The Wolf Marshal's Pack (U.S. Marshal Shifters 3)

A distraction he had to double down on when she started taping up his ribs.

“Silver bullets are a myth, anyway. You did the right thing by pulling the trigger even without one.”

“They won’t do anything?” She sounded cutely disappointed. “I feel lied to.”

“They’ll do something,” Colby assured her. “I couldn’t touch them without breaking out a little. But fatality-wise, they just won’t do anything more than a regular bullet.”

“Which doesn’t seem to be much.”

“We’re stronger than your typical wolves,” he admitted. “And the fur’s thick enough that it can slow the bullet way down before it even hits the body. But mostly, it’s just that when you’re shifted, you’re keyed up on adrenaline and animal instincts. If you’re a predator, and this is your time to attack, nothing’s going to slow you down. You’ve already bet your life on this going in your favor. Wolves don’t lose many fights that they walk away from afterwards. For the most part, it’s victory or death.”

Aria was less troubled by that than almost anyone else would have been.

But then, Colby remembered, she’d seen wolves fight before. There was a photo of hers that showed a pack of wolves taking on an enormous elk, and he remembered from the caption t

hat that battle had gone in the elk’s favor. The wolves may have had the numbers and the teeth, but the elk had its massive rack of antlers, and it had used them well.

She was a nature photographer, and very few things in nature were clear-cut. And none of them were easy.

She finished wrapping up his ribs—at this point, Colby thought, he looked like a mummy, his chest mostly made out of gauze and surgical tape—and then sat back on her heels.

She said, “What are we going to do, Colby?”

The look in her eyes was one of absolute trust, and it made Colby even more determined than ever not to let her down.

“We spend the night here. We get some dinner,” he added, since they’d been cheated out of it. “I should be healed up in the morning. And then I’ll have a go at sniffing out Eli, now that I’ve been close enough to him to really get a noseful of his scent. I want advanced notice of when he’s going to make his next pounce. He shouldn’t have the upper hand over me.”

“Shouldn’t have the upper hand over us.”

She put her hand on his chest, carefully placing her palm between the bruises and scratches. He could feel the warmth of her all the way to his heart. Her face was completely, utterly serious.

“You said this was for life, Colby. I’m not going to let you deal with any of this on your own.”

He hated to play this card, but he had to.

“What about Mattie? You can’t risk leaving her all alone, either.”

But Aria was stubborn, and the expression on her face didn’t change at all.

“Eli Hebbert isn’t going to stop coming after me. We both know that. If I leave you to face him alone, and things don’t work out, he’s just going to keep coming, only then I won’t have you to protect me. I’m sure dragons and US Marshals are all great, but I’d rather have you. Don’t tell me anyone else would do a better job.”

He couldn’t.

It was true, technically, that Theo could hover above Eli Hebbert and roast him from the sky, but that could only happen if Hebbert was dumb enough to fight a dragon in a place where Theo would have enough room to transform, let alone transform and have the advantage of striking from the air.

And there was no way, unfortunately, that Hebbert was that stupid. Any wolf could sniff out a dragon a mile away—they all had that same distinctive smoky scent to them, like nothing else Colby had ever encountered.

Aria was right. He and Hebbert were two sides of the same coin. He was the only one who could take Hebbert on.

“I don’t want to leave Mattie without a mom,” Aria said. “But I don’t want to leave her with a psychotic werewolf on her tail, either. This way, either we win, or... at least Mattie doesn’t have Eli Hebbert to worry about.”

“I know.” He rubbed his eyes. “That makes sense. I just don’t like to think of you being in danger.”

“I’m not the biggest fan of it myself,” Aria said dryly. “But I think between the two of us, we can figure something out.”

She offered him a hand up off the edge of the tub and then stepped close to him, resting her head against his chest.

He held her. It felt like her love for him was soaking into his skin, pulling him back together even more quickly than he would have thought possible.