But later that night,after Evie had gone to bed and I was stacking the dish washer with Damon’s help, I saw that black wolf pad into our yard again. That’s when I lost it.
Damon looked at me in confusion as I stormed down the hallway, bursting into the spare room where Jasper and Ben were lying on the bed on their phones.
“What…?” Jasper said, rolling up and onto his feet. “What’re you after, beta?”
“A pair of your tracky dacks or shorts or something.”
“Ohhkay.” He reached down and ruffled through his bag and presented me with a pair of tracksuit pants which I snatched off him as I took off back down the hall. The guys followed hot on my heels right up until I wrenched the sliding door open and then stomped into the yard.
The black wolf shied away, but I wasn’t having that. I ran over to him, with much greater speed due to the damn training, and then flung the item of clothing at him.
“Change, now!” I snapped, trying for an alpha bark of my own and doing a damn fine approximation of it, if I did say so myself.
I don’t think I really expected him to obey, so when he did just that, I was left gaping as the wolf became a very naked, very hard man. Well, that’s the excuse I’m using to justify the way my eyes slid over Logan’s muscular form. Like the other guys, he had no fat on him whatsoever; every muscle was clearly delineated and I got to see the delightful way they bunched and stretched as he reached down to grab the pants.
Although not to put them on straight away. I’d been getting zombie Logan, contrite Logan, miserable Logan, since we’d got back home, so seeing smug bastard Logan was a relief. Sort of.
“Like what you see, beta?” he asked me and that provoked an uncontrollable growl from me.
“Of course I like what I see!” I snapped. Logan felt like that sore tooth in my mouth, the one your tongue can’t leave alone, and right now I was just ready for the damn thing to be pulled. “Look at you? There’s dickhead gymbros who are all spouting about their ‘alpha training programs’ so they can get ‘shredded’ and ‘swole’.” My fingers made speech marks in the air. “They want to look just like you and you’re just like…” I hunched over, spreading my arms and legs wide, pretending that I was the one with a metric fuck tonne of muscles packed on my frame, “…I’m a freaking alpha. I’m all muscly and hot.”
“So I’m hot now?” Logan asked, with a sniff.
“I’m hotter,” Damon interjected. “I’ll strip down naked in the garden and you can do a comparison.”
“Shut up, Damon,” Logan snapped.
“Yeah, shut up, Damon,” Ben added. “We’re going up the shops. There’s that thing we need to get.”
“What? We went shopping after work?” Damon said, then I heard the dull thud of one of them punching him. They did that a lot. “Ohhh… that thing. Got it.”
“Don’t kill each other until after we get back,” Reed said and then I heard the back door slide shut again.
“Is this what you’re going to do?” I asked when I turned back to Logan. He was dressed now, thankfully, though the magnificence of his chest was still all too obvious. I crossed my arms across mine in response. “Come to training sessions with Evie. Lurk around my garden? Rinse and repeat?”
“I…” Logan shook his head slowly, then looked down at his hands. “That’s why I was hitting the piss real hard before. As soon as I sleep, or my guard is down, he comes out, and my paws, they always bring me back to you, Lily.” He stared at me then, dark eyes piercing through the night air. “The only way I can stop him is to get so fucking drunk I can’t move and even then… But if I do, I can’t be there for the cub, so…”
He let out a long sigh then.
“Help me out here, beta. I fucked up. God, did I fuck up. I fucked up years before you came along, listening to all of Dad’s bullshit and going along with his every dictate. I used to be so fucking proud that it was me he relied on to keep the others in line, that I was the one he trusted. He’d tell me over and over that I was the one he had to have by his side, because…”
“Because your other fathers died, leaving him with five unruly, hurting boys to manage and he couldn’t do it alone,” I said, feeling like I was putting two and two together. “Your mum must’ve been crushed by her mates’ death.”
“She barely left her bed for six months,” he said. “I used to bring her in tea and biscuits, trying to make her eat something. She’d just turn her face towards the wall and tell me to leave it on the bedside table.” His jaw flexed as he spoke, the words seeming to claw their way out of him. “I’d clean them away later with barely a sip gone or a nibble taken, only to bring more over again. Then I heard Dad talking to some of the other adults.”
He shook his head.
“I’m not telling you this shit for sympathy.”
“Too late for that,” I croaked out and his eyes jerked up to meet mine.
“I want you to understand. It doesn’t make it right. I was a fucking prick the whole time and I know it. But… they said Mum was dying. It might have been hyperbole or just plain worry, but I snuck into her room as a result. I stood there with a fresh mug of tea in my hands and a bloody peanut butter sandwich in the other and I barked at my mother to wake up. Her eyes flicked open.”
His were too, wide and silver now.
“She looked up, but not really seeing me. She saw my dads instead, always feeling this moment of hope for a moment before she put two and two together. But when she was at her most vulnerable, I used what alpha bark I had and compelled her to eat and drink something. When she did, I felt this fucking rush. Of relief, of gratitude, of hope… but also—”
“You felt empowered,” I finished for him. “In ways a kid shouldn’t. It doesn’t help a child, thinking they can control their parents, forcing them to do what they want. They think they want that, but really it’s just terrifying.”