Filed To Story: Alpha's Regret: His Wrongful Rejection
“I’m not trying to brag or anything.” He sighs and frowns. “It’s just how he is.”
“I know. I can’t hear them either.” He seems so unhappy that I tack on, “My wolf doesn’t have super hearing or super smell or anything,” just to keep this strange conversation going.
“She’s a good wolf,” he says. In her defense?
My mouth curves, genuine this time. “Yeah, she’s all right.”
“She took that guy’s throat out in one bite. I wouldn’t have thought her jaw could open that wide.” His gruff admiration rings with sincerity.
My cheeks warm, and I shift on my cold, aching, bare feet. “Thanks. Your wolf was pretty badass, too.”
“Sorry about the whole thing with the, uh, skull,” he says, directing the apology to the ground.
I sneak peeks at him out of the corner of my eye. He’s filthy, bruised and beaten, covered in dried blood, his faint silver scars impossible to make out under the grime. He looks like a hardened warrior returned from the war, and also, at the same time, shy as hell with his head bent, darting glances at me from under his thick lashes.
He’s my mate.
Maybe. If he doesn’t bail again.
“I didn’t mind,” I say before that thought can get too far. “That guy had it coming. At least it wasn’t my head.” I try to laugh, but it comes out rickety and weak.
“My wolf—he was cool with your wolf.” He sounds as surprised as I was at the time.
“You didn’t know he would be?” I blink.
He jerks his head no.
“So he could have gone for me?”
The answer is yes—it must be—but Darragh raises his head and gazes into the middle distance, the furrow returning with a vengeance to his brow. “I wouldn’t have let him.”
“Would you have been able to stop him?”
The question’s rhetorical, but he looks down, scanning my face, cataloging my eyes, my tangled curls, my flushing cheeks, my tongue licking my suddenly dry lips.
“Yes,” he says, as if he’s discovering the fact in this moment. Maybe he is.
Something about that quiet, certain “yes” undoes a knot in my throat.
“What if I’m pregnant?” I ask, my voice a whisper, and I don’t know exactly what I’m asking, but everything is surreal and heavy and nothing is firm under my feet.
His gaze falls to my belly, his whole body tensing. His wolf rumbles.
“I won’t let anything hurt him,” he says. He thinks a second and the crease between his eyes deepens. “Or her.”
It’s not quite an answer, not a reassurance. It sure as shit isn’t a plan or a commitment or a promise that everything is going to be okay.
But I think it’s what he can give me right now. I think survival is the only thing on his mind, and that makes sense. We just barely escaped with our lives.
It strikes me as he touches me on the small of my back to guide me across the stream, and we begin the hike back to the road—we are vastly different people who lived through very different times. He was almost grown before I was even born. For years, I’ve hated him for doing something that even if I knew why he did it, I might not understand.
As we make our way back to the road, and he pushes aside the brambles for me, just like he did when he led me back to camp after my ill-advised unannounced visit when we first recognized each other, a question sifts up from the muddle in my mind. “Why were you always bringing me meat? ‘Cause you had to?”
He squints at me over his shoulder. “‘Cause I had to?” His jaw tightens. “Killian kept you fed.” An ominous note enters his voice. “Didn’t he?”
“Yeah. Of course.”
He plows forward like he answered me, but he didn’t. Too bad for him, the female who would’ve accepted the dodge, the brush off, she’s gone. She got left in a container box. “So why, then? Why bring me meat if you knew I was fed? Guilt?”
He braces himself midway up a slick, muddy slope and offers me his hand. I take it. As he hauls me up, he says, “At first. Yeah. That was part of it. Then—I thought maybe you’d say something to me about it.” He shrugs like it’s nothing, but dark slashes appear on his cheekbones.
“Something like what?”
“I didn’t care. Anything.”
“Why didn’t you give it straight to me, then? Like the pheasant.”
“What if you were afraid of me?”
“That would’ve been so bad?” We’re wolves. Our lives are ruled by who we fear, who we protect, and who will protect us.
“Yeah.” He doesn’t say anything else, but as we come to the low brush along the road, he falls back to walk beside me, adjusting his stride to match mine.
I don’t know what to feel. My emotions are shorted, as muddled as my ability to think more than a step ahead. I’m so tired that I’m past tired. I’m in that place where my body and mind are only keeping on out of inertia.
Darragh walks beside me, and in a way—for the first time since my mother died, and I got thrown to the mercy of the pack—I feel safe.
And in another way—as his hands brush mine, and maybe a new life multiplies cell by cell inside me, and our bond flows, growing stronger every minute—I feel like I’ve never been so uncertain with so much to lose.
* * *
By the time dusk falls and Darragh hides me in a tunnel that runs under the road while he stands in the open, waiting for Killian, I’m not feeling anything except pain and exhaustion.
They come in three trucks, armed to the teeth. All the A-roster males are present—Ivo, Tye, Dermot. Several others. Darragh fetches me, carrying me up the incline to the road in his arms like a baby. I don’t argue. I couldn’t if I wanted to. My teeth are clattering too hard. He tucks me into a backseat, covers me in one of those aluminum foil blankets, and slides in beside me.
As soon as we start moving, I pass out. By the time I wake up, we’re back on pack land. I’ve never been so happy to see Salt Mountain in the distance until I remember the men tracking us with dogs.
Darragh, who had been resting his temple on the windowpane, blinks over at me with a frown. I can feel his concern through the bond. Could he feel my anxiety?
“Some of them got away,” I say to him under my breath. Killian and Tye are up front with the radio on.
“I’ll go after them soon.” His frown deepens as he examines me. “When you’ve been looked at.”
My heart lurches. “I don’t want you to go.”
He doesn’t have the chance to answer me. The truck skitters to a halt in the commons, and we’re surrounded by a crowd of elders and males. Mated females hang back, concern etched on their faces. I wouldn’t have thought my disappearance would have caused this kind of outpouring, but they did take Darragh, too, and they’re a clear threat to the pack. The females must be worried for their pups.
Someone opens the door and reaches in a hand to help me out. Darragh snarls. The helping hand disappears.
Darragh gets out, stalks around the bed, packmates backing out of his way like water flowing around a rock, and lifts me out.
“I can walk,” I hiss at him.
“I know,” he answers, and he carries me across the lawn to the infirmary. Cheryl is there. She holds the door and gestures for him to lay me in a bed. A bottle of water is pressed into my hand. I guzzle it down, and as soon as I finish it, I’m given another. I’ve never tasted anything so sweet.
And then Una is there, shuffling into the room, and Kennedy and Annie are on her heels.
Una has tears in her eyes. She rushes to my side and lays her palm on my forehead like she’s checking for a fever, and she must realize that’s silly, because she smooths her hand up to brush my dirt and blood-crusted curls off my face.
Kennedy coughs from the foot of the bed. “Hot date?” she asks, her lip quirking, bruises under her eyes from worry.
“I kind of got carried away,” I say. My throat is raw, and my voice comes out husky.
“We chased you. The van—it all happened so fast.” Kennedy’s face is stone hard. She’s mad at herself.
“None of us saw it coming,” I say. Kennedy’s expression doesn’t change. She’s not going to stop beating herself up because I say so. She’s the most stubborn person I know.
“I’m sorry, Mare,” she says, low, back and shoulders as stiff as a soldier.
“I love you, Ken.” I give her a smile. She goes red, and her lips spear down as her chin hikes up. I love embarrassing her in public.
“That’s enough for now,” Una says, rolling over a tray of bandages and bottles. She replaces Kennedy at my side and tends to my wounds, treating my burns with a salve and wrapping them in gauze. She frowns at my claiming bite. I automatically protect it, tucking my head and lifting my shoulder to my ear. She goes back to fussing with my scrapes and cuts.
She’s cleaning up her supplies when Old Noreen bustles in with a tray of her own, and she shoos everyone away until I have a cup of hot tea at hand and a wet rag on my forehead. She settles herself in the chair beside the bed, takes out her knitting, and glares at anyone she thinks is speaking too loudly.