Ryan saw red. His wolf waited at the edge of his consciousness, and he fought the animal hard for control. He swung his fists at the man who had been taking Kate.

The man was a wolf—Ryan could see the magick settled around him. And he’d recited the mating spell. Thank the gods, it hadn’t taken. He’d said more than one of the phrases wrong.

As a future alpha, Ryan knew all the versions of that spell. The thought of what might have happened sickened him. Only he should be joined with Kate.

His fist landed hard on the guy’s face, and he straddled the bastard so he could get good leverage. “You keep your fucking hands off her,” he snarled, landing another hit.

Kate’s hands were on his shoulder. “Don’t kill him, Ryan. Please.” He heard the desperation in her voice, and he eased up on the guy, but kept him pinned down.

“Don’t you get up,” Ryan said through his panting, pointing down at the bastard’s scruffy face. He blinked and shook his head. He recognized that scruff. And that half-bloody face. “Wait. Christian?”

He backed up, climbing to his feet. What the hell. Christian Kyle? He should be a human. But the signature around him was unmistakably wolf. Shit. One of Ryan’s long-time competitors in steer wrestling, one of the best bulldoggers in the world had been… turned.

Christian was notorious on the circuit. He was a sucker for a buckle bunny, and had a string of one night stands. Reclusive when they weren’t in the chute—no one knew exactly where he lived—but definitely human. Shit.

What the hell was he doing here?

Ryan held Kate against his side before the jackass got any more ideas. The alley was deserted, and he honed in on the sounds around them. Sounded like no one else was around. He glanced down at his woman, who didn’t seem surprised to see this famous human as a shifter. “How is he a wolf?”

“They turned me,” Christian sputtered out, coughing blood. “Look, man. I have to do this. They have my sister.”

“They?” He hadn’t stopped looking at Kate. The fear on her pretty face confirmed that she was as scared of they as Christian was. Her grandparents.

Her fucking asshole of an alpha.

“You were saying the bond spell. Why are you trying to bond Kate?”

“Please, Ryan,” she said, pulling on him. “We have to go. My grandmother is around here somewhere. I just know it.”

“No.” Christian raised a hand, pulling himself up to a sitting position. “She’s not. She sent me.” He coughed again, more blood sputtering out onto his light jeans. “She gave me this, to track Ryan’s phone.” He held up a long piece of equipment with a map on the screen. A red dot was blinking.

Ryan’s breath was still coming fast. He was smelling Kate’s hair and Christian’s blood and the dust in the alley, and everything was on high alert. The moon was getting close. He always got this way before the shift, and the adrenaline wasn’t helping.

But this was…unbelievable. Kate’s grandparents had forcibly changed Christian, and now they were trying to bond him to Kate.

My Kate.

Ryan swallowed. “I think you need to back off, man.”

“You don’t understand,” Christian said, standing.

Ryan had to move Kate behind his body to keep his wolf happy. Protect her like she’s ours. “I don’t need to understand shit,” he growled out. “You touch her, and I will kill you. Understand that.”

Behind him, Kate shuddered and wrapped her body around him, and the blood started to rush to every single inch. It was too close to the wolf moon for all this shit to be going down.

“They are going to kill my sister,” Christian repeated.

“We’ll figure that shit out. But I swear to you, you get any closer to her, and my wolf is gonna come out. You might not know this about your animal yet, but the closer the moon gets, the bigger the tug. That means we have less control.”

“Fuck.” Christian’s scruffy face swung up toward the sky, like he was checking to see where it was. But he didn’t understand. It wasn’t about seeing the moon. It was about how it felt. That was the core of being a wolf. Feeling the animal, feeling the moon, feeling the magick. It was all damn feeling.

Seeing wasn’t believing in the case of the Moonbounds.

Feeling was.

That realization socked him in the center of his chest. His mother had said those words to him before. She’d tried to make him understand why his Pops had done such an awful thing. Seeing isn’t believing, she’d said. Feeling is believing.

And he hadn’t understood what she meant until now.

He could feel Kate’s rightness. He could feel her wolf gentling his. Arousing his. Calling to his. It wasn’t anything physical, though gods, he wanted her. It wasn’t a look or a gesture. It was literally the way she felt.

Stop fighting this.

“We have to get off the street,” Ryan said, pulling at her. “Can’t you feel it?”

“It won’t be long,” she whispered.

Christian bent down to pick up the pieces of torn paper that Kate had thrown onto the ground. He scurried for the bigger ones, and Ryan kicked him so hard, he went down before he reached them.

“Go get the rope out of Dee’s truck,” he hissed, pinning the big cowboy onto the ground and struggling to keep his hands behind his back. Christian wouldn’t know his own strength yet, and that might work to Ryan’s advantage.

“Where’s the rope?” she asked.

“It’s in the back somewhere. She always has rope. Maybe in the tack box.”

“Get the hell off me.” Christian’s shoulders strained as he struggled to free himself, but Ryan could tell he’d gotten it right. The big man was still thinking like a human. If Christian allowed his wolf instincts to take over, it would be a fair fight again. Ryan hoped he wouldn’t do that.

If they couldn’t reason with him, they’d have to tie him up.

Kate ran back with the rope, and he saw a flash of gold in her eyes. The moon really was getting close. Not even a half-hour away. Most wolves could feel the oncoming pressure of the moon’s pull, and once their eyes started to flash uncontrollably, it was time to find shelter.

He took Kate’s hand, gripping her hard, when she held the rope out. “Control your wolf,” he hissed out. “We still have work to do.”

She released the rope and quirked her head to one side. “What do you mean?”

“As the moon approaches, you’ll have to hold your wolf back. Bear down.”

But she didn’t appear to understand what he meant. “Bear down?”

“Stay human. Don’t let your wolf take you.”

“I can’t do that.” She shook her head and her long blonde hair slipped over her shoulder. Ryan had a quick flash back to earlier—her legs wrapped around his shoulders, her sex under his tongue, her hair wild around her as she came.

Shit. His wolf was too close. The pull toward Kate was getting stronger, too. He bit down and held back.

“You can’t hold her forever,” he said. “But you can hold her back for a time. Haven’t you ever denied yourself anything?”

“Why would you deny your wolf?” Kate belted out a laugh as she bent to help him tie up Christian’s hands.

Ryan grunted out a matching laugh and pulled the man to his feet, looking around. No one that he could see. He yanked the handkerchief out of the cowboy’s back pocket and wadded it up, shoving it in his mouth.

“We need to stay aware until we get out to the cabin. I have no idea when he is going to shift, but we need to stay human as long as we can,” he said, pushing Christian forward. He looked around the streets before they wrestled him into the truck.

Christian was squirming and trying to spit out the gag as Ryan pushed him into the back seat, smacking him in the back of the head so he’d get the message to shut up.

Ryan ran around the other side of the vehicle, climbing in to drive. He pulled onto the street and glanced at the clock. It would take at least ten minutes to get to the cabin, and they needed to get Christian locked away somehow, or he’d escape as soon as they all shifted.

He pushed down on the gas pedal.

They’d get there.

He gripped the steering wheel and glanced at Kate. She still had that look. The one that had made him come outside after her. The one that said she was going to run.

“Did you get ahold of Gretchen?” he asked.

“No.” She held her hands out, like she’d just realized the phone wasn’t there anymore. “That’s okay. They’ll all shift soon, anyway.”

“If they’re still tracking us, it’s better that we don’t have it.”

Kate shrugged her slight shoulders and curled closer to the door. Still with the look on her face. Half a goodbye.

Something told him that if she had her way, he’d never get the other half.

“Are you going to run?” he blurted out. “When we shift.”

Her jaw tightened and she turned toward the passenger window, staring out at the passing prairie. “I’d rather not talk about it.”

“I don’t want you to run, Kate.”

He saw the tension in her neck, but she still wouldn’t look at him.

“You have a funny way of showing it,” she said, the end of her words breaking just a touch.

“I don’t want to lose you,” he insisted.

“Sure. But you will. You’ll choose your pack over me. And you should.” Her nod was slow, almost reluctant. “I don’t like it, but I understand it. Hell, I admire it.”

“I’ll call my friend Falcon,” he said, turning down the gravel road that would lead them to the cabin. “After we shift.”

“I’m not going to join some pack I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll wait until my grandfather is gone, and I’ll go back…” Kate glanced behind her, at the lump that was Christian Kyle.

“Can’t go back to your sweet Julian. You know the first place he’ll look is Somewhere.”

“He’s not my sweet anything, Ryan. You know you’re the only one I want.”

His blood responded to those words, even as she sighed around them.

“Well, you know he’s still at VonBrandts’ ranch. You can’t go there. He’ll—” Ryan shook his head, trying not to let himself think about what would happen when her grandfather actually found her.

He’d turned Christian against his will. Bastard. There should be a law against it.

If Bracken had said yes to the pairing between Ryan and Kate, back when Quade had approached him about it, she would have been spared all of this. Christian, too.

Is my penance…is my family…are they worth it?

“If you let me take you to Falcon,” he said, desperately, “I’ll always know where you are, and if you can just give me five years, I’ll have enough time to turn things around here.”

She groaned under her breath, shaking her head. “You want to fix your pack, Ryan. You don’t want me. Not really. What if five years isn’t enough? What if it stretches to ten? Twenty? What kind of…torture…what kind of…”

“I’m trying to take care of you the best way I can.”

There was a long pause in the truck, and he couldn’t tell what she was thinking. He couldn’t see her face.

Over the little rise ahead, he saw Jace’s cabin appear, like a little gray box emerging from the earth. He sped down the gravel road, raising a cloud of dust behind them. He wanted to get to the cabin before they shifted, but he needed Kate to promise him that she wouldn’t run.

“I don’t want you to go,” he said. “Please. Just give us some more time to work this out.”

She turned to face him, and her eyes were red; tears were running down her cheeks. It cut him to the quick, and he tried to reach for her, but she pulled back. “Don’t, Ryan. Please. It’ll really be easier if you just let me go.”

“Kate.” He pushed air out his nose. “Just. Give me the night to think about this. Okay, so you don’t want to go to Falcon. Maybe I can keep you here. Maybe you can pledge to me.”

“And what would I do for work?” she asked, wiping at her cheeks. “You already fell all over yourself trying to keep me out of your ranch office. But that’s what I’m the most qualified to do. So what would I do?”

“We’ll figure it out. I’ll take care of you.”

She crossed her arms over her chest, letting her chin drop, like she was defeated. “I don’t need you to take responsibility for me, Ryan. I’ll find another alpha for that.”

He turned into the drive for the cabin, feeling the first warning press of the wolf against his skin. It seemed to magnify everything else. Christian’s groaning in the back seat, Kate’s sniffing, Ryan’s desire for his mate.

His fear.

When he pulled the pickup to a stop, she was out before he could reach her. Ryan jumped out of the truck, pulling out the keys and dropping them, desperate and careless in his eagerness to get to her.

Kate had kicked off her boots and was pulling down her panties, undressing for the shift, but it slowed her down just enough that he could grab her. He pulled her to him, pressing her curves into his body, and her gasp was so audible, it nearly drew the same sound from his own chest.

“Ryan,” she choked out, like she’d start to cry again. “You’re just torturing us both. You have to let me go. You made your choice.”

He gripped the sides of her face, staring into her eyes. “I have to choose you, Kate. I have to. I tried every way I can think not to, but I need you too damn much.”

Her gaze dipped to his lips and she licked hers. “Don’t say that to me unless you mean it.”

“I mean it,” he said, crushing her to him, walking her back against the side of the truck. “You’re mine. I’m yours.”

Her legs parted just enough that he could step between them, his erection pressing against her. She lifted one leg over his hip, like she was inviting him. His wolf wanted hers. Wanted to run with her. Wanted to play, to bite, to mark.

To mark her.

Kate’s fingers went to the button on his jeans, and she opened his pants as her lips moved against his. He plunged his tongue into her mouth at the same moment that he sank his cock into her wet heat. Her gasp drove him fucking wild. Ryan pushed her legs wider and plunged into her. The rightness of him inside her was so complete, it was like his whole body felt at peace.

Her moans feathered against his ear as she wrapped her arms around his neck and urged him on. The emotion was so raw in her voice, he wanted to finish this for her, to help her find release.

Ryan’s fingers found her clitoris, and he worked her up to the panting edge of her orgasm. The wolf was almost there, but Ryan could hold him off. He needed to finish. Needed to come in her. Claim her.

She clenched around him and squealed her pleasure in his ear, making him freeze as he felt release plowing through him. He could feel the warm jets pulsing out of him, into her. He spilled out of her, down her leg, as he continued to pump into her. Her spasms slowed, and she leaned against his body.

He’d done it.

He had chosen. It would be Kate, or it would be nothing.