Filed To Story: Alpha's Regret: His Wrongful Rejection
He doesn’t move. He lets his arms hang at his sides. The only sign of what we were just doing is his rapid breathing and his wolf’s bass rumble.
“I’m not presenting in a storage closet.”
“I would not expect you to.” The Cadoc Collins who kissed me is gone. The uptight alpha heir is back.
“Kind of sounded like you did.”
He steps away, pivoting to face the wall hung with rackets and various sticks. “Calm down. We need to be able to discuss your heat rationally.”
I scoot to the edge of the mats as far from him as I can get and hop down. It has never been more apparent than in this moment how nobs and scavengers inhabit totally different planes of existence. It’s like he’s a hologram in my world. He seems to be there, but he’s not.
He’s negotiating a sexcapade. I’m falling to my doom.
It’s no use in bothering to explain it—it never is—but maybe I’m looking for something to give myself another minute before I have to walk out and face the pack again, so just this once, I try.
“This isn’t calm and rational for me. It’s dangerous and humiliating.” My eyes well, and it’s stupid—nobs can’t hear you—but I keep going. “However this goes, you’ll be fine, and I’ll be screwed.”
He half-clenches his hands into fists, the veins in his arms rising. “I won’t let anything bad happen.”
“You can’t stop it.” Isn’t that obvious from what just went down?
A growl rattles his ribcage. “I will find out who touched you. They won’t ever again.”
“It doesn’t matter. It’ll be different folks next time, and it won’t stop.”
“You’re wrong.” His voice is utterly confident, but he won’t meet my gaze. “And regardless of what you want, or your concerns—” He says ‘concerns’ like it’s code, but I don’t know for what. “—the heat will win out. Or the rut will.”
I shudder. Letting it go to rut would be worse. Sometimes females get hurt. Sometimes so badly they aren’t ever the same again.
“I don’t mean to scare you, Rosie. I want you to face facts.”
‘Face facts’ is a human saying. It means accepting another person’s point of view as true. I know that’s what he wants. That’s how this whole pack works—you have to believe what you’re told, believe that the way the nobs see things is reality. It is easier to get along that way, and impossible to survive if you don’t.
He is half-right. Heat is inevitable, but I’m not all the way gone to it yet.
I kick off my floppy sandal to carry it so it doesn’t trip me as I walk out.
And I don’t know why, but as I pass Cadoc, I answer the question he asked before the kiss, when he first touched me. My voice is low because it feels like a secret. “Just so you know, I didn’t let you touch me because of the heat. I liked it. It felt good.”
There’s a beat, and then the bond yanks in my chest. I’m so surprised that I stop. Cadoc strides past me to open the door.
“Are you going to tell me who messed with you?” He bends to pick up the gym uniform someone left folded on the ground and hands me the shorts. Thankfully, there’s no one in sight.
“No.”
“I’ll find out.”
I toss a shoulder. I quickly pull the shorts on, the elastic snapping around my waist.
“You aren’t very submissive for a wolf of your rank,” he says while he digs out his phone and starts tapping.
I always thought I was, especially compared to Bevan and Nia. Maybe I’m just mellow. I shrug.
“Can I go now?”
“Wait for Derwyn.”
I said it to be sassy, but damn if he didn’t hear it as a sincere request.
We stand beside each other for a minute, Cadoc on his phone, me staring at the pebble marks on my knees. Finally, Derwyn shows, and I move to go.
Cadoc grabs my wrist. As soon as I stop, he drops it. He swallows before he speaks. “I wasn’t suggesting we build our nest in the equipment room.”
He holds me there with the force of his gaze until I give a little duck of my head.
Then I book it for the bathroom by the library. Nia’s got to be there by now. Derwyn trails me, and he’s not leaving as much space as before. It smells like I’m being stalked by a rotting log. I can handle it. Cadoc’s scent is wafting from his shirt and caught in my hair.
As I hustle down the path, it’s not the incident in the locker room or even the ill-advised make out session that repeats in my head. It’s that word “our.”
“Our nest.”
It haunts me like a threat. Like the kind of fever dream that leaves you crying in the morning.
Chapter 5
5
CADOC
In my dreams, my wolf is gnawing his way out of my skin. I wake up to the fourth morning of Derwyn throwing rocks at me. My jacket’s frozen to the rusty siding of Rosie’s trailer and my left foot is dangling in the ice-cold marsh water, the shoe soaked.
Eyes still crusted shut with sleep or frost or both, I catch a pebble mid-air and pitch it back at Derwyn. There’s a satisfying whine when it hits him.
“You told me to wake you up at five,” he says.
“Lower your voice.”
I blink and squint. The sun hasn’t even cleared the foothills. Derwyn is poking his head around the corner of the trailer. Rosie’s still asleep. When she’s knocked out, the bond is a steady hum. I can almost ignore it.
I swing upright, and draw my legs up to the ledge. Every joint cracks. There’s a crick in my neck. I can’t feel my feet.
“It’s five,” Derwyn whispers at the top of his lungs.
I fumble for a pebble that missed me, and even though my fingers are numb, I manage to wing him in the shoulder.
“I’ll just wait out front then,” he says.
I lean back against the thin metal, dusting the cobwebs out of my brain, listening to Rosie breathe.
What the fuck am I going to do?
She isn’t what I thought she’d be. I mean, I’d never considered the possibility of a scavenger as a mate, but if I ever had, I’d never in a million years have imagined her.
She’s not submissive, but she’s not dominant. I don’t know what the fuck she is except really unimpressed by me. She did like it when I kissed her, though. When I touched her. She was interested then. She looked at me.
Somehow, my dick is now frozen and hard at the same time.
I leap to my feet and stamp them a few times to get the blood flowing.
Maybe I want her to wake up. Feel the bond come alive and sing. What is it she said that the scavengers call it? Yanking the leash?
But she’s out for the count. It’s better that way. Her heat has to be cresting soon, but I need to be elsewhere. An imperative is solidifying in my brain as the sleep clears.
My wolf is silent and distant as always, but the dream is vivid. Visceral. The fangs slicing through my chest wall. The snarl barreling forth from a gaping wound.
It’s all clear as day.
I have to learn how to flip-shift.
I can train for the rest of my life—become the fastest, strongest, most disciplined. It doesn’t matter as long as Alban Hughes can flip-shift once. I’ve been wasting my time honing my skills for a fight that’ll never happen. When Uncle Alban comes for me, he’ll depend on his only advantage. If I can’t flip-shift, I lose. Period.
No one raised in Moon Lake Pack has ever learned to flip-shift.
But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.