Everything Carries Me to You (Axton and Leander Book 3)

...the gentleness that comes,
not from the absence of violence, but despite
the abundance of it.
Richard Siken

The sky was the color of a headache and Leander Avilez was, not for the first time, late for his physical therapy session. These two facts were unrelated, but Leander still took a second to squint up at the overcast sky as he furiously wheeled himself down the sidewalk.

Leander had gotten his legs broken in a fight with a werewolf.

This was not the story Leander told his physical therapist. It was not the story Leander told the doctors that had attended to his broken bones. It was not the story he told the police officers who had questioned him. It was not the story Leander had told anyone.

But somewhere out there, Leander knew, there was a werewolf who had broken his legs and then kidnapped his boyfriend, in that order. Leander was going to find out the exact location of
somewhere
. He was going to get his boyfriend back, and maybe the leather motorcycle jacket that had also been stolen. He was going to get his boyfriend back, and then no one was ever going to dare separate them again.

It would probably take a long time.

There would probably be false leads.

But Leander would kiss Axton Rhoden again.

He was making sure of it.

Right now, though, he just needed to get this fucking door open somehow. He needed to do this without bashing his foot into anything.
Again
.

"Boss!" Sarah yelled behind him. "If you stopped angrily rushing ahead I could open the door for you!"

"I'm going to graduate to crutches soon," Leander muttered to one in particular. "I'm going to get on crutches and then everyone had better watch the fuck out."

"Does this hurt?" asked the fit, pretty redhead that was Leander's Tuesday-Thursday physical therapist. Her name was Michelle and she was exactly the type of girl Leander would have said was his type, before he'd fallen in love with a guy who happened to be a werewolf.

"A little," Leander lied. "It only hurts a little."

He bit his tongue and tasted blood and held on to the lie.

It was the stupid little things that got to him first.

His apartment had a stoop with stairs. They'd had to get that fixed before he came home.

"At least you don't have carpet," Sarah said to him often, with forced brightness.

Caffeine was bad for bone growth, so Leander cut his coffee habit back. He had to use a grip extender to reach the tea tins in his kitchen, because he couldn't--or wouldn't--move everything down to hand level. Tea was never the same--it was like painting with ink when you were used to oils.

Leander was a style conscious guy in addition to being a stealth intellectual, and he was wearing tear away workout pants every day because he
couldn't
wear anything else, and it was driving him nuts. He was a jock, too, and so associated his tear away pants with physical activity, running or grappling or punching, and not sitting in a chair all day.

In his apartment he had a closet full of beautiful suits and Leander would wheel himself to his closet door and stare at his work wardrobe. Then he'd stare at the workout gear stored next to it. Then he'd stare at the suits some more. Then he'd wheel away.

Sometimes the wheelchair would stick a bit in the doorway as he tried to go from room to room.

There were a lot of stupid little things.

For a short merciful time, Leander's nights had been too foggy to really miss Axton with the full force of his wounded heart. Then he'd quit all his prescribed painkillers early, because he preferred to know exactly how much everything hurt. Leander chose knowledge over ease as a matter of course even in routine life. Yet his nights had been relatively easy for a while longer--his body, exhausted from constantly trying to knit itself back together, demanded sleep. Sleep was deep and dark and painless, like some people hoped death would be.

But soon the ache in Leander's chest sharpened; soon his heart oozed bile and pain that kept him awake at night.

Getting up to do anything useful was such a fucking pain--having to transfer out of the bed and back into the chair using only his arms wasn't something he looked forward to. It just made him angry, the reminder that his life was so different now. So Leander sat up in bed, sleepless, staring out his bedroom window at nothing as the light of the moon washed over his expressionless face.

There wasn't anyone to be stoic for, but that didn't matter.

Tonight it was storming, so the shadows of the rain pattern against the window flit across Leander's face.

His phone chimed.

Leander glanced at it. It was comfortably within reach--he'd eventually learned to not set it thoughtlessly on his nightstand when he'd risked falling off the bed to lunge at his phone.

It was probably nothing.

The phone chimed again.

Leander looked at it for a while. It had betrayed him too many times.

Demandingly, the phone chimed yet again.

Leander checked his messages.

hey

then

call me

and

i think we got a lead
.

Leander closed his eyes and forced himself to take ten steady breaths.

The great serpentine beast that was the LA highway system seemed to go on forever. When the concrete leviathan was at last exhausted, desert stretched out in all directions.

Dana drove on and Axton stayed silent.

The dusty new color palette was all bleached out browns and yellows with splashes of red, interrupted by scrubby vegetation like blips on a radar.

They drove straight through the night and the cold desert wind ruffled Axton's black fur when Dana rolled the windows down, and still Axton stayed silent.

Eventually Dana turned on the radio.

Light bled into the plush velvety darkness of the night and it was dawn again. They were no longer in the desert. The scent of baked earth had melted away, replaced with the tantalizing promise of bigger, leafier trees--oak and maple and hickory. As they drove, the roads had buttresses of greenery, and the two wolves could smell deer even as the truck whipped through the distance. The land unfurled her promises, lush and bright and warm, and still Dana drove and Axton stayed silent.

"You could swap skins," Dana said, around what Axton guessed was the northern end of Washington, "and make conversation. That's an option."

Axton stayed silent.

Sweat trickled over Dana's face and his grip on the steering wheel was too tight. Axton could
smell
the hunger rolling off him, it was so bad.

Metabolic cost
, Axton thought. How many times had Dana shifted from human to wolf and back in the past two days? How much energy had he used up healing from all the injuries he'd sustained? He'd been shot, had his ankle broken, taken a hatchet to the chest, been hit by a truck... there was more to that list, probably, but Axton didn't feel like examining the details of his long list of failures.

Werewolves could starve to death, or just collapse from lack of fuel. It was one of the easier ways to kill a werewolf.

Just how weak with hunger was Dana?

Coiled in the passenger seat, paws tense and tucked under his body, Axton watched, and Axton wondered. A swift lunge to the throat; another car wreck--then the sweet feeling of his jaws closing over that muscular neck, crunching that vulnerable human shaped spine. Blood and bone, the tangy taste on his tongue.

But Axton was a wolf of his word.

He must have stared a little too long or a little too hard--

"Don't even fucking think about it," Dana muttered. "We're almost there."

Axton put his head down on his paws and kept staring.

They got off the highway and then the roads they took got smaller and smaller, until they were on a thin dirt track. Deep in the woods, Axton's blood should sing--he'd wanted this so badly, for so long, had been starved and bled dry for it. But now there is no joy, there is no wild freedom. Axton didn't think Dana would let him run, not alone, so that he could howl his pain and loss and shout his wounded heart to the moon.

Maybe together, maybe they'd run together.

Axton smelled no other wolves on the air.

Dana threw the truck into park in front of a small house and got out. He didn't open any doors for Axton--just snapped his fingers and pointed at the ground as he walked.

"Out," he ordered, striding forward.

Axton waited just long enough to make Dana give an annoyed glance back, and then pawed his way out slowly. It wasn't entirely on purpose because he was clumsy without hands, but he wanted it to seem as deliberate as possible. When he was out, he walked towards Dana with weighted paws. Dana didn't bother looking back again.

There were some very sturdy looking cellar doors.

There were chains on the ground.

Dana muscled the doors open.

"Down," he said.

Axton looked into the yawning darkness, smelled the musty scent of places underground.

"I don't trust you running loose," Dana said, taking his sunglasses off. He shouldn't have--his bare face looked tired, drawn. The tired face in turn made his hard body look soft, vulnerable. "And I need to hunt. Get in there."

Axton didn't move.

Dana's growl started in the back of his mouth, a very human sound, and then traveled down and deeper, rumbling in his chest, pure wolf. It was a promise of violence.

Axton didn't react and kept on looking at the concrete stairs in front of him.

So this was how it was going to be, then. He would be a prisoner.

Dana meant to break him.

Axton stood up straighter. Head held high, as if he was trotting down to finish his breakfast, he went down the stairs and descended into darkness.

The doors slammed shut behind him, and Axton heard Dana chain them shut.

The world was dark. There was nothingness all around him, and in this nothingness in which Axton was the only
something
--he was exhausted. Heartsick, headsick, homesick--done. Axton shut down.

He slept.

Axton woke to the sudden awareness that there was a storm, and that unshed tears hadn't been the only thing making his head ache. The sounds of the storm were curiously muted and he couldn't hear the rain itself at all. It was more that he
knew
, in his bones, that the weather had changed. Maybe he had caught the softened echo of thunder, but it was mostly the relieved sigh of his blood.

That was all, in the nothingness, in the darkness.

And then it was gone.

Axton slept.

The nothingness was hollowing him out. There had been so many feelings, the last time he was human, more than enough feeling to carry on as a wolf, even in front of Dana. But between him, between his
self
and the darkness there was no barrier. And into the nothingness his consciousness diffused breath by breath. The nothingness was as vast as the ocean, as deep and dark, so it stole his breath and gave nothing back, until Axton was so diluted in this sea of silence as to not exist.

Axton slept, or something like it.

Later it took Axton a long time to realize he was awake, more awake than he had been in some time. Open rather than shut eyes made no difference, and the fuzzy wandering of his thoughts was unfocused enough to almost be a dream. The darkness in the cellar was total and definitely artificial: a normal cellar would have light leaks around the door, at the very least, and that would have given his eyes something to adjust to. The totality of darkness suggested that Dana had selected or built this room specifically for the deprivation of sight and stimulus, which in turn implied that he'd planned for the keeping of a prisoner, which then raised many sinister questions.