“It was a bloodbath. The Germans were all killed, but so were all the hostage wolves, and most of the Alphas who had gone with Jeremiah. My father…” Desmond sucked in a breath, and I heard the tremor in his voice. “My father died protecting his king. But it didn’t matter. Jeremiah died the next day. His wounds were too extensive, and he was too old.”
“Des…” I touched his arm, and he flinched.
“So stupid.” He ran a thumb under each eye, though he hadn’t cried for the duration of the story. “Lucas and I got home, and suddenly he was a king at twenty-one, and I was his second. We had a whole damned pack to run and barely any idea of how to do it.”
“But you did it,” I told him.
“Did we? I don’t know. Sometimes I think we’re holding it together, but we never let it heal properly. I worry all it will take is one hard tap and the whole thing is going to fall apart.”
If that was how my uncle saw the Eastern pack, it was no wonder he was making his move now. And by the sound of things he was doing it exactly the way Desmond believed was the smart route to a hostile takeover.
I couldn’t let that happen.
Squeezing his hand, I rested my head against his shoulder. Whatever it took, I would play my role in all of this. Lucas’s pack wouldn’t fall apart because I wasn’t willing to be a pawn. It was time to put my pride on the back burner and live up to my title as pack protector. If I didn’t, it might be Desmond and Lucas who paid the price, and I couldn’t live with myself if that happened.
Chapter Twenty-One
I wasn’t cut out for university life.
This was only my second trip to the Columbia campus, and I already detested the place. It wasn’t that the buildings didn’t have a certain academic charm to them, or that the feel of a miniature city within a city didn’t have an appeal. No, none of those things made me hate higher education.
The goddamn place was teeming with people who were begging to become victims.
Young women filed out of Mayhew’s lecture hall, and it was like watching an evolutionary progression diagram. Except instead of showing the development of early man into homo sapien, I was seeing a digression from good-girl student into sororitos sluttius. The shirts got lower and the skirts got higher as each new girl stepped out.
It was February, for God’s sake. I couldn’t feel the cold, and I still wouldn’t wear a micromini outside.
When the last girl had left, I ducked into the classroom and stood at the top of the stairs watching Professor Mayhew pack up his big leather books. When he didn’t notice me right away, I cleared my throat.
“Oh, Miss… I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name, love.”
“Yeah, must be hard to keep track of them all.”
“Beg pardon?”
The stairs were deep and narrow, but I managed to descend without taking my eyes off him. “I was wondering something. Does the quality of a girl’s bedroom performance impact the level of the grade she gets, or is it her willingness that does it? Like, if she’ll only blow you, is it a one-letter grade bump? What does she have to do for an A?”
Mayhew propped an elbow on his lectern and stared at me with his hooded gray eyes, unfazed by my words. After a moment of contemplation, he shrugged one shoulder. “I didn’t put as much thought into it as you evidently have. The arrangement was mutually beneficial, Miss McQueen. What is it they say? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it?” He affected a perfect redneck accent for the last phrase, making me shudder.
“I see you have no problem remembering my name when the discussion is about blowjobs.”
“Maybe I hadn’t forgotten you at all.” He tilted his head to the side and smirked at me. “So are you here to offer, or did you want to see if I’d deny it?”
Good question. I wasn’t here to offer him anything other than the pointy end of my knuckles. But I had expected him to deny it. His cavalier confession was throwing me for a loop.
Taking advantage of my momentary uncertainty, Mayhew hopped off the raised platform so he was standing uncomfortably close to me. It was a peculiar gesture for a man with a permanent limp, a little too lithe and graceful to be natural.
Something was wrong here.
I stepped back, and Mayhew followed me, catching my wrist and pulling me back towards him. His strength was shocking. My synapses were firing on full blast, screaming at me to do any number of things. Instinct said I should punch him, kick, slap, claw and do anything it took to break free of his hold.
My body responded by doing nothing and letting him tug me against his chest. “I was wondering how long it would be before you found your way back to me,” he said, nuzzling his nose against my throat.
A thousand furious thoughts bounced around inside my skull, but none of them shook my limbs out of their leaden stupor.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” My mouth still worked, apparently. As usual, though, it didn’t do me a fat lot of good.
“What does it look like, love? I’m grading you.” His voice was smooth and had an undertone of something dangerous. Not a threat, but the promise of violence lurking under his tweed-clad professor veneer. It pained me to acknowledge it, but my body responded to him.