Filed To Story: Alpha's Regret: His Wrongful Rejection
I purposefully picture the other night. Haisley’s wolf leaping for my wolf’s throat. Killian watching. Not moving a muscle.
She whimpers and slows her roll. It’s tough love, but she’s going to have to learn. He’s a dead-end street.
I take my time picking out my outfit, settling on a periwinkle blue maxi dress with long sleeves and sandals. It’s a synthetic fiber, but I like how it flows when I walk. Silky and soft. I don’t have a lot of sensation around some of my worst scars, so I like soft fabrics that whisper over the skin I can feel.
I wash a cereal bowl Kennedy left full of milk in the sink, and I fold a quilt Mari dropped on the floor, laying it on the back of our secondhand sofa. I shut the windows. There’s a hint of an approaching thunderstorm in the air. Then, finally, when I can’t think of anything else to do, I stop putzing around and head for dinner.
The evening is cooler than it has been. There’s that undernote of rain, but the sky overhead is cloudless and almost purple as the sun sets.
I can’t imagine living anywhere else. The ridge, the ravine, the river, the caves, and the foothills. The seesawing mountain breezes and valley breezes. It’s my territory. It runs through me like veins, connecting all my parts to the earth.
But I also wish I was a million miles away.
With each step, my dread grows. The pack is going to stare. Talk shit. Laugh. I lost a challenge, and that’s how a pack works. It teaches you your place.
And the Byrnes will be there, smug that they’ve put me in my place.
I’d happily skip dinner, but Annie, Mari, and Kennedy expect me. They went ahead, always anxious about being late. God forbid a male wants a beer and has to get it himself.
I shouldn’t be so critical. I was just like them when I was their age. Being a lone female messes with your mind. You’re consigned to the kitchen, the furthest cabin from the commons, the jobs where you don’t have unsupervised interactions with unmated males-in other words, the sucky ones. You’re pack, but not. You’re a satellite.
Easy to pick off.
Humans like to talk about “alone time” as if it’s a good thing. That’s how far they are from their herd origins. “Alone time” means you’ve been left behind. It means you’re on your own, and no one has your back. And there are predators out there. Still.
An old memory of gnashing fangs and screams surges from my subconscious. I slam it back down and walk a little quicker the rest of the way to the lodge. The evening has shadows now, and strange sounds. A shiver zips up my spine.
When I slip through the screen door, Old Noreen is piling serving dishes on trays. Annie and Mari are shoveling food into their mouths while standing at a counter, and Kennedy’s squatting on an overturned bucket in a back corner, absorbed by her phone.
“Took your time, eh?” Old Noreen swipes her forehead with a dish towel. “Come on then. This isn’t that movie with the hot beast in highwater pants. The dishes aren’t gonna dance themselves out.”
Kennedy snorts from her corner. Mari wrinkles her button nose and says, “I don’t get it.”
I grab a tray. There’s a knot in my stomach.
This is it. The last time the pack saw me, I was naked and covered in my own blood. This is step one in painting over that picture. It needs to be done, so therefore, I can do it. That’s my mantra.
My face burns. It feels like forever ago, but it was only three nights. Pack memory goes much, much longer. They’ll be reminiscing about the time my wolf went suicidal for years to come.
I can’t hide from it. All I need to do is push open the door and walk through. Piece of cake. Done it a hundred times. The sooner I get to it, the sooner I can trade places with Kennedy and go back to researching mushroom cultivation. The pack can be awful, but if I fall back in line and tuck my tail, they’ll go back to ignoring me.
“Do you want a kick in the ass to get you moving?” Kennedy pipes up from her corner.
“Kicking it myself,” I mutter.
I square my shoulders as much as I can carrying a huge round tray, and then I knock the swinging door open with my hip and hold it for Mari and Annie.
A hundred heads swivel. Voices hush except for a nasty laugh here and there.
Against my will, my gaze flies to Killian. He’s in his place on the dais, his bulk overwhelming the metal folding chair, legs cockily sprawled as he lounges on his throne.
He has two modes when he’s up there-the pissy lord of all he surveys or the arrogant emperor willing to be entertained. Based on his posture, I’d say tonight we’re in for the latter. That’s good. Usually that means less blood to mop off the floor at the end of the night.
Ivo is crouched beside him, bending his ear. I venture out into the great room, and Killian glances at me for a split second. Then he casually-and very deliberately-looks away, replying to Ivo, dismissing me from his notice.
My heart drops.
Cool. That’s cool.
The pack takes it as a cue. Conversations resume. I’m no big deal again. There’s some pointed snickering, but the mood in the room mellows, the focus returning to food. I lower my eyes to the floor and keep moving.
Killian’s giant silver wolf is only a vague presence in the background tonight. Killian the man is in full control, and he obviously has no interest in me.
Good.
That’s what I wanted.
I swallow past the lump in my throat and make my way to the front of the room. Serving the lieutenants and the other fighters is my job. Mari takes the elders and pups. Annie and Kennedy trade off on the others.
Serving the lieutenants isn’t an honor or anything. The unmated males hit on everyone but me and Old Noreen, and it makes Annie and Mari anxious-and skeeves Kennedy out to no end-so I take one for the team.
The unmated fighters sit at two tables by the dais-A-roster and B-roster. A-roster is closest. The lieutenants and a few other favored fighters are always seated there. They make room for Jaime if he’s on a winning streak and Alfie if he hasn’t pissed off anyone lately. And then there are the high-ranking females. Ivo’s sister Rowan. Killian’s cousin Ashlynn. Haisley.
Haisley’s mother Cheryl is the alpha female. She eats with her mate at the high-ranking elder table and then floats around the great room, ostensibly “supervising.” Mostly she makes us fetch things until she gets drunk and forgets about us.
The B-roster table buffers A-roster from the elders so the lieutenants don’t have to listen to their stories. B-roster is generally younger. Dominant, but not oozing aggression like A-roster. There are no females at B-roster’s table-they don’t rank high enough to draw female interest-and yet, overall, they’re a lot better behaved.
Tonight, I serve B-roster first. Finn and Alfie shoot me dirty looks, and I smirk on the inside. I take my time going back to refill my tray. Packmates whisper as I pass, but if I don’t focus, I can’t make out what they’re saying. I keep my eyes straight ahead and think about mushrooms.
Besides the product I have ready to sell now, I have maybe six or seven pounds drying in the shack behind Abertha’s. They’ll be ready for market in a month. If the deal with ShroomForager3000 works out, I might have a steady buyer. That’s another four or five hundred dollars. The girls and I could upgrade our phone plan to unlimited data. Or we could reinvest the profits.
The morels were a lucky find, but they’re going to run out. I want to cultivate them. You have to capture the spores in a slurry-which sounds foul and probably smells rancid-and then after you seed the right area, it takes a couple years for the mycelium to form, but then you’re golden. A cash crop with minimal upkeep. What else am I doing with my life? Beats the hell out of bees. The competition with honey is getting too fierce.
Suddenly, there’s a tan work boot in my path.
I dash left, quickly skirting the leg. While I was passing, Alfie stretched into the aisle with no warning. Inconsiderate dick. It was a close call.
What was I thinking about?
Mushrooms.
With the whole farm-to-table, slow food, locavore movements, there’s a growing market. I wish I could brand them as Quarry Pack morels. Shifters still have a mystique, even if it’s faded since the packs came out in the 50s. We get the occasional fanatic trying to sneak onto our territory, and Chapel Bell, the nearest town, has made a cottage industry out of wolf tchotchkes and New Age “moon power” crap-crystals and dream catchers and essential oils and tarot cards.
Why shouldn’t we cash in, too?
The elders go on and on about the dignity of the beast and pack pride and the mandate of destiny, but at the end of the day, the pack pays its bills by charging humans and rich shifters to watch our males maul each other and bet on the outcome. Dignity my ass.
The uptight elders don’t want females making our own money because then we’d have options, and they’d have less control. It’s about status. At the end of the day, everything in pack life is about status.
There are plenty of elders who see things differently, though. Nuala trades me berries from her garden for chocolate and liqueur from town-and I know she turns around and trades them to her friends for twice as much.
I’m feeling kind of cranky, so when I get back to the kitchen, I take a bathroom and phone break before I go back out with A-roster’s dinner. The great room is ringing with talk and laughter, and it feels normal. Everyone is shoveling food into their mouths except A-roster. As I pick my way to the front of the room, I’m very careful not to smirk.
When I approach the table, Haisley stands and glares at me with her arms folded. I figured she’d say something.
My wolf instinctively shrinks, but she doesn’t show her neck. That’s weird. I’d prepared myself for that. We did get owned. By all rights, my wolf should be sniffing Haisley’s butt, but she’s managed to hold onto a few scraps of pride. Good girl.
As for Haisley, I ignore her. I expect her to give me shit. That’s part and parcel of losing a challenge. You get to eat dirt until there’s a new loser.
As I start passing out dishes, she lifts her chin and gives me her back. That’s cool. Better than I expected, actually. I figured she’d run her mouth-take a few pot shots at my leg or how small my wolf is-but I guess I’m supposed to feel bad because I’m not even worth hassling.
Sweet.
I set the vegetables in front of Finn, and then I limp down to the other end of the table to unload the meat as far from him as possible. Haisley saunters past me, pats my shoulder, and struts over to the dais.
She pauses, smirking at me, making damn sure she has my attention, and then she licks her glossy lips. My wolf alerts, rigid from tail to ears, teeth bared. She’s indignant, but for some reason, she’s not trying to take our skin. I reach out to test the edges of my control, and they’re solid.
The place where the mate bond used to be is raw-like the pink flesh after the scab falls off a skinned knee-but it doesn’t throb or hurt or react at all.
Haisley props a high-heeled black leather boot on the single shallow step leading to Killian. She makes the pose work. Her apple bottom gets a lift, and so do her perky boobs. She tosses her loose blonde curls. It’s like a 90s music video to the soundtrack of shifters snarfing down brisket and talking with their mouths full.
I set the last dish on the table, intent on heading back to the kitchen, but my wolf can’t tear her eyes away. And I guess I can’t either. There’s a sinking sensation in my stomach. My wolf whimpers. There’s nothing we can do but watch.
Haisley says something to Killian. He’s still in a t?te-?-t?te with Ivo, but he doesn’t wave her away. She approaches him. He glances up and offers her his usual tight smile, not much more than a softening of the lips.