by J. L. Wilder
Fire building was a good way to escape from the stresses of the world around him. As Ryker piled the sticks together and leaned over to blow on the flame, he was nearly able to forget the fact that there was a beautiful stranger in his cave.
That was, until she sat up, groggily rubbing the sleep from her eyes.
It seemed to take her a few moments to take in her surroundings. She stared uncomprehendingly at Ryker for a few moments, apparently unsure of what she was looking at. Then she gasped, and drew back against the wall of the cave.
“There’s no point in trying to run away from me into the cave,” Ryker said, not sure whether he was annoyed or amused.
“Who—who are you?” she stammered.
“I’m the guy whose cave you passed out in.” No, he was definitely annoyed. Who was she kidding, acting like he was the one who was out of place? “I live here.”
“You live here?” she asked. “In a cave?”
“Where should I live? Outside?”
“You don’t have a house?”
“Shit,” he said. “You’re really not from around here.”
She was trembling. He didn’t know whether it was the fever, the fact that she clearly hadn’t eaten, or fear. “You’re feral,” she said, her voice hardly above a whisper. “You’re one of the wild ones.”
“I don’t know what you mean by that,” he said, even though he did. He didn’t feel like making this easy for her. She had barged into his home, and now she was acting like he was the one who had something wrong with him.
“You don’t belong to a pack,” she said.
“Damn right, I don’t,” he said. “Do you?”
“I...” She took a shuddery breath. “I did. I used to.”
“I see,” Ryker said. “They kicked you out?”
She looked down and nodded.
“What’s your name?” he asked her.
“Sophie.”
“Ryker,” he said.
“I’m sorry I wandered into your cave,” she said, and to her credit, she did look a bit sorry. Or was that still fear? He couldn’t be sure. “I can leave.”
“No, you can’t,” he said. “It’s getting dark out. You’re a wreck. You won’t survive a night out there on your own.”
She looked up at him, questions written across her face.
“You can stay tonight,” he said. “You can leave in the morning.”
“I’ll die in the morning just as much as I’ll die tonight,” she said. “I can’t survive out there, Ryker. I don’t know how. I don’t have what it takes.”
“That’s not my problem,” he said roughly, although something about her words had tugged at his heartstrings. “You can stay tonight. You can have dinner with me. That’s the best I can offer. Take it or leave it.”
She swallowed hard. “Okay.”
“Okay, what?”
“Okay, sir?”
He sighed, exasperated. “You don’t have to call me sir,” he said. “This isn’t a pack. You don’t belong to me. I just mean, are you going to stay tonight or not? Because I’m about to cook up this squirrel and I want to know if I’m going to have to share.”
“Oh—” She looked shaky and scared. “I’ll stay. But...but you don’t have to share that.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Ryker said. “You’re starving. When was the last time you ate?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted.
“Go sit by the fire,” Ryker said. “I don’t think your fever’s too high, but you should keep warm. I’ll get the food ready.”
“You don’t have to—”
“For fuck’s sake, quit arguing with me and go sit down.”
Looking slightly alarmed, Sophie did as she had been told.
She covered her face with her hands when Ryker skinned the squirrel. “Christ,” he said, looking over at her. “No wonder you haven’t been able to eat, if you’re that squeamish.”
“That’s not why,” Sophie said. “I can’t eat because I can’t catch anything.”
“Not even in wolf form?” he asked her.
“I never learned how to hunt that way,” she said. “I did set a snare earlier today, and I got a rabbit, but a bear came along and took it from me.”
His head snapped up. “A bear? Or a bear shifter?”
“A shifter,” she said. “Does it matter?”
“Yeah,” he said. “It matters.” How much ground could she possibly have covered in one day? Whoever that bear was, they had to be close by.
Maybe Ryker’s cave wasn’t as safe as he thought it was. He would have to be on guard.
He finished preparing the squirrel meat, skewered it on a stick, and began to cook it over the fire. Sophie hugged her knees and watched as he worked.
Soon the meat was brown and crackling. Ryker divided it into two portions and handed half to Sophie. She took it awkwardly as if she wasn’t quite sure what she was supposed to be doing.
“Eat,” he said.
Sophie nodded and raised the handful of meat to her lips. She nibbled daintily.
“What are you doing?” he asked her. “Trying not to get your face dirty? Just eat it.” By way of demonstration, he took a massive bite of his own hunk of squirrel meat and grinned.
Sophie swallowed hard and took a large bite herself. “It’s good,” she admitted.
“Of course it is,” he said. “You haven’t eaten in days, right? Dirt would probably taste good to you right now.” She was starting to eat more quickly. “Take your time,” he said. “If your body isn’t used to food, you don’t want to shove it down too fast, or you’ll just puke it all up.”
She scowled. “Charming.”
“I’m not trying to charm you,” Ryker said. “I’m trying to make sure you get the nutrients you need. You should be thanking me, you know.”
“Thank you,” Sophie said.
He handed her berries.
She looked down skeptically. “These aren’t poisonous, are they?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “If I wanted to kill you, I’d just throw you out of my cave. Why would they be poisonous?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Sometimes wild berries are poisonous.”
“Yeah, and sometimes they’re not. These ones are fine.” He ate a few to show her. “When you leave here tomorrow, that’ll be something you can look for on your own,” he said. “They grow along the banks of the river. You shouldn’t trust every berry you see, but if you find more like this, they’re safe for you to eat.”
Sophie began to pick at the berries in her hands. “Thanks,” she said quietly.
“So?” Ryker said.
She looked up. “So what?”
“So why did your pack throw you out?” he asked. “There’s got to be a story there.”
She shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about that,” she said.
“Did you do something? Commit a crime? Wait—did you steal from the alpha?”
“No, I didn’t steal from the alpha,” she snapped. “Jesus.”
“Well, how am I supposed to know?” he asked. “You’re very mysterious.”
“I’m not mysterious,” Sophie said. “And I was thrown out for refusing to follow orders, okay?”
“Refusing to follow orders?” He frowned. “You mean, like, alpha’s orders?”
She nodded.
“How could you refuse to follow an alpha’s orders?” he asked. “I mean, how is that even possible?”
“Don’t ask me,” she said. “I didn’t want to do what he was asking. All I could think about was how badly I wanted to say no, how much I wanted to get away from him in the moment. I never thought it would actually work.”
He regarded her quietly for a few moments. “You’re an omega,” he said. “Aren’t you?”
She hesitated, then nodded. “Yes.”
“What did your alpha order you to do?”
She looked away.
“It was some kind of mating ritual, wasn’t it?”
He shook his head. “You don’t have to tell me. It’s all right. I’ve heard about those. The way omega girls who belong to packs are raised like...like crops for the ascending alpha. Like you’re something to be harvested when you’re ripe. Like there’s no way you would ever want anything for yourselves and the only thing that matters is fulfilling your role in the pack.” He shook his head. “Shit like that makes me so glad I left.”
“You left?” she asked, frowning. “What do you mean?”
“I mean I ditched my pack,” Ryker said. “Walked away when I was just a kid. I didn’t want to be a part of that life anymore.”
Her eyes widened. “You had a pack? And you left it willingly?”
“I can’t believe you didn’t leave willingly,” he retorted. “After what they were going to put you through. Why would anybody want to stay with a group of people who would make them take part in one of those mating ceremonies? Don’t they drag you out and fuck you in front of the whole pack?”
She covered her face with her hands again.
“Oh, hell,” Ryker said, a guilty sort of nausea welling up in his stomach. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to actually—you know—say it. Shit. Are you okay?”
“I’m okay,” she said, lowering her hands slowly. “I got away before anything actually happened. But it was close. It’s...I still have nightmares about him.”
“I bet,” Ryker said, surprised to find that anger was growing slowly within him. He wanted, suddenly, to find the alpha who had tried to hurt Sophie and to make him pay for what he had done. “But aren’t you glad to be away from him now?”
“I’m going to die, Ryker,” Sophie said. “Look at me.”
He did. It was true that she was beginning to look emaciated. “How long have you been on your own?” he asked her.
“Only a few days,” she said. “And I’m already falling apart. I don’t know how to live in the wild. They knew that when they sent me away.” She swallowed hard. “I don’t want to go back there,” she said. “Of course I don’t. But I don’t want to live wild either. I can’t survive like this. It’s going to kill me.”
She was right, Ryker realized. The world she had been living in, the pack she had described, it sounded like pure hell. It sounded like the kind of thing she was lucky to get away from, and it was certainly much worse than the pack Ryker himself had run away from as a child.
But she was also right that she had no good options.
If she had stayed, she would have been forced to mate with the alpha of her pack, and by all accounts, he was horrible and violent.
But now that she’d been sent off on her own, she was likely to die.
Was it better to live enslaved to a cruel and abusive alpha or to die free?
Ryker didn’t know.
It was strange, but he found himself aching to give her a third option.
Why should I care? She isn’t mine. She’s nothing to me.
And yet, if he let her leave the cave tomorrow morning without doing anything to help her, didn’t that make him responsible in a way for whatever happened next?
He had already given her advice on what to eat. Maybe he could offer her a little bit more before sending her on her way.
She had finished her squirrel meat, and her eyes were starting to drift closed. “Get to the back of the cave,” he told her, feeling oddly protective. “That’s the warmest place to sleep.”
It was a mark of how tired she must be, he thought, that she didn’t question him. She didn’t ask him to guarantee her safety while she slept. She just nodded and crawled to the back of the cave.
Ryker sat awake for a long time, thinking about what he might do when the morning came.
Chapter Seven
SOPHIE
Sophie was surprised to see that the sun was already high in the sky when she awoke the following morning.
He let me sleep in.
Ryker had let her sleep in.
A jolt of fear shot through her. He was no different from anyone else she had met since leaving home. He wanted her gone. Maybe he had left the cave assuming that she would be gone by the time he got back. Maybe he would attack her if she was still here when he returned.
She scrambled to her feet, grabbing her backpack and slinging it over her shoulder, determined to get out before he discovered her.
But in the mouth of the cave, she ran headlong into him and fell backward, tripping over her feet, landing seated on the cave floor, her breath ejecting from her lungs in a surprised huff.
He raised his eyebrows. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?” he asked.
“You told me to leave in the morning,” she pointed out.
He frowned. “I can’t tell whether or not you’re afraid of me,” he said.
He couldn’t? That was surprising to Sophie. She was terrified of him. Her stomach was churning so hard that she thought she might vomit. She looked up at him and said nothing.
Ryker held out a hand to her. “Might as well get up off the ground,” he said. “I brought breakfast.”
“But...but you said you were going to want me to go,” she said.
He scowled. “Do you want the crawdads or not?”
“I want them.” She hesitated. “What are crawdads?”
“Seriously? You really are green, aren’t you?” He showed her. The animals looked like a cross between shrimp and miniature lobsters. “They’ll make a good breakfast, and they’re pretty easy to catch. I can show you how to make a trap.”
“But I thought—”
“Listen,” he said. “Are you in some kind of hurry or something?”
“No,” she said. “No hurry.”
“Then just relax and do like I tell you,” he said. “I can give you things you can use to stay alive out there. Advice. Tricks and tips. You might as well learn a few things before you go, right?”
She looked up at him warily. “Why should I trust you?”
“Christ,” he said. “You don’t have to trust me. Leave if you want to. I don’t give a damn. I’m just trying to help you. It’s not like there’s anything in it for me.”
She felt a shudder pass through her. “All right,” she said quietly. “Show me your tricks.”
He nodded, the argument apparently already forgotten. “Do you know how to build a fire?” he asked her.
“No,” she said.
“I’ll teach you,” he said. “It gets cold at night, for one thing, and for another, once you’ve got fire, you can cook your food. Something tells me you’re not really used to eating raw.”
Sophie thought back to the rabbit she’d had the other day. She had been ready to eat that raw. But cooked would have been better. “Okay,” she agreed. “Show me how to build a fire.”
Ryker sent her out of the cave to collect wood. Every few minutes, Sophie brought an armload back. He would examine every piece, adding some of them to the pile, throwing others away. “More like this,” he said, holding one up. “See how it’s nice and dry? It’ll burn easily, and that’s good for getting the fire going.”
He tossed a handful to one side. “Those pieces are all too small,” he explained. “The flames will consume them in seconds. You need small wood to start out with, it’s true, but you need it to burn long enough that you can start adding the bigger wood on top of it. Go get more.”
She wanted to accuse him of making her do all the work. Things had never been like this with Josh’s pack. If anything, it had been the opposite. Rather than being forced to do manual labor, she had been forced to sit out of everything the pack had done.
But they had made her fetch things for them. Snacks from the kitchen. Second and third beers. Sophie was used to being an errand girl for alphas.
The only thing that stopped her from confronting Ryker about it was the knowledge that she could just walk away any time she wanted to. There was no need for her to do what he was asking her to do, and they both knew it. If she didn’t like it, she could just leave.
She wasn’t ready to leave. Not yet.
The idea of leaving was frightening. As intimidating as Ryker was, it scared her to think of being out on her own again. She would stay here in his cave, she decided, as long as he would let her. Maybe if she could drag this out long enough, he would let her spend the night again. The thought of spending the night with him again made her blush.
When enough wood had been gathered to suit his liking, he knelt beside her. “You have to generate enough heat to start the fire,” he explained.
“How do I do that?”
“By rubbing sticks together.”
“Seriously? That’s not just an urban legend?”
“No, it isn’t an urban legend,” he said, looking at her as if she might be crazy. “Friction generates heat. It’s physics.” He handed her a flat rock and showed her how to position a pile of dried leaves on top of it. “Now take your stick—put it end-down against the tinder, that’s right—and spin it between your hands. Move your hands down as you do it to put pressure on it.”
“Like this?” She gave it a try.
“You’re going to need to put more pressure on it than that,” he said. “That’s not going to start any fires.”
She frowned and tried again. “I don’t feel like I’m doing this right.
He moved behind her, wrapping his arms around her so that he could cover his hands with hers. “Do it like this,” he said, rubbing their hands together over the stick, pressing down against the rock.
As he did so, he rose up ever so slightly behind her, his body rubbing against hers, his hips lifting into her.
She would have expected the sensation to horrify her. After what had happened with Josh, she would have imagined that having a man touch her again would be the last thing in the world she would want.
Instead, she found herself leaning into him.
He rolled the stick between their hands again. She felt his warm breath on the side of her neck. Heat flooded her body.
On the third attempt, the spark lit. A little flame jumped to life in front of Sophie and she let out a gasp of surprise. Ryker cupped his massive hand over the flame, covering it completely, and when he took his hand away, the fire was out.
