He stood beside Dax’s prone, unmoving body staring at me. Into me. Somehow, I saw Levi in the gaze, which was insane.
Maybe I’d been dosed with ketamine. It was known to produce hallucinations. I’d just seen a guy, my lover—ex-lover—turn into a wolf and rip out Dax’s throat.
I dropped the shovel handle and crawled across the ground toward Dax to see if I could help. I wasn’t thrilled to have Dax blackmail me, but I hadn’t wanted his throat ripped out either. I wasn’t a human doctor, but I could—
Levi… the wolf, leaned into me, putting his weight into it, pushing me away from Dax. I didn’t touch Dax, but I could see it was too late. Doctor or not, it was obvious. Blood pooled beneath his head and upper back. His gaze was fixed and up at the sky.
He was dead.
Levi had killed for me. To protect me because there was no doubt Dax had every intention of stabbing me.
I turned my frightened gaze on Levi. I wasn’t scared of him, specifically, but he had just gone all Incredible Hulk and turned into a fucking animal. And I’d thought we’d bared all at the overlook the other day. But this? Yeah, he’d left this out. He licked my hand as if to comfort me.
“Levi?” I croaked. “Holy shit. You’re… um, yeah.”
He licked again. I buried my fingers into his thick fur and choked on a sob. And then I had my whole face buried against his soft neck, and I was bawling. Not for Dax. Well, maybe a little for Dax. But mostly releasing the trauma of the past month, since this whole ordeal with Dax began. Especially the last twenty-four hours, believing he was going to do something awful to Pops and then to me. Leaving Levi.
But he was here now. And he was a wolf. And oh, God, he’d just killed a man.
What had I done? What had I set into motion with my actions? “What am I going to do?”
The weird sound of bones and cartilage and other things I couldn’t even process had me blinking past the tears and seeing Levi switch back from a wolf to… a huge naked guy. The guy I recognized. The one I knew every inch of… or thought I did.
Seeing the blood on his face made me gag. The very idea of killing someone with my teeth… I started laughing. I was definitely a touch hysterical because I was thinking I really did have a gag reflex after all.
“Are you all right?” Levi asked, stroking my hair back from my face, his touch so gentle in comparison to what I’d just witnessed.
He looked a mixture of rage-filled and worried.
“I’m not sure,” I admitted truthfully. Was I all right? I glanced at Dax, swallowed. “This is bad. Levi, I killed a guy.”
He shook his head. Hard. “No. You didn’t kill him. You were defending yourself and then a wolf came out of nowhere and attacked.”
I knew he was trying to make up some kind of story, but it wasn’t a story because it was true.
Glancing around I popped up to my feet. “The cameras. Claymore has some out here.” I searched the top corners of the stable beneath the eaves. I didn’t see the black orbs like at the airports or in the ceilings at a store that my boss had installed around the outside of the property. Nothing since we were in the back where the only thing that usually happened was open and close a paddock gate or pile manure. We were at the far edge of the property, the land saved for open pasture where Seraphina was casually grazing. I exhaled in relief. Dax’s trip to my office would have been seen, but he entered my office alone. “There aren’t any back here.”
Levi grabbed his tattered shirt, the one that had fallen off of him when he’d turned into a wolf and wiped his face. He went bare assed over to his car, leaned in and emptied a water bottle onto the shirt, then wiped his face and neck clean. When done, he tossed the sodden mass onto the ground. He grabbed for a small bag next, pulled out some clothes.
All the while, I stood there dumbly, staring. I was enthralled, but not aroused. God, how could I be? My lover was a wolf who was wiping another man’s blood from his body.
This was nuts.
“Um, Levi… I think you might need to explain some things to me.”
He looked my way as he tugged a pair of jeans up over his lean hips then zipped them up. “I’ll tell you everything later. Now we’ve got to deal with this.” He glanced at Dax.
I bit my lip. Lost. “Why… why are you helping me?”
He came over to me, cupped my face. All traces of Dax’s blood were gone from his skin, and if I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have believed he’d even done what he did. “Did you give this fucker ketamine to sell on the streets?”