“She’s fine.”
Riley Taylor pulled away from me and turned to those men.
“She’s a bit dehydrated, no doubt from the tranquilliser, so make sure she gets lot of water and has somewhere she can urinate.”
“She’s not shifting,” Beau said.
“And why is that?” Haze stepped forward, arms crossed as he stared each man down, and I instantly liked him the best, my tail wagging from where I lay on the couch inside the unit the Lockwood’s had given me to stay in. “What did you do?”
“W-We didn’t—” Beau began to splutter.
“Yeah, you did,” came his flat response. “And if you want some free advice? Admit it quickly.” He turned towards Riley, his gaze instantly softening, then heating. “We lost seven fucking years with the one woman that held our hearts. Don’t be a bunch of dumb cunts like we were, trying everything else but the one thing you know you have to do—fall on your knees and beg your mate to give you the time of day.”
“I don’t remember there being a lot of begging,” Riley shot back.
“You heard the woman,” Colt said. “If our mate wants a good grovel, she’s gonna get it.” Then he glanced at the Lockwoods. “There’s nothing to stop her from shifting back, and you know that—nothing but her heart. Talk to her. Don’t fucking mansplain whatever the fuck you did, just be honest and tell her. Tell her what you did and how you’ll never fucking do it again.”
“And mean it.” Haze’s voice had become a growl as he stared at each of the Lockwoods. They shifted restlessly, bristling like territorial dogs, but I wasn’t something to be fought over. I jumped down from the couch and then went over to the bowl of water on the kitchen floor, lapping more up more, focussing on what my body needed.
And nothing else.
I didn’t know how the conversation ended. Instead, I padded down the hallway, the thick carpet feeling strange on my paws. I nosed open the nest door, crawling up onto the bed, then turning once, twice, three times before settling down.
“I’m dying to get back to my nest.”
I didn’t want Chloe’s voice in my head, didn’t want her opinions or observations or even her fucking Insta-worthy face. I closed my eyes, screwing them tight, as if that would keep her out. It didn’t. I kept seeing her, hearing her words, which somehow hit so much harder than Miranda’s intention to kill me.
Hers were the crazed ramblings of a bloody madwoman, some part of me realised, even as I lay there in fur, but Chloe’s? They spoke of a history, of experience, of a richness that I didn’t share with the men who were supposed to be the other half of my heart, and that made my chest ache.
The throb of it was a slow counterpoint, beating over and over, providing a percussive rhythm for the sonorous hum of the city beyond, one that took me down into sleep.
It hadto be the drugs. I’d slept so deeply, I hadn’t noticed him joining me, his body curled around mine, holding my wolf to his chest. We moved slowly, peering over our shoulder at the sleeping Max, but that movement seemed to wake him. Blue eyes met mine, staring and staring for what felt like forever before he rolled up into a seated position, setting his back against the wall. His eyes, though, they stayed on me and his hand joined them, stroking across my fur, his fingers digging in to touch my skin.
“Tobias will want to tell you this himself, but…” He snorted then, staring up at the ceiling, smiling but not smiling. “Fuck him, amirite?” Those ghostly blue eyes rolled back to meet mine. “He’s a high-handed fuck, always has been, but we keep listening to him so he keeps doing what he does, and he won’t stop until we do.”
The look he shot me then was much more furtive, a rejection playing out in his mind before I’d had a chance to deliver it. He patted the spot right beside him, inviting me close, so I’d have to press my wolf’s body right along the line of his thigh, and she, she was on her paws and moving over, then flopping down in just the way I’d visualised. He gave good pats, I could feel her reasoning inside my head, but that wasn’t it, because even in this form, I needed him, ached for him, in a way that didn’t ease until he was touching me.
“Lucien and I knew by now that Chloe wasn’t the right one for us. It shouldn’t be that hard, right? We knew all the hearts and flowers they use to describe the way it feels when you find your true mate was probably exaggerated, but this? We always pulled in four different directions, but before her, we’d been able to make that work. We each had our strengths and that helped the whole, but she smashed through the fragile alliance we’d created and she did that because we let her.”
His voice was a low hum, one that seemed to mesh with the sounds of the traffic outside, and something about it soothed me, even as he spoke of terrible things.
“I had my doubts, but the others seemed so fucking entranced by her. Her scent was sweet when it filled my nose, making me think I could just go along with them on this. I think that’s why she never liked me, didn’t want me as her mate, because my strengths?”
He didn’t want me to feel that tension, but in this form, I could feel the spasms in his fingers as he fought the urge to rake them against my skin, the rapid uptick of his heartbeat.
“Mine don’t lure people closer, like Beau’s, or command others to do my bidding, like Tobias’. I don’t even have a genius for sniffing out talent like Lucien does.” His fingers moved faster now, scratching and scratching at a place in my fur, like I might when plagued by fleas.” He glanced down at me, and we looked up his leg to meet his eyes. “I’m not telling you to feel sorry for me, or to… What did Haze call it? Mansplain this? I…”
That falter in his tone, that had the wolf shifting because Max, despite what he might think, was an alpha. He smelled like it, felt like it deep inside my head, my heart. If he really wanted to, he’d have been able to command me out of fur. He was the only one who could, because he was my mate. Under the ruff of fur around my neck, his mark throbbed, and that feeling only intensified as I watched him stare. I found myself moving then, shifting until my muzzle was lying on his leg, nudging him to continue.
“I’m the one who notices…fucking everything. All the shifts in mood, tone, inflection, and expression. The tag in the back of my shirts. The texture of the food we’re eating. The sounds, so many sounds…” His eyes silvered as he spoke, the words spilling out until he forced them to stop. His throat worked as he swallowed, then he forged on. “That’s why I was always good at coding. I could lock myself in my room, put my headphones on, cutting out all the extraneous noise and replacing it with my favourite tracks. Then I’d get lost in all that fucking code, finding what needed to be tweaked, what was causing issues in line after line of it.”
A slow hiss of breath.
“So I noticed the way she turned to us, her face radiant, whenever she thought we were looking, but no one can maintain that lie one hundred percent of the time. She’d stroke and grip and caress us, trying to catch us up in this omega spell of sweet scent and receptivity, but it wasn’t right…”
He shook his head, staring at the shaded window, but that wasn’t what he saw.
“It wasn’t right. If Lucien had felt that, he’d have said something and wouldn’t have shut up until everyone was listening. Beau… Fuck, I don’t think he knows how to have an argument. He’d have just pulled away and pulled away until we all found ourselves on our own, and Tobias? He’d just have decided we were done. Only it was me that noticed first. I saw something I didn’t want to, my brain cataloguing every damn thing. My wolf had his nose to the ground, and he wouldn’t leave off now he had the scent.”