Filed To Story: Alpha's Regret: His Wrongful Rejection
“Good girl,” he says like an afterthought when he sees I haven’t moved. He scoops me up, slips the sling over his head, and resettles me against his chest. My heart rate slows.
He takes off again, running alongside the road. He puts a good three or four miles between us and the gas station before he stops, picking his way up a steep bank and down into a wooded gulch before he collapses to his butt and rests his back against a thick oak.
He tips his head and stares at the sky for a minute before he unties the sling from around his neck and sets me on the ground between his bent legs.
My wolf wriggles loose from the fabric and stretches her forelegs, arching her spine until it cracks and thrusting her rump in the air. She wags her tail a few times to get the kinks out before she settles on her butt, propping her paws on Darragh’s thigh. She gazes up at him expectantly.
His grim mouth tilts up at the corners. “Hungry?”
She yips.
I didn’t even realize our stomach was growling, but now that I’m tuning in, I hear her belly gurgling and smell the meat in his pants. My wolf noses the bulge. He chuckles, gruff and creaky.
“Water first.” He takes out a bottle and pours it carefully into her mouth as my wolf laps it up. It’s cold and so freaking good. Her tail whaps the hard earth. When she’s had enough, he finishes it off and digs a bag of sausage sticks out of his pocket. The preservatives stink, but I can ignore it. I’m starving.
He opens the bag and before he can hold up a stick, my wolf snatches it from his fingers. Darragh barks a laugh. It’s a rusty sound.
“How about you help yourself?” he says and peels the plastic open, laying it in front of me like a plate. My wolf goes to town.
He focuses on the phone, puzzling out the directions, fiddling with the buttons. He doesn’t seem very familiar with how it works.
I could help, but I’d need my human skin, and nothing inside me wants to shift back yet. I feel safer with claws and fangs, even if I’m smaller in my fur.
And it’s easier like this—with Darragh. I don’t want to think about what we did, about the bite mark still throbbing on my neck. I need the comfort of not dealing with it. It’s become crystal clear to me that I am very good at blocking stuff out. I always thought it was a personal strength. Maybe my only one.
Is it?
I don’t want to search my soul as I snarf down meat bites on the run in the middle of nowhere, bone weary and beaten up, fur matted into knots with dried blood.
But it isn’t strength to close your eyes and plug your ears, is it?
My wolf turns away from the remaining sausages and tucks her snout to her chest. Darragh reaches past me and snags a bite as he mutters under his breath, “Left soft key press to access notifications.”
He’s baffled.
I can help, but I’m scared. I don’t want to be naked in front of him again. Like when we did—what we did in that box.
“Your phone already has a Nano SIM card installed,” he reads. “Okay. That’s good. What do I do with the SIM card?”
He’s lost.
Oh, I don’t want to do this. I stagger to my four feet. Darragh idly trails his fingers down my spine. My wolf shakes out her fur, wanders a few feet away, and I try to summon the energy to shift, but my every atom is wrung out.
In the end, I kind of ask my wolf to hand over our skin, and she’s so exhausted, she sort of drops it like a heavy laundry basket on a bed.
For a few moments, I crouch, huddled to the ground, pressing my breasts to my knees, as all the aches and pains that were stifled in my wolf form reemerge. There are angry red burns along my sides. My shoulder sockets are sore.
My pussy is, too.
And there’s a raw, aching bite mark in the crook of my neck. My fingers fly to it, stopping at the last second to hover over the broken flesh. Darragh tracks the movement, a light sparking in his drained eyes. The wound is giving off heat.
It’s a different pain than the taser burns or my wrenched shoulders. I want to be careful with this wound. I want a mirror so I can see what it looks like.
“I’m sorry,” Darragh mutters. His neck bends.
An awful feeling blooms in my chest. Is he sorry because he wishes he hadn’t done it? Because he doesn’t want me, and now he’s stuck?
“No, no.” Darragh raises his head immediately. “I’m not sorry, but it hurt, and I don’t want to hurt you. Fuck, Mari.” He drives his fingers into his matted hair. “I’m not sorry, okay?” He catches my gaze, and he won’t let go. The gold rings around his irises are back and bright.
“You’re not?” I lower myself so that I’m sitting on my heels. I hug my arms around my breasts.
“No. I’m sorry I hurt you. Not sorry about anything else.” His jaw clenches, and for a few seconds, his temple tics. “I told you that I’m not good at talking.”
I remember. He said that he didn’t know how to talk to me that day behind the kitchen when he gave me the pheasant. Was that only a couple of days ago? It feels like a hundred years.
“I guess I’m not that good at it either,” I say grudgingly. I sigh. “I know phones, though.” I hold my hand out.
“Yeah?” Some of the strain eases from around his eyes. He hands me the phone and tries to pass me the instruction booklet.
“I don’t need that.” This is the same brand Una used to buy us before she mated Killian and got us all on the pack’s plan. I get it ready to go in no time. It actually has a twelve percent charge.
I pass it back to Darragh. He stares at it. He’s got to know how to use a phone.
He glances up at me ruefully. “Do you know anyone’s number?”
Well.
Shit.
I rack my brains. For several long moments, I draw a complete blank, but then I remember. “Yes! I know the commissary number!”
It’s so random, but when I was younger, after my mom died, I lived with Cheryl, our old alpha female, for a while. She would hang out at the commissary and have me call down when her mate got home so she could act like she’d just ducked out and hadn’t been gone all day, leaving me to watch the pups.
I rattle off the number. Darragh dials. He has a quick, clipped conversation, and the word GPS comes up, and I have to show him how to pull it up.
Everything seems to happen at double speed after that. Darragh helps me into the bloody jacket he’d used as a sling. It smells like deodorant and fear, but at least it comes down well past my thighs. We continue making our way southeast as the sun clears the horizon, slower now since I’m hoofing it on two exhausted legs. We’re careful to stay far enough from the road that we can’t be seen, but close enough that we don’t lose it.
We see vehicles from a distance. Once, an eighteen-wheeler passes. The site of the container on its bed sends my heart galloping. Darragh slips closer to my side and brushes my hand with his.
“You’re safe,” he says. “I killed most of them. I’ll find the rest and finish them. After you’re home.” It isn’t bragging or even reassurance. He’s telling me the facts.
A little past noon, we find a stream with a steep bank about a quarter mile from the road. There’s a rocky outcropping with tall pines growing above, and we rest for a while, away from the sun, and finish a second bag of sausages and a last bottle of water.
I drowse afterwards, propped upright, but as my head nods and my arms go slack, Darragh reaches for me, tucking me against his side. I drift off into a dreamless sleep, and when I wake up, I feel clammy and dirty and achy and stiff. I peel myself off Darragh’s chest and stretch my legs. His eyes are closed, but there’s a rumble in his throat. The wolf is awake.
I crawl out of the overhang to stand by the stream. I want my own clothes. My bathtub. My bed. I want Una and Kennedy and Annie.
I have to pee, and my downtown is raw and ouchy from—
I don’t let my mind swerve. I make myself think the thought—from mating with Darragh. Taking his knot. His seed. Cum. Whatever. All the words are embarrassing. Whatever you call it, some of it is still dried on my inner thighs, and my heat has broken.
Last time, after that horrible debacle in the guest cabin, there were days of discomfort, an itchy, crawly irritation that wouldn’t have been bearable if I hadn’t been numbed by the wound in my side and the crush of rejection.
There’s no discomfort now, at least not that kind. Does that mean I’m knocked up? That’s how it goes, right? A knot, a bite, a baby.
I reach down and slip my fingers under the jacket to prod the padding that rounds my lower belly. Obviously, there’d be no change yet. I try to focus inside myself. I can’t sense anything other than my wolf, who’s conked out in a corner on her back with her legs sprawled.
There’s a crunch behind me. I don’t startle. It’s Darragh’s foot on the pebbled bank. Now that I’m aware of the bond, he’s becoming something like an appendage—a floating one, but still. I’m aware of him in space, and when he responds to something I thought but didn’t say, it’s not fazing me.
I shiver. This is the opposite of alone, and so much more dangerous.
I wrap my arms around myself and try to sweep the worry away. We have enough to deal with, here and now.
Darragh comes to stand by my side. We both watch the current swirl small yellow leaves downstream. After several long moments, he clears his throat. “You’re scared,” he says.
I lift a shoulder.
“We lost them. Hours ago. I’d hear them if they were anywhere close. Smell them.”
I nod and keep on following the leaves caught in a shallow eddy. New ones keep getting trapped and bumping others free.
“My, uh, wolf—he has a very good sense of hearing and smell.”
I make myself smile, acknowledge the reassurance.