Filed To Story: Alpha's Regret: His Wrongful Rejection
And it’s not the saddest thing; it doesn’t break my heart at all.
I’m going to be safe.
I decided. I chose.
And if it doesn’t feel like a choice, no matter.
I’m not trapped, I’m not hurt, and I’m not scared. And in my experience, that’s pretty much the best you can hope for.
4
JUSTUS, FIVE YEARS LATER
“What the hell was that, Alroy?” I roar as I pin together Max’s wolf’s flailing forelegs so I can wrap the bloody gash that Killian Kelly ripped down his side. Max is not making it easy. The old dog has more fight left in him than I’d have thought.
None of our wolves escaped Killian Kelly unscathed. They stand around the clearing thunderstruck, listing side to side and dripping blood in the dirt.
Only Alroy and Khalil are on two feet, and only because I commanded them out of their fur and into their skin. Since we were pups, they’ve been the source of all trouble and a constant burr in my side. I’m not sure which is worse—Alroy’s inability to think through an idea or Khalil’s utter disregard for consequences.
Alroy paces, dragging his hands through his red hair. “It was supposed to be a straight trade. I made the deal with the younger Byrne. He said Kelly wouldn’t be an issue.”
Alroy’s balls have long since dropped, but you wouldn’t know from the high-pitched whine in his voice. He sounds like he shifted for the first time yesterday.
He almost got us all killed, and Khalil, with his death wish, was happy to egg him on.
“What did you trade?” I growl at Alroy. “Your ever-loving mind?”
Max nips my hand, taking advantage of my distraction to express his displeasure that I’m wrapping up his guts so they don’t plop onto the forest floor. I hoist his carcass high in the air and give him a shake. “Enough, gray belly! You’re bleeding all over the place. You’ll leave a trail.”
Finally, he sees sense and goes limp. His paws and tail dangle like a chastised pup’s. I set him down on a log and finish binding the wound. He got the worst of it. It’s a miracle no one died. Alroy and Khalil didn’t recruit our best for this misadventure. Just our dumbest.
“Could you not smell a trap? Is your snout stuck as far up your ass as your head? Eh?” I tie off the bandage and pat Max’s haunch. He grumbles and immediately starts gnawing at the shirt I used to staunch the bleeding. I whack his nose. He waits until I walk off a few paces before he starts back at it.
I get in Alroy’s pasty face until it blanches so white, his freckles look like they’re floating.
“I’m sorry, Alpha,” he whimpers, baring his neck and backing away.
“For the hundredth time, I’m not the alpha.”
All the males in the clearing, wolf and man, give me that look. I bare my fangs, and their gazes slide away and their heads tilt.
“I’m not the goddamn alpha.” I repeat it loud enough to shake the remaining birds from their perches in the high branches. Signaling to Killian Kelly exactly where we are. Now I’m being a dumbass, too.
If I were the alpha, I wouldn’t be here. Alroy would have felt obliged to run his fool plan past me. I wouldn’t have heard it from Max too late to stop this sad-sacked, Fate-forsaken pack of absolute shit-for-brains from crossing into Quarry Pack territory before I could reach them.
I wouldn’t have seen her.
I wouldn’t feel like this.
“By all rights, we should be dead right now,” I snarl and swing my gaze around the clearing, and they stumble backward. “If Kelly wasn’t more interested in the traitors in his own pack, we’d be worm meal.”
Well, Alroy and his band of merry dipshits would. Kelly is a majestic fighter—unworldly—but he defaults to expecting his opponent to come at him head-on. That’s how the lost packs fight—in roped-off stages with bells announcing the first blow. It’s a good thing he wasn’t raised in First Pack. He’d be invincible if he’d spent his pup-hood like us with his pack brothers leaping onto him from behind every boulder and every tree branch sturdy enough to hold them.
As it is, it’d be a toss-up whether I could win against him. He’s clearly not the young, stupid male he was back when I found my mate.
Annie.
My guts knot, and my gorge rises. The old rage drags its claws down my skin from the inside. I ignore it, scanning my pack to see who else is hiding a potentially mortal injury. Elis is crouched low to the ground with his rear up in the air. I grunt and carefully keep my eyes focused on the others while I slowly sidle closer to him.
Killian has learned a few things in the years since I basically strolled onto his territory. His patrols still travel the same routes, but they’re staggered, and they overlap, and he has sentries at the river now. And his reputation as a monster has even reached us. He must be fearsome indeed if even out in the camps, we hear tales.
He relies on his opponent being thrown when he shifts mid-air, though. He wasn’t raised playing snatch ’em like we were in First Pack. I was king of that game. I could predict where a tail would appear, and I’d grab it and swing the wolf like a lasso and then let him go to see how far I could make him fly. Those were good times.
Maybe that’s what’s wrong with my packmates. I threw too many of them into tree trunks when we were pups.
“What the hell were you thinking?” I bark at Alroy, sneaking a glance at Elis’s wolf. He’s trying his best to hide a gash in his belly, but blood is seeping into the dirt around him.
“I was thinking three unmated females,” Alroy answers, awfully defiant for how badly his hands are shaking.
I snort. Except for the blessed one, not a single one of those females was unmated, and I’d like to see any of my pack brothers claim the blessed one’s wolf. He’s a beast. You can smell his size. He must be as big as a moose.
“You’re a fool.”
“You don’t understand,” Alroy whines, his face flushing from white to red like beet juice poured into a glass of milk. “Fate gave you a mate. You had a choice.”
A choice. Annie’s stiff body and fear stench flash in my memory. I wouldn’t call walking away a choice.
She’s even thinner now. Her brown eyes are hollows, eating up even more of her face. Back at the Quarry Pack dens, while the Byrnes were strutting around and blustering like stuffed roosters, she didn’t look at me once. Not even from the corner of her eye. Her fear stink was the same as I remember. My wolf almost took our skin. If I wasn’t stronger willed than him, he would have.
I never told the pack that she didn’t want me. I told them she was too afraid to live like a real wolf, that she was twisted in her head like the others in the lost packs, so I left her where she belongs. Where she wants to be.
I hate her, and I hate myself for it. It feels wrong to despise such a weak and cowardly female, so I am ashamed of myself, and I hate her for that, too.
“What were you planning to do when Quarry Pack came to fetch their females?” I ask Alroy to distract myself from that train of thought.
“It was a fair trade, not a theft.”
“And what were you trading?” I ask. I bend over Elis and rest my hands on his sides. He tenses and whines. I wait for him to relax. The last thing I want to do is upset an injured Elis. When his wolf bites, he goes for your dick.
Alroy mumbles an answer that sounds like pelts and steaks.
He better not have fucking said pelts and steaks.
“What?” I ask sharply. Elis startles and presses himself more stubbornly into the dirt, whimpering when it hurts. Dumb wolf. I pat his haunch and rumble.
Alroy hangs his head. His expression is still ornery, but his face is turning green. His lips are mashed together. He’s decided silence is his best move.
I look at Khalil and raise an eyebrow.
“Pelts and steaks,” Khalil says.
My stomach sinks. “How many?”
“All of them,” Khalil says, holding my gaze. He’d love for me to take it as a challenge. He’s been angling for a real fight for years, but if he wants to go out in a blaze of glory, he can find someone else to do the dirty work. There is no room in the pack I carry for any more ghosts.
“Fate’s own idiots,” I groan, searching my memory. I don’t remember seeing a stack of pelts and steaks at the Quarry Pack dens. “Tell me you hid the goods somewhere until after you had the females in hand.”
Khalil’s brown cheeks darken. “One of their males hauled it all into a den before you got there.”
I lift my hands off Elis so I don’t squeeze his guts out through his belly as my fingers ball into fists. “And you thought you’d make this trade right under Kelly’s nose?”
Khalil shrugs. “Old Byrne said something’s wrong with Killian’s new mate. He said she’s made him weak and distracted.”
“And you didn’t question how reliable the word of a male making deals behind his alpha’s back might be?”
“We make deals behind your back.” Khalil smirks.
“I am not the alpha.”
Khalil shrugs again.
Every word from these idiots’ mouths pumps more blood into my brain. It’s going to explode. “The lost packs have alphas,” I begin for the thousandth time. “They are the ones so lacking in pride that the stronger make themselves bigger by standing on the shoulders of the weaker, pretending that’s our way.
Our instinct. But that is man’s way. Look at the natural wolves. You only find alphas in cages. In zoos. In the woods and hills, there are only packs.”