“Secret, you go out there night after night acting like you’re still the same person you were before the necromancers, but you’re not. You had gifts then, and as tough and smart and incredibly capable as you are, you’re only human.”
This was the other fight we liked to have endlessly, and it went hand in hand with the one about me moving back to New York.
“I’m not ready.”
“You’re not even willing to talk about it, and I don’t understand why. Being a werewolf is in your blood. Your sister and brother are both wolves. Your aunt and uncle. Your husband.”
He was annoying me, so I replied, “Both of my husbands.”
It was a low blow and a mean thing to say, but he knew I didn’t want to have this conversation at the moment, so I wasn’t about to let him steamroll me with it.
Desmond wasn’t my first husband.
He was the first person I had married legally in front of a judge, making him my one and only on-paper spouse, but before Desmond there had been Lucas. Lucas Rain was the previous werewolf King of the East, a title handed down through generations of men in the Rain family. Desmond was his best friend and second-in-command, and our entire little three-person relationship had been a never-ending hellscape of drama.
Lucas decided to put an end to my romance with Desmond by marking me as his own, then springing a werewolf wedding
ritual on me when we were visiting my family in Louisiana.
Surprise! You’re a wolf queen now!
Then, when we were planning to get married for real in an expensive and highly publicized wedding ceremony at one of his hotels, Lucas simply didn’t bother to show up.
Of course, it was hard to hold a grudge about all that since Lucas had died protecting my sister and me when a gang of necromancer bikers tried to burn down New York.
And he had remained dead until my sister accidentally cast a spell that brought him back to life four years later.
It was complicated to say the least.
But for the time being, Lucas was in the wind. He hadn’t wanted the responsibility of his pack back and left it all in Desmond’s capable hands. As of today only a small group of us knew he was alive. When he’d last checked in, he was in Argentina somewhere. He sent me a very nice case of wine.
If you think Lucas being alive again made Desmond happy, you’d be absolutely right. He’d missed the man who had been like a brother to him, missed his friend. But Lucas’s return had also dragged a lot of unpleasant memories up about our past relationship, and six months had not been nearly enough time for that open wound to heal between us.
Especially when I poked at it every time Desmond annoyed me.
“Lucas isn’t the reason you refuse to let me change you,” he said.
“Listen to what you just said. Play it back in your head for me.”
He sighed again. “That’s not how I meant it, and you know that perfectly well. I love you as you are, Secret, but being a werewolf is part of who you are, and if you’d let me bite you, your life would be so much easier. You’d be stronger, faster, better equipped to do that job you so love to do.”
“Better equipped to do it from New York.”
That’s where this little discussion came off the rails every time. I knew his heart was in the right place, and I wasn’t really against the idea of being a werewolf again, either. The problem was that once he bit me, I would be a part of his pack. The East Coast pack. And I would be expected to start living up to my role as a member of that pack in blood and not merely by marriage.
The other part was that the second he turned me back into a werewolf, I would be trespassing in Los Angeles.
By being a werewolf royal, I could only be on another king’s property with their good graces and blessing. The werewolf King of the West was not exactly known for his hospitality towards me. He didn’t like that I, a technical werewolf Princess of the South, hadn’t asked permission to stay in Los Angeles, which would have been the appropriate thing to do.
Explaining I was no longer a werewolf hadn’t gone over that well, and he made every attempt to let me know my presence here wasn’t welcome. Which turned into a real pain in the ass whenever the unit needed something from the wolves.
If I let Desmond bite me, the one technicality that allowed me to stay here would evaporate because there was precisely zero chance I’d be allowed to live in L.A. once I went from being technically a werewolf queen to literally one.
So whether Desmond wanted to admit it or not, if he bit me, I’d have no choice but to go back to New York permanently. Which was exactly what he wanted.
And so we went around like this in a circle over and over again, because he wanted me home for good, and I wasn’t ready to be pinned down to one place.
If anyone ever tells you marriage is easy, you have my permission to punch them right in the face.