Chapter 5 - THE ABANDONED MILL
Pain ripped through Gideon’s collarbone.
The impact drove him to one knee in the deep drift.
Dark, royal blood sprayed across the pristine white snow, steaming in the freezing air.
"Gideon!" Hazel cried, dropping beside him.
She grabbed his jacket, trying to haul his massive weight toward the shelter of the pine line.
"Get behind the trees," he grunted, his teeth gritted so hard a line of blood leaked from his lip.
The bullet had passed clean through his left trapezius.
A standard wolf would have had their shoulder pulverized.
Gideon pushed himself up, leaning heavily against a frost-covered spruce.
His regenerative healing was already fighting the damage, but the silver residue in the hollow point burned like acid.
"It was coated," he gasped, his skin turning pale under his dark stubble.
"Silver nitrate."
"It slows the blood clotting."
Another round splintered the trunk of the spruce three inches above his head.
Pine bark exploded in their faces.
"Move!" Gideon roared, shoving Hazel ahead of him into the dense hemlock forest.
The snow was waist-deep in the ravines.
Hazel plowed through the drifts, her small boots finding purchase on buried roots and granite rocks.
Behind them, the high-pitched whine of snowmobiles echoed across the river.
The trackers were searching for a crossing point downstream.
They had five minutes.
Maybe six.
"The old sawmill," Hazel said, gasping for freezing air that burned her lungs like broken glass.
"My uncle worked the timber berths when I was small."
"There is an old drying kiln built of fieldstone."
"It has a woodstove and an iron storm door."
Gideon stumbled behind her, his left arm hanging limp, his breathing growing ragged.
"Lead," he commanded.
They broke through the timberline into a snow-choked clearing.
The ruins of the Blackwood Lumber Mill rose against the starry winter sky like the ribcage of an ancient leviathan.
Rotted conveyor belts hung from sagging roof beams.
Rusted circular saw blades, six feet across, leaned against crumbling brick foundations.
At the far end stood the stone kiln.
The heavy oak door was reinforced with iron strap hinges, half-buried under a three-foot drift.
Hazel dropped to her knees, frantically digging the snow away with her bare hands.
Her fingernails tore against the frozen crust, but she didn't stop.
Gideon reached the door, hooked his uninjured right hand under the iron latch, and yanked upward with a savage growl.
The rusted bolt shrieked in protest and snapped.
The door swung inward into pitch blackness.
Gideon shoved Hazel inside, backed in after her, and slammed the heavy oak door shut.
He dropped the four-inch wooden crossbar into the iron brackets.
They were sealed inside.
The kiln was ten degrees warmer than the forest, smelling of dry pine sawdust, old grease, and cold stone.
Gideon collapsed against the stone wall, sliding down to the floorboards.
His head fell back against the masonry, his chest heaving.
Hazel dropped beside him, her hands trembling violently.
She clicked on the small pocket penlight she kept for laundry inspections.
The narrow yellow beam illuminated the carnage.
Gideon’s black wool coat was soaked with heavy, dark blood from his neck to his waist.
The wound at his collarbone was bubbling with grayish foam—the unmistakable sign of silver poisoning eating away at wolf marrow.
"We need to cut the bullet path open," Hazel whispered, her voice tightening with dread.
"The silver nitrate has to be scraped from the bone."
Gideon opened one golden eye.
A faint, mocking smile touched his pale lips.
"Do you have a scalpel in that little pocket, laundress?"
Hazel pulled the small paring knife from her boot.
The carbon steel blade was three inches long, razor-sharp from years of slicing through heavy linen cords.
"I have this," she said.
Gideon looked at the knife.
Then he looked into her dark green eyes.
"No anesthesia," he murmured.
"You'll have to hold me down."
"I can't hold you down," she said simply.
"You're an Alpha King."
"If your wolf fights me while I'm scraping the silver, you'll tear my throat out."
Gideon reached into his tactical belt with his right hand.
He unbuckled a thick, heavy leather strap used for securing climbing gear.
He wrapped it twice around the heavy cast-iron support pillar anchored into the concrete floor.
He strapped his own right wrist to the iron, pulling the buckle tight with his teeth.
"There," Gideon whispered, sweat beading across his forehead.
"My wolf is chained."
"Do what you have to do, Hazel Brooks."
Hazel knelt in the bloody sawdust.
She used the paring knife to slice through the heavy fabric of his coat and thermal shirt.
His bare chest was magnificent—sculpted muscle crossed by dozens of pale silver scars from past border wars.
And right beneath his left collarbone lay a black, gaping hole that hissed with poisonous heat.
Hazel took a deep, shuddering breath.
She reached for the edges of the wound.
Before her steel touched his flesh, Gideon’s left hand shot out.
His burning fingers wrapped around her right wrist, pinning her hand in place.
His pupils were completely black now.
His royal wolf was fighting for control, snarling from the depths of his fever.
"Hazel," he rasped, his voice vibrating with terrifying power.
"If you use your blood to heal me again..."
"I have to," she said, tears blurring her vision.
"The silver is too close to your subclavian artery."
"If I cut wrong, you bleed out in two minutes."
"If you bleed into me a second time," Gideon growled, his canines lengthening against his lower lip,
"the life-bond becomes permanent."
"You will never take a husband from an ordinary pack."
"You will belong to the royal throne until the day you die."
Hazel looked at his bleeding chest.
She heard the distant baying of the tracking hounds drawing closer through the timber outside.
She thought of the schools he had built.
She thought of his hand lifting an old kitchen maid from the snow six years ago.
"Then I belong to the throne," she said.
She sliced her freshly bandaged palm open with a single, brutal pull of the knife.
She pressed her bleeding flesh directly into the blackened wound of his shoulder.
Gideon threw his head back and screamed.
The sound of his roar was not human.
It was the cry of an ancient beast being reborn in fire.
Blinding white light erupted from the contact point, illuminating the entire stone kiln in a brilliant, starlit glare.
The silver nitrate vaporized in a hiss of black smoke.
His shattered bone fragments clicked together, realigning and fusing in seconds.
The leather strap around his wrist snapped like thread under the expansion of his Alpha power.
Then, the wooden roof above their heads collapsed inward with a deafening crash.
A grappling hook tore through the dry pine boards.
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A voice bellowed down through the opening:
"BLOW THE HINGES! THEY'RE IN THE DRYING KILN!"
