I moved aside, and the two of them walked in. I looked back at Jack and Hawk in confusion.
“What about us, love?” Jack said.
“The invitation was implied, Jack,” Kelly said tersely. “Come in and stop playing the fool.”
“Sorry, Mother,” he said with a twisted smile.
Mother? My eyes went wide. If I thought things were awkward before, with Kelly stiffly requesting access to a house she’d just handed over to me hours ago due to some arcane reason, they were now as awkward as when the contestants on the Bachelor realised the dude had been sleeping with each of them.
“As alpha of Sanctuary, I’ll be giving a little speech in front of all gathered, to make it official that your pack has been accepted as one of our own. Then there’ll be a petitioning ceremony, where those who wish to apply to be part of your pack will offer a gift and deliver a short speech on what they believe they will bring to the pack.”
“Ah, she already knows,” Slade said. “Aaron got the ball rolling.”
Apparently, there were levels of awkward still to be plumbed. Finn went white, his eyes burning brightly. His fists slowly curled, then relaxed. When he looked at me, I saw something I’d never seen on his face before: fear.
Kelly was a whole other ball game. “That is not how it is supposed to—”
“We’ve all been playing it by ear, Kelly,” Finn said. Her eyes were grass green when they glared at him for the interruption. “Jules hasn’t gone through initiation, has been largely left to her own devices.”
“Something you argued for. You said it was all under control.”
“Yeah, well, I was wrong... and probably thinking with my dick,” Finn said.
Jack snorted at this.
“It’s the spirit of the rituals that matter, not following them to the letter. If I’d been here early, you’d be damn sure I’d be laying my token and heart at her feet as well. It is what it is.”
Jack watched the whole exchange with a lazy smile, looking over his shoulder to where Hawk stood, a silent sentinel.
“Well, if we’re not following protocol,” he said, and dropped to his knee.
“Jack!” Kelly snapped.
&nbs
p; “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Finn growled.
“Julie, daughter of Marian,” his smile grew wider as he chanted the words, his hand going to the open collar of his shirt, sliding along the golden flesh and stopping over his heart. “I ask that you accept this token as a symbol of my regard for you. I wish to start the petitioning process to join your pack. My deepest wish is that I will prove worthy and that I will take a place by your side. As part of my offer, I give you all I have that’s worth a damn.” He looked back again, Hawk standing there, eyes wide. Jack nodded, gesturing to the man to come forward.
“What the hell do you think you’re playing at!” Kelly said. “You can’t offer another person as a token.”
Hawk strode over, face a seamless blank. It wasn’t until Jack stood and placed a hand on his shoulder that I saw the tension there as it leached away. Hawk’s eyes partially closed for a second, then opened again. He stared back, an endless chocolate brown gaze that seemed to see everything and nothing all at once.
Jack took a step towards me, something that wrenched a snarl from Slade. He just sneered in response, but when he turned to me, all of it—the cocky bullshit, the cynical front—seemed to drop away. “Take him,” he rasped in a low voice. “He wants a woman more than anything, and I’ve got no other way to give it to him. No one else will take us, with things the way they are. But you—”
“You’ve got a lot of fucking nerve,” Slade said.
“You think I don’t know how you feel right now?” Jack snapped back. “Like your heart jumped out of your chest and started walking around, vulnerable and open to being kicked at any time, and you’re just helpless to watch it go? You’d do anything for her, wouldn’t you? Walk through fire, slay a thousand enemies, bring her the world and lay it at her feet. Don’t tell me I have some nerve, when you’d do the exact same thing in my place.”
“You don’t have to do this,” Finn said to me. “This is so bloody unorthodox, I don’t know if you’ll get the matriarchs’ approval, even if you do.”
“What won’t get the matriarchs’ approval?”
It was right about now the drama in my life ratcheted up from reality TV to telenovela. Ophelia stood within the doorway, looking for all the world like a sorceress. She wore a rusty black dress that fell around her in voluminous folds, and she rose from within it, a steely tower.
“Well?”
“Jack has made a petition and is using Hawk as his token,” Finn said.