Cold Foot Komodo (Wreck’s Mountains Book 2)

Bang, bang, bang!

Sasha startled hard at the booming knocks on her front door. She’d been in the kitchen cutting up chicken to cook for easy meals on her lunch breaks.

Heart racing, she made her way to the door with the knife gripped tightly in her grasp.

“Who is it?” she called through the barrier.

“It’s Reed.”

Reed? She unlocked it and pulled open the door, and for a moment, she didn’t understand what she was looking at.

A mass of gargantuan bodies were crowding her small front porch. Reed dragged King’s limp body through the door, turning sideways so they would both fit.

“What happened?” she demanded.

“Where can I put him?” Reed asked, his voice sounding too thick. There was a long hiss at the end, and when he looked at her, his lighter-colored eye was so light, it looked like it had no color at all.

“The bed.” She could see the blood dripping from King’s fingertips as Reed dragged him down the hall. “Is he bit?”

“Yes.”

“By you?”

“Yes.”

Shhhit. She had a good medical kit somewhere in one of the boxes. Which one had she packed it into? She slashed the knife down the tape of the three near the kitchen and rifled through them as fast as she could.

“Grab a towel from the bathroom and put pressure on it to stop the bleeding!” she called.

“The others are right behind me.”

“Are they going to be fighting you?”

“Probably.”

She rifled through the next box desperately, shaking her head. King had been bleeding all the way down the mountain roads. That was perhaps half an hour. And with Reed’s venom in him? There!

At the bottom of this box was the huge red medical kit she’d packed in her old life.

She snatched it up and bolted for the bedroom. Reed had pulled King’s shirt off, and she got her first look at a Komodo shifter bite, and oh…my…God.

His flesh had been ripped from his outer shoulder to the other side of his chest. “Angle him, let me see his back.” Reed pushed him up, and sure enough, the teeth had ripped the same shape across the entire span of his enormous back.

“Was he Changed when you bit him?” she asked, dipping into her nurse’s voice while her mind raced with what she needed to do.

“Yes.”

“What the hell happened, Reed?” she demanded.

He shook his head and backed toward the wall. “I lost it. He was losing it back and he Changed, and then my animal…”

She poured alcohol straight onto King’s wounds. “Did he lose consciousness immediately?”

“No. He passed out three minutes after the bite, maybe.”

“You’ve seen this before?”

“Yes.”

“How long does he have?”

Reed shook his head again, just staring at King.

“How long?” she asked more firmly.

“I don’t know. I’ve only bitten other Komodos. They have armor and are resistant.”

There was a commotion in the living room, and then Wreck was yelling in the hallway. “She’s working on him! You’ll stay out. That’s an order!”

Chills rippled up the back of Sasha’s spine at the grit in the Alpha’s tone.

“What do you need?” Wreck asked from the doorway.

“There’s a snake-bite kit in the console of my truck.”

“I’ll get it,” he said, and disappeared.

In a rush, she rifled through her medical case and pulled what she needed. She was loading needles by the time Wreck returned with the snake-bite kit.

She looked back at Reed, who was kneeling by the wall, eyes on King. “Pull your own venom,” she barked.

Without a word, Reed stood and started putting together the plunger and suction cup.

She injected the antibiotics into King’s shoulder as Reed drew venom and blood from each ragged tooth-mark on King’s chest. Some would already be in his system, but any help they could give to King, they were going to do it.

Katrina was talking to Wreck in the hallway. She was crying, from the sound of it.

“He’s going to be fine,” Sasha called out.

Reed huffed out a long, relieved breath. “Truth.”

“You got to believe if you do what I do for a living,” she whispered. “Draw venom faster, please.”

Reed went to work and found his rhythm as she emptied every medicine she possessed that had any shot of helping King directly into his bloodstream. She wished she had an IV. Hell, she wished they were doing this at the hospital, but she would have to break about a dozen rules to treat him like she needed to. Shifters were a different animal. Beth had been right about that.

Already, King’s ragged breathing was steadying out, and the burning temperature of his skin was normalizing.

King sat up in a blur with a gasp, and grabbed her arm so hard, she thought he was breaking it. She yelped, but Reed was there. He slammed his fist straight across King’s jaw. “Let her go! She’s helping!” He hit him again, and again, but King’s eyes were vacant, like he couldn’t feel anything.

“King,” she pleaded.

“Let her go!” Wreck demanded.

King’s hand went limp, and she fell backward and hit the wall hard.

She gripped her arm and winced.

“Kat?” King bellowed.

“Kat, come in here,” Wreck called, trying to help Reed keep King down.

Katrina appeared in an instant and bolted for her mate. King settled, and they started talking low as Reed made his way to Sasha.

He hesitated before he knelt in front of her. “Let me see it.”

“It’s fine,” she said, defensive and shut down. “I’m fine.”

Gently, he pried her hand from her arm and brushed his finger over the red marks there. “Can you move it?” His voice still held a hiss to it that she didn’t recognize.

She tried, and succeeded. “Just bruised.”

He nodded, his eyes full of some emotion she couldn’t read. His shoulders rose and fell with his fast breath, and his eyes were both still light—one almost white, and one the color of good whiskey.

“What’s going on with you?” she asked. “King is your friend.”

There was suffering in his eyes as he eased back and ran his hand down his face. “Thank you for helping him.” His words were thick in his throat.

Reed stood and left the room without looking back.

“Reed,” Wreck said. “You need to be treated. Reed!”

Treated? “Is he hurt?”

“King bit him first,” Kat murmured. She’d taken over drawing venom.

“Bet I won’t do that again,” King gritted out. “This sucks.”

Wait, what? Sasha pushed upward and staggered out into the hallway, holding her aching arm. “Reed?”

“He’s already outside,” Timber said from where she’d been pacing the living room.

Sasha pushed her legs and made it outside just as Reed was reaching his truck, parked sideways in the street. His door was still open from his rush to get King inside.

“Reed!”

He turned, but wouldn’t meet her eyes.

He wore a black sweater with no rips, so she wouldn’t have guessed he was hurt in the chaos of treating King, but as she approached, she could see how the material clung to his skin wetly on the left side of his body.

“Let me see it.”

“I’m fine. Nothing a few drinks won’t fix right up.”

She made a clicking sound behind her teeth, good and done with stubborn men for the day. She tugged at the hem of his shirt and lifted it. A gasp escaped her.

Two enormous puncture wounds were seeping blood right under his collarbone. “Oh my gosh,” she uttered as she turned him around and looked at his back.

“It’ll be healed by morning,” he murmured as he pushed his shirt back down and eased out of her reach.

“Why did he bite you?”

“Because this is the life,” Reed gritted out. “Because this is our normal. You saw it in there. We tried to kill each other and no one is angry about it, Sasha. No one is picking sides. This is just life for a shifter. We fight.” His tone was harsh, and his eyes held anger.

She didn’t understand. “You’re not being nice to me.”

His eyes softened, and he parted his lips like he wanted to say something…but he changed his mind and turned for his truck. “I’ve got to go.”

“Go where?”

“I’ve had a bad day, and I’m spinning out, and I’m…I’m…I don’t know what I’m fucking doing here.” There was such heartbreak in his words. She understood spinning out. She understood questioning what she was doing here.

She inhaled deeply. “You don’t need any bandages?”

He hung his head. “Thank you, but no.”

“Are you punishing yourself?” she guessed.

He studied her face, and then ripped his gaze away from her.

“You cleared the road for me again this morning.”

“I’ll probably do it again tomorrow morning.”

She bit the corner of her lip and remembered what Beth had said. She needed to give him time. Until he figured himself out, she could be a friend though.

“The 406 has the medicine for what ails you. I went to dinner there with Beth.” She rolled her eyes. “I’m giving away all my secrets, but they have fantastic cosmopolitans.”

She could see the swell of his cheeks from his smile. “You got a bartender in Darby, Montana to make you a city-drink?”

“If you ask for things nicely, you’ll often get what you want.”

He lifted his gaze to hers. “Well, I’ll take the nurse’s advice. Goodnight, Sasha.”

“Goodnight, friend.”

As he loaded into his truck, she already knew what she was about to do. She wasn’t sad watching him drive away as she made her way back into the house.

Something big was going on with that man, and sometimes when a world fell apart, all a person needed was someone to listen—like Beth had done for her today.

Sasha would see him real soon.