74. Hurts Like Hell Part IV
*What if this is all the love you ever get?*
*You’d do a couple things so differently, I bet*
*What if this is all the love I ever know*
*I’d say the words that were so hard to say, don’t go*
*So you’ve fallen in love*
*So you’ve fallen apart*
*What if it hurts like hell*
*Then it’ll hurt like hell*
*I’m in the ruins too*
*I know the wreckage so well*
*Come on over, come on over here*
*What if this is all the love you ever get?*
*- What If This Is All The Love You Ever Get?*, Snow Patrol
_______
Kiran dreamt that his soulmate died.
When he bolted into consciousness, Zinnia was only sleeping next to him under a quilt. A sigh of relief had him laying back down to bring her back to his chest, closing his eyes. She didn’t hum and nestle closer like she usually did, which he thought was strange, but she must have been in deep sleep.
“Are you willing to hunt today?” he asked her quietly, brushing his lips to the nape of her neck. But it didn’t taste like her. She didn’t respond. “Zin?”
Kiran opened his eyes. Her neck wasn’t slender and white like it was supposed to be. Why was it sticky and red?
He jerked into sitting. He was all too familiar with death and dying and it hit him quite quickly:
*Zinnia was dead*.
The thought was fact before he could make sure her heart was beating—it wasn’t—and her chest was rising and falling in time with her lungs—it wasn’t—and her eyelids were fluttering as she dreamed—they weren’t.
Her throat healed wrong. It was lumpy as if the muscle decided to heal in an ugly clump.
Rushing filled Kiran’s head. “Zin?”
He eased her onto her back. She looked dead.
She *was* dead.
Kiran was dumbstruck. Anger? Horror? Sorrow? They didn’t have a place yet.
“Zinnia?”
“Hey, you.”
Delirious, he thought Zinnia barked the order. “What?” he croaked.
“You. Turn around.”
Numbly he obeyed. He registered the sight of the doctor and her assistant. Looking wrathful and terrified respectively, the human woman said, “Your wounds healed suspiciously well. But I couldn’t save her. I’m sorry.”
Kiran glanced down at himself and saw strips of cloth around all his former injuries.* Immortal werewolf genes to the rescue*! he thought with a delirious chuckle. Then he replayed the words. He looked back at the two humans.
“What did you say?”
“She’s dead, *werewolf*.”
They stepped aside to let in more men with rifles.
That brought Kiran back to reality like fingertips snapped together.
He shielded Zinnia’s body with his own, ready to take a dozen more bullets for her…but no shots came.
“That’s right, you better be scared,” the doctor said. “We’re giving you thirty seconds to take her and get the hell out of this town and never return.”
It only took a split-second of decision-making for Kiran to say, “Deal.”
Kiran scooped Zinnia’s body up in the quilt and crossed the room. The men stepped hastily aside with their fingers crooked on the triggers. He loomed several feet taller and he hoped they all shit their pants when he met each of their stares. Looking at the doctor last, he found only defiance. No regret, no fear, no sorrow for not saving a life she was in charge of doing.
*You’ll be the first to die*.
Kiran ducked through the doorway and started walking onto the snow-dusted street. He was still naked and barefoot, but that didn’t matter because his soulmate was dead.
He felt a sudden bite in his shoulder—slow and powerful, a ghost pain, as if someone was sinking their teeth into his flesh.
Kiran gasped and fell to his knees that cracked against the cobblestone. His gaze dropped onto Zinnia’s exposed shoulder. *Oh, gods…no…*
The Mark was disappearing. The beautiful scar he left on her body to claim her as his forever…it was gone. Still holding her in one arm, his hand flew to his own neck. Smooth skin, no trace of her claiming his body.
Kiran wept then.
He held the dead body of his soulmate and keened into her damp hair. He screamed an unbroken roar into the evening sky as anger and horror and sorrow all crashed down on the immortal Alpha of the Sun pack.
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