war against our pain and the people who have perpetrated it.

“I’m trapped in a house with you,” she spits venomously. “What do you think?”

“I think,” I say cautiously, “that we need to talk.”

She immediately shifts to leave and I exhale the breath I had been holding as my first instinct is to panic. I just got her here, I just got her talking, I’m not ready or willing to let her go so soon. So without really thinking about it, I reach out and grab her arm to stop her from leaving.

Heat electrifies my skin originating where my hand touches her arm traveling all the way through my arm and into my lungs where it blooms in my chest.

Fuck, I’ve missed this feeling.

She deliberately warms her skin, watching my reaction from her periphery, but I don’t let go. Hotter and hotter her skin becomes causing blisters to form on the hand that is grabbing her but still I hold on. I lost her once. This time there’s nothing she can do to make me let her go again.

She must sense this, because her next course of action is to coat herself in flames. I hold on, I brace for the pain of the burn but it never comes. Flames billow along her arms and around my hand and wrist but she’s limiting the temperature of the flame, not allowing it to seriously hurt me.

That’s all the confirmation I needed.

She still cares.

She flinches when I jump up off the couch and she releases a loud squeal when I throw her over my shoulder, flames and all, and march her ass outside. The rain has picked up and is falling in sheets. One step into the deluge of water washes away her flames, leaving her smoking as the water evaporates off her skin.

I toss her into the middle of the yard and despite my rough handling she lands gracefully on her feet. I summon her blade and throw it so it lands embedded in the ground at her feet.

“Trying to use me for target practice again?” She shouts over the thundering rain.

“The opposite actually.” I yell back. “I get it, Sol. You’re angry. I know that feeling better than any other.”

“What do you know about anger?” She interrupts me, and picks up the knife at her feet. “What do you know about pain?”

She throws the dagger at me, aiming for my shoulder, but I catch the dagger by the blade in my hand before it can impale me. My hand is coated in crimson but the cut is relatively shallow and will heal in a few minutes. Sol lunges at me throwing a fake punch to her right and then lands a bone cracking blow to the other side of my ribcage.

“I’ve been nothing but angry and pained for four years!” I shout back at her, not even attempting to block the fist she crashes into my jaw.

“I can’t say I feel bad that the guilt of selling me to breeders is eating away at you. You deserve to suffer.” This time when she tries to uppercut me I grab her fist, breaking the bones in her hand in the process.

“I had nothing to do with that, Solana. I was waiting for you at An–”

A thin, searing line of metal slashes across my face, cheek to cheek. “I swear to the Gods if you speak her name I’ll cut your fucking tongue out.”

In a move I’m not proud of, I backhand her across the face. Sol doesn’t even sway or take a steadying side step. She stands still as a statue, blood dripping from her mouth from where I hit her.

Her eyes brighten with a wicked glow and her mouth curls up in a smirk to match. “Where is she now, Hunter? Did you sell her, too? Was it all worth it?” She says slowly as she stalks towards me.

Her blade presses against my throat but it’s my turn to be stoic. I don’t react to her blade, to her empty threat. I grab her by the back of the neck and angle her head so her attention is fixed on me.

“She’s scattered across the continent.” I whisper. Her eyes widen, momentarily confounded, before dropping back into suspicious slits.

“She and her brothers colluded to sell my bride to breeders,” I lean down closer so our noses brush against one another. “They killed our pup, they nearly killed you.” She tries to buck out of my grip but I have an ironclad hold on her. “I started with Annie. Fox tore out her throat right there in her living room, and then we hunted down and did the same to her brothers.” My lips skim against hers, warm, smooth, and wet from the rain. “And it was worth every. Fucking. Second.”

I close the thin distance between our lips and kiss her like my life depends on it. I’ve dreamed of the day I’d have her in my arms like this again, tasting her. Kissing her last week after the meeting with Reef was a cruel tease, an appetizer for the main course.

Like last time, though, she doesn’t let our kiss escalate. She pushes on my chest, shoving us apart. “If that’s true, then why didn’t you come back?” Her voice cracks at the end, exposing just how pained and how hurt she still is.

“Because I couldn’t! They would have killed me, Sol. The future Beta, son of the current Beta, killed his mate and her brothers who happen to also be the children of the Queen’s aunt-by-law…that’s how they see it. Elena would have demanded I be banished if not executed.”

“We could have told them the truth!” She sobs.

“Elena never would have believed that. I needed proof or else she would have blamed you.”

Solana scoffs and releases an empty laugh towards the sky. “She blamed me anyway, Hunter. Plenty of rumors have circulated since that day – that you ran away with her, that you killed them…that I killed them and then killed you. I couldn’t stand the way your father looked at me after you left. So I left too.”

“I never wanted that for you, Solana. I thought I was doing the safest thing. I wanted it to look like I had abandoned you and left with her. I didn’t want any of this coming back on you because it’s always been my fault. My fault that I couldn’t love her daughter because I love you.”

— — —

Solana

Because I love you.

Love.

Present tense.

My thoughts swirl around my head like they’re lost in a snowglobe. Things are getting out of hand and I’m rapidly losing my control. I came here focused with a sure understanding of what I wanted and how things would operate under my terms. Somewhere along the way I’ve let myself be drawn in by every single one of these boys – even Hunter.

Though, if I’m willing to open up that part of my heart that’s been sealed off and shoved in the back corner to collect dust, then I’d have to admit that I never stopped loving Hunter and that’s why it’s hurt so much.

“Love? As in present tense you love me?” My voice is pathetically small, almost entirely drowned out by the onslaught of rain.

He pulls his shirt over his head and approaches me confidently, placing my hand over the tattoo of my name over his heart. His skin is warm despite the rain, and the contact makes my body hum like a live wire.

“Love.” He confirms gently.

It’s this exact moment that Ace fast-tracks to the front of my mind. I don’t know how it was so easy for Hunter to reject his mate and it makes me feel guilty that I don’t feel the same way about mine. I am attracted to Ace, I do have feelings for him. But how can I tell that to the guy who once was my everything, who I was supposed to mate and marry, who killed his mate and her brothers for me without a second thought?

How can I go back to the way things were when so much has changed?

“Hunter…I –”

“I know I fucked up, and I know so much has happened and changed.” He lifts my head up with two fingers beneath my chin and smiles at me kindly, “I know that you’ve grown close with the rest of the guys…some more than others.” He smirks and I want to shrink away at how accepting he’s being about everything. “But I will never be able to not love you and there’s no fucking way I’m letting you go again.”

I’m a fucking wreck. It’s everything I wanted to hear and everything I didn’t. I was prepared to hate him for the rest of eternity, I was prepared to hurt him in a manner equivalent to the pain he caused. But here he is speaking the words I secretly have wanted to hear, saying all the right things only now it’s the wrong time. It’s too late. He can’t keep me.

“I don’t belong here, Hunter. There’s no place for me in Death.” I say firmly because it’s the truth.

“You’ve certainly found a place in each of their beds,” he mutters with a half smile under his breath but I hear it even despite the rain.

“Being with them isn’t the same as being with you. With you it’s — more.”

“Fuck, Sunflower,” he groans before pulling me to him and locking our lips together in a heated kiss. His tongue lashes against the seam of my lips and this time I don’t have the energy or willpower to resist him or the way I burn for him.

His tongue wraps itself around mine, wanting to be as entangled as possible so we’d never be able to separate again.

He tastes so good, just as good as Ace. Fuck! I can’t get him out of my mind. Kissing Hunter doesn’t feel wrong exactly, but it doesn’t feel as permissible as it used to. Fucking Ace.

Fucking Ace and his Hunter-blonde hair and matching green eyes. What a twisted paradox — my mate who should want me sees the truth that I can’t stay, while an old flame believes his own lie about being able to keep me.

“Ace will never let me stay,” I admit to him, breaking our kiss, but he responds with a brief laugh.

“I’m pretty fucking sure Ace would let you stay.”

My head shakes in rebellion, he doesn’t understand. “No, Hunter, I mean he’ll never let me stay here with you. He’ll never let you keep me.”

“The fuck he won’t,” Hunter asserts before bending down, grabbing me around the legs, and throwing me over his shoulder, carrying me towards the house.

He tosses me gently onto the cabana daybed I added to the back deck after Hunter rained metal against the house. His tight, muscular body hovers over mine, his hips press firmly against mine keeping me pinned beneath him.

“Ace may be Alpha but he doesn’t get to decide this, he doesn’t get to decide who I want, who I love.”

There’s that present tense again.

If I cross this line with Hunter there may be no coming back. Instead of leaving as angry as I was when I came here, instead of hating him like I have the last four years, I’ll fall for him once again only to have to walk away from him and Ace.

“Sunflower,” Hunter bathes me in his warm vanilla and chocolate scent, a scent as comforting as it is mouth watering — especially when he sucks on my neck right there.

“Yes?” I practically pant.

“Let me in, let me love you again.”

My body flushes with liquid heat without the rain constantly cooling me down.

Later I’ll blame the combination of overwhelming senses for my choices. Between his scent, the heat of our bodies, and the pull on my heart, how could I say anything other than, “yes.”

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