Filed To Story: Alpha's Regret: His Wrongful Rejection
“I’ll let Dermot take a few males with him.”
“Not too many.”
Killian nods, humoring me. “Of course.”
I sigh again. “I better get the chains.”
I give the bog worm one last prod just to see it jiggle, and then I head to the structure I’m building in the elms on the northern edge of the clearing. I haul myself up the rope ladder to the first platform, hand over hand.
Life was easier when I lived in the old shelter, everything in one place, on one level, but I needed the space for the planer and the lathe and the other machines I bought to do the woodworking. I also sleep better up high— when I sleep—knowing my wolf would probably break its legs if it took our skin in the night and leapt to the ground. And, most importantly, if she gets it in her head to come up here again, she won’t be able to catch us unaware.
I climb the floating staircase to the platform where I store my shit, rummage in a box, and take out a length of chain, a collar, and a padlock. I toss them over the railing, and I guess I should’ve looked first, because there’s a thunk and a yelp.
I poke my head over the side. The kid is hopping on one leg, holding his foot.
“Sorry about that,” I call down.
He squints up. “It’s cool, man.” He walks it off, hissing when he puts his weight down. “Can I ask you something though?”
I grunt.
“Why are you building a treehouse?”
I hear the unspoken part. What’s up with the gingerbread trim and red shutters and shit? It’s a fair question. I’m not a fucking garden gnome.
“Shits and giggles,” I say. The kid doesn’t have the balls to ask a follow-up question.
I lower myself back down the ladder and drop the ten feet between the bottom and the ground. It took experimentation to come up with the exact height and ladder design to prevent my wolf from getting a foothold, but I came up with the right specs eventually.
While I was occupied, Killian stripped naked, and now he’s rolling his shoulders, stretching out his triceps. I join him in the dead center of the clearing, drop my pants, and tighten the collar around my neck until the buckle bites into my skin. The kid turns a little green around the gills.
“We’re just sparring, right, Alpha?” he asks Killian as he kicks off his trainers.
I hook the chain to the metal loop in the collar and padlock the other end to the ring in a twelve-foot steel post I buried ten feet deep. After what I did to her, I slept chained for years until I was sure I wasn’t going to shift in the middle of the night.
“Yeah, that’s the idea,” Killian says, lifting himself up onto the high branch of a black walnut tree. He sits there bare-assed, swinging his legs like a pup. He’s expecting a good show.
“Your wolf knows we’re just sparring, right?” the kid asks me as he squares up.
“Not at all.” My wolf wants to kill everyone. He has no concept of “sparring.”
The kid grins like I made a joke. When I don’t blink, it fades into a look of dawning horror. He flicks a glance up at Killian in the tree. “Why do I have to do this, Alpha?”
“Because you’ve got the yips. That’s why you can’t win a reconciliation match. You know the best thing to do for the yips?”
The kid shakes his head as he gets into his fighting stance.
“You scare ’em away. Like hiccups.” Killian gives me the nod.
I focus on the tight hold I keep on the wolf every second of every minute of every hour of every day, and like Atlas when he handed over the world, I exhale in profound relief as I release the reins. Always ready, the mad wolf inside me launches himself into the world. He bursts through my bones and muscle in an explosion of blood and fur.
The second before I recede entirely, Killian calls down from his branch, smug, eyes sparkling, “Can you smell Mari on the kid? I can. I can smell her all over him.”
My roar is submerged in my wolf’s.
The kid’s scream hovers in the air as his wolf takes his skin and immediately turns tail.
My wolf is quicker. He slams into the smaller wolf’s side, sending him cartwheeling across the clearing. The end of the chain jerks my wolf short, so he leaps and snarls, snapping at the air. The kid’s wolf wisely stays outside the radius of the chain, whining, head bowed. A bared neck does nothing to appease my wolf. To him, it’s an instigation.
She bared her neck that night. Not intentionally. I’d touched one of her curls, and I guess I’d tugged her head to the side. My wolf saw the pale skin, the pulse flickering under her ear, and he wanted to rip out her throat. He threw the image into my mind, rendered in perfect detail complete with the scent of copper and the sound of blood gushing from a gaping wound.
My wolf rages at the evening sky, fighting to get free, to kill the defenseless wolf trembling yards from us, lowering his chest to the ground in a hopeless bid to appease it.
“Come on! Get back in there.” Killian chucks a black walnut at the kid’s wolf. “He’s chained up for fuck’s sake.”
The kid’s wolf scoots backward in the dirt.
My wolf lunges for him, choking himself off with the collar. The force of each leap causes the chain to swing him backward through the air. He slams into the ground and bounds back onto his feet, over and over, because my wolf is unrelenting. He’s a curse.
If the kid’s wolf comes within range, he doesn’t have a chance in hell. I reach out to see if there’s a possibility of taking our skin back, but there’s no handhold, no crack. My wolf won’t be satisfied until he bathes in blood.
There’s nothing I can do but wait for an opening.
Killian leaps down from the tree. “Come on. Where are your balls?” He nudges the kid’s rump with his foot. The kid’s wolf flattens himself even closer to the ground.
Killian sighs and a wicked grin breaks across his face. He strides to the exact point in space where the chain jerks my wolf back and stares unblinking into his slavering, snapping fangs.
He ignores my wolf’s mad howls, speaking low and clear. “I bet you hate that this kid gets to hang out with your mate every day, talking with her, laughing with her.
Smelling her. I bet it fucking kills you. And I bet this wolf here doesn’t care about anything but ripping the kid’s throat out. And you know what else I bet?”
Killian’s smirk widens and his eyes gleam. “I bet if you killed this kid, little Mari would cry. So I bet when I set you free—I bet that you’re not gonna kill him. What do you think?”
I roar, but it’s nothing against my wolf’s raging howls.
“Let’s find out, shall we?” Killian winks and feints left in human form. My wolf lunges. Killian flipshifts and darts past him, shifting again, and with a shout, rips the post from the ground and hoists it like a javelin across the clearing. My wolf is flung through the air behind it, dragged by the collar, and slams into the ground, tangled in the chain.
Killian bounds for his tree and scrambles back up to perch on his branch.
As my wolf struggles to free himself from the snarled chain, I fight him, haul back on the reins, but there are no reins, not when he’s wearing our skin. There’s only his will versus mine, and he’s subject to no constraint, no compunction, no qualms.
He wants to hack the small, quivering male wolf huddled in terror across the yard into pieces. He wants to tear down the world. Break everything breakable. Rip the civilized veil off the world until it’s as blood-soaked and chaotic as it really is, underneath.
Mari will cry.
It isn’t a plea. I’m not trying to reason with him. I gave up on that decades ago. It’s a passing thought. Nothing more.
But, for the first time since he was dragged out of me at age nine, he doesn’t launch himself into action. He kicks the last loop of chain from his foreleg. He’s free, but he doesn’t race for the kid’s wolf. He stalks toward him, unhurried, until he’s looming above the quaking mound of fur.
My wolf sniffs at the piss-scented ball. The fear is as thick as soup, and for a second, I can feel the rage threaten to overtake him again, but for the first time, he shakes himself off.
What is he thinking?
I can’t tell. I’ve never been able to.
He snaps his teeth one last time at the kid, and as if he’s lost interest, he strolls away, plops his ass down, and thwaps his tail against the ground. I don’t waste a second seizing our skin. He doesn’t fight me.
I hop to my feet, striding towards Killian, adrenaline pumping.
“Come down here so I can beat your ass,” I holler up at him. His expression is stuck between smug and boggled.
“I told you,” he says as he swings himself down.
“You couldn’t have known.” My blood is roaring in my ears.
He barks a laugh. “To be honest, I didn’t, but I figured the odds were better than even.”
The kid has taken his skin back, and he’s rising on wobbling legs, pale as a ghost.
“I could’ve killed him.” I slam Killian in the shoulder with an open palm. He shoves me back. Our eyes meet, and there’s a second when we decide whether we want to keep it going while our wolves posture by rattling our chests, but I guess neither of us are that invested.
We turn away from each other. I walk it off, hands on my hips, while Killian snags the kid around the neck and ruffles his hair. Lucan tries to yank himself loose to no avail.
“You almost got me killed,” he says, incredulous.