Filed to story: Alpha's Regret: His Wrongful Rejection
She let me mount her even though she didn’t want me. I touched her, and the whole time, she hated it. Hated me.
I’m going to puke.
I take a step back. She whimpers.
Every move I make is a threat. I’ve done nothing to hurt her, nothing that I didn’t have to do, and she looks at me with horror in her eyes.
Everything I never dared to dream of until a few weeks ago—running with my own female under a full moon, cuddling our pups in our warm nest, a family, a real home—it will never happen. She doesn’t want me. This scrawny, cowardly female thinks I’m not good enough.
“Tell me why,” I growl, my voice deeper than it was even minutes ago. I sound like my sire. I haven’t heard his voice in years, but here it is, coming from my mouth.
My mate’s wolf cringes, her thin legs shaking. She tucks her chin. She’s not going to shift and answer me. I’m not even worth her breath.
A spiteful rage rises in me like dust in a whipping wind, burning my eyes. What did I do to deserve this? To be left alone, over and over again?
“You’ve got nothing to say for yourself, do you? What a sad female you are. I don’t want such a pathetic coward for a mate. What would my pack say if I brought you back?” My forced laugh scrapes my throat. “You smell more like food than female. You stink like prey.”
I glare at the small, huddled ball, willing her to show a spark of life, to care, but all she does is quiver. She is food. She’s a cowering mound of jelly.
I scoff at her, that gritty, dusty rage egging me on, drowning out my wolf. He’s whining, urging me to calm her. He doesn’t understand. She’s turned the best moment of our life into something ugly and shameful. She rejected us. She’s made us into the kind of foul, craven male who fucks unwilling females. She’s trampled everything we’ve ever wanted under her foot. She’s ruined our life.
I take a purposeful step toward her. She whines in fear, and I am glad.
“I will pray to Fate that I did not get a whelp on you.” I sneer down at her. “A female like you would make weak, spindly young.”
I stand over her. I want to pick her up and shake her. I want to give her something to be afraid of.
But I don’t. My righteous rage deserts me in a sudden rush, and all I feel is cold and lost and far from home.
I square my shoulders, turn my back, and walk away.
With no pride.
No consolation.
And no mate.
3
ANNIE, AGE EIGHTEEN
As soon as our mate is far enough away that my wolf feels that she has a good head start to escape him if he changes his mind, she tears off in the opposite direction. She runs as far and as fast as she can, racing along the river until she can’t stand the exposure anymore, and then she crosses into the woods, barreling through the undergrowth.
When her thin legs give out, she hides. Somehow, she finds her way to the blackberry bramble where we used to hide. She wriggles through the stickers, eyes squeezed shut, oblivious to the thorns scraping through her fur.
She knows he didn’t follow us, but it doesn’t matter. His words hurt, sharp as knives, and she might not quite understand them, but she knows she’s been attacked, so she reacts accordingly.
When she’s as deep in the thicket as she can get, she twists until she’s facing the trail we blazed and primes herself to fight.
If he comes back, you won’t have a chance against him.
The voice and I are stuck inside my wolf together now in this strange nowhere place. The thicket is close and dark and barbed,sticky with the sweetness of overripe berries rotting in the black soil. Its words ricochet, amplified, booming like proclamations.
But he doesn’t want you. He hates you. Did you see his face? You disgust him.
I saw his face—it’s burned into my mind—and I can also feel his disgust, flowing through the bond. Horror. Loathing. Revulsion.
I can’t breathe. My wolf is gasping, but there’s no air in here.
He probably wants you dead. He’s coming back to kill you. You need to run.
He’s not coming back. I can feel him getting farther and farther away, and it’s a relief—it is
—or it would be, if I could breathe, but I can’t.
Can you suffocate inside your wolf? What happens then? Does your wolf run around with the spirit of your decomposing body inside them? Would that smell better or worse than my constant, unrelenting stench of fear?
My wolf bares her teeth, raising up on her haunches so that she can better launch herself against whatever’s threatening us, but like always, it’s me, my thoughts, my utter inability to defend myself.
I let him touch me. Itold him to do it.
I can’t think about it. It didn’t happen. It will be another bad dream.
Ican breathe. Iam breathing, even if it doesn’t feel like it. I’m inflating my lungs, and if I’m really not, if I’m dying, then what will it matter if I’m lying to myself once I’m dead?
“You’re not dying,” a familiar, raspy voice calls into the bramble.
My wolf scuttles backward, snagging herself on a tangle of prickers. She whines.
“I mean, we’re all dying, in a sense, but you’re not dying right now. Probably. The odds are against it.” Abertha clears her throat. “Well, it would be really ironic if you were dying.” She’s quiet for a moment. “Or would that be a coincidence? I can never remember the difference.”
My wolf plasters herself to the ground, trembling. For once, the voice in my head has nothing to say. She recognizes the witch as a greater power.
“Is this going to be a long one?” Abertha waits for a response, but my throat is swollen shut, and so is my wolf’s. “Okay, I’ll assume that’s a ‘yes.’ I’m just going to have a seat on this handy fold-em-up stool then.” There’s a scuffling sound and a long sigh. “Take your time, Annie-girl,” she says and then mutters, “Goodness gracious, my dogs were barking.”
The first jab of shame pierces my panic.
What a sad female you are. I don’t want such a pathetic coward for a mate.
I don’t want to be cringing in a bramble yet again with no choice but to wait it out and feel lower than dirt afterward. I don’t want to have to scrub one more humiliation out of my brain.
I am so tired of being sad and broken. I can’t take myself another second.
Fueled by nothing but self-disgust, I force my wolf to crawl forward, inch by inch back out the tunnel she made on her way in, and she doesn’t want to leave, but my will is stronger than hers. I drive her out of the dark thicket into the glaring late afternoon sun.
Abertha is perched on a plastic, three-legged stool, legs crossed, packing a pipe. She blinks, surprised, and smiles, flashing the gold tooth in the back of her mouth. “Atta girl, Annie. I thought we’d be here at least ’til dusk,” she says and slaps her thighs. “Let’s go put the tea on.”
She takes a second to tap the tobacco back into an old mint tin and return her pipe to its pouch, slipping it into a crossbody bag I made her. I embroidered her cat Apollonia on it wearing a snorkel since she likes to hang out in the bathtub. She’s very strange for a feline—she likes wolves and water, and I swear, one time I saw her stick her paw out to prevent Mari from knocking a cup off the table by accident.
Once Abertha’s got her bag adjusted, she tucks her stool under her arm and leads the way toward her cottage. My wolf trots at her side.
Occasionally, Abertha’s long skirt brushes my wolf’s flank, sending her skittering away a few steps, but then she comes back and keeps close. Abertha is safe, and she is fearsome.
She doesn’t look it. She’s older, her hair is silver-gray, but she doesn’t have the brittle thinness that the eldest shifters get, like their bones have worn to pumice stone. She has her share of laugh lines and frown lines and red roses under her high cheekbones from decades of exposure to the sun. Sometimes, she looks fifty, and sometimes she looks seventy, and I’m never sure whether it’s because of the light or her expression or how she’s holding herself.
Unmated females, especially elders, are low rank as a rule, but I’ve seen males in their prime go out of their way to give her a wide berth. There’s just something uncanny about her. She moves like a much younger shifter. She walks with a purpose. Like Kennedy.
And she’s always coming and going, disappearing for days or weeks at a time. We don’t stick our nose in her business, and besides taking a cut of our profits, she leaves us to our own devices with our farmers’ market business.
Despite the mysteriousness, she’s the only person that my wolf and I trust implicitly. She’s the one who rescued us, after all.
When we get to her cozy thatch-roofed cottage, she holds the door open for my wolf. “After you,” she says.
My wolf trots inside, instantly enraptured by the kaleidoscope of scents. It’s like everything good about the outside has been brought into the safety of four thick walls—oils and herbs and spices and extracts and essences. Lemon, sandalwood, sage, calendula, fennel, bergamot, tea tree, and lavender. The scents all blend with years of woodsmoke, baking bread, and the oak from the exposed beams overhead and polished planks underfoot.
My wolf drags it into her lungs, and some of the oxygen finally reaches me, too. We both love it here.
“Let me see what I’ve got for you to wear,” Abertha mumbles, throwing open the trunk at the foot of her narrow cot. She rummages until she finds a worn blue flannel and a denim skirt. The skirt is knee length and fringed at the hem, but beggars can’t be choosers. I’m grateful for it.
She lays the clothes on her bed and says, “No rush. You stay in your fur as long as you need. I’ll be over here, putting the kettle on.”
For a second, my wolf considers the clothes. She’s been through the wringer, and now that we’re inside behind a barred door, she’s more than ready to hand our body back. Her limbs are wobbly from running so far and so fast the very first time she’s taken our skin. She braces her shaking legs, though. She’s not going to abandon me if we’re not safe.
I reassure her that we’re okay now.