Filed To Story: Alpha's Regret: His Wrongful Rejection
I turn to see Justus’s reaction, and my heart jumps into my throat. The crowd behind me is five deep. I am well and truly surrounded.
Justus shrugs like the idea of taking Killian Kelly out isn’t ridiculous—or out of the question—and says, “It wasn’t exactly planned.”
The one called Khalil snorts again.
“Well, what are you going to do, Alpha?” the redhead’s voice rises, color creeping up his neck from his pale chest. “He’ll come after her, mate or not.”
“I’m not the alpha,” Justus replies. He says it offhandedly, as if by rote. Isn’t he, though? He seemed to be during the Byrnes fiasco. “And I laid a false trail.”
“And how long will that delay the inevitable?” Khalil asks.
“Long enough,” Justus answers. They share a speaking look and then Khalil shakes his head and backs off.
The redhead keeps pressing. “We don’t need the trouble. She’s favored by Kelly’s mate. You saw that. We all did.” The redhead’s face has flushed almost as bright as his hair. “Can’t you just mount her somewhere else?”
The murmuring, muttering, scratching pack instantly falls silent. The redhead takes a huge step back, knocking the males behind him aside, and bares his neck.
“Apologies, Justus,” he says. He’s able to hold his tongue for about two seconds before he mumbles, “But what’s wrong with high valley camp?”
“Black bears,” the male with the drumstick calls out. “Can’t fuck there until you clear out the bears.”
Khalil snorts.
The redhead glares and continues muttering, “Why not take her to the red clay camp then? Killian Kelly isn’t as stupid as he looks; he won’t fall for a false trail for long. If we steal a female, we have to hold her at another camp until we’re sure we got away clean. But I guess the rules don’t apply to alphas.”
He goes on and on, but he keeps his head bent, and the pack’s attention is drifting away from him. There’s movement coming from the caves in the terraces. Figures emerge and join together in a train that makes their way down a switchback path to the clearing. As they pass a tent near a tall sycamore tree, several more join them.
When they reach the gathering, the crowd shifts to make a path. My wolf’s pulse picks up. Whoever is coming, they make the males nervous. There’s a general shuffling of feet. The younger males posture, puffing their chests and throwing their shoulders back. The pitch of the entire crowd’s muttering drops an octave.
The males gathered closest to us part, revealing a phalanx of females led by a black she-wolf, a gray-haired female in her skin, and another female, maybe in her late thirties or early forties, who is somehow both furry and all woman at the same time. She looks like the NSFW character art that Kennedy downloads on her phone—so much butt and boobs and hips.
My wolf draws herself up. She cowered like a pup in front of the males, but for some reason, she doesn’t want to show these females her neck. She’s trembling visibly, but she’s holding her head high.
The voice is too freaked out to make any coherent warnings. All she can do is screech the kind of wordless, elongated, high-pitched “ahh” a person makes when they knock something over and it rocks back and forth, and back and forth, right on the verge of tipping. She’s panicking, but I’m not.
Why aren’t I?
By all rights, my wolf should be panicking, too. These females have the numbers, and most of them have a size advantage as well. Her best move is submission, and my wolf understands that, but she has no intention of giving an inch.
She’s defending Justus.
But not because he’s vulnerable.
Because he’s hers.
“What’s her name?” the gray-haired female interrupts my mental meltdown. I leap on the distraction, inspecting her as closely as she’s inspecting me.
She has a North Border accent, and unlike the males, she’s dressed. A skirt is wrapped around her waist and draped over her bare shoulder, somewhat like a sari or sarong. The blue fabric is clearly homespun and hand-dyed, but it looks as fine and soft as machine-made.
“Annie,” Justus answers, lowering his voice respectfully like he’s been called to speak at an elders’ meeting. “Annie, this is Elspeth.”
My wolf inclines her head. It’s an acknowledgment, not a show of submission.
The black she-wolf prowls forward, leaving a good distance as she anxiously sniffs in my direction. My wolf tenses, but she doesn’t blink.
“This is Nessa,” Justus says. “Annie’s from Quarry Pack,” he tells her.
She seems reassured by this and melts back into the gathering, tucking herself against the flank of a huge gray wolf. Three little wolf pups appear as if by magic between their legs. They gape at me, wide-eyed, their tiny tails thwapping the ground.
Instantly, my heart melts like cotton candy in water. Where did they come from?
They’re shifter pups, but they’re in their fur. How is that possible? Males don’t shift until puberty, and females don’t shift until they recognize their mates.
Except that’s not always true, is it? Killian Kelly shifted when he was still a pup to save Una and Mari. Were these pups attacked? They can’t be more than a year old.
My wolf growls and glares at Justus, displeased at the thought that he might’ve let them be hurt. His brow wrinkles.
Can the pups shift back and forth to human babies, or are they stuck as wolves until puberty? Somehow my curiosity allows me to relax enough to venture a little closer to the boundary between my wolf and me. The pups don’t seem traumatized. One lies on her side, dozing off. Her belly is pure white. It looks so soft.
Another pup snuffles around the feet and legs of the males around him, yipping and nipping and head-butting at random until he gets a pat on his flank or a scratch behind his ears.
The third pup—the littlest one, a mix of her mother’s black and her father’s gray—seems as captivated by me as I am by her. She keeps padding toward me. The first few times, her dam yipped at her to come back, but when she just kept approaching, her dam gave a rumble, warning her to behave, and let her come.
She trots straight to me. Inside my wolf, I reach for her. It’s a reflex. I’ve done it before I realize what I’m doing, and as soon as it registers, I drop my arms to my sides.
I don’t get close to new people, not even the cutest little ball of fluff I’ve ever seen in my entire life. Her paws are no bigger than walnuts, and her nose is a black jelly bean. The others smile down fondly as she pads between their legs.
She keeps coming closer until she gets to the invisible line around Justus and me that no one is passing, and then she plunks herself onto her tiny rump and begins to groom her coat as she watches me.
An unsettling ache throbs in my chest. She is so small. So trusting. So defenseless. And there are so many males here, and so few females. They—we—are outnumbered ten to one. They could do whatever they want to us. They have the power.
You’re trapped. You and the pups. There’s no way out.
The furry, curvaceous female’s snout wrinkles. “Justus, she shouldn’t smell like that. Something’s wrong.”
I can’t settle on where to look at her. The draped fabric serving as her dress is rigged so it only covers her nipples, and it doesn’t cover her furry hips or thighs at all. It covers her privates, but every time she moves, the skirt swishes left or right,or bunches up in the middle, and somehow that makes her look more naked than if she wasn’t wearing anything at all.
I don’t want her to come any closer. Neither does my wolf, but she doesn’t want to growl and disturb the pup.
I don’t want my wolf to growl and anger a Last Pack female who outweighs me by fifty pounds.
I force my gaze to settle above her neck because I was raised not to gawk, but her face is as arresting as her body. She has whiskey-gold human eyes with a wolf’s muzzle, long whiskers, and lush human lips that are pillowy on top because of the snout.
In a way, she reminds me of the small band of human females who come to the farmers’ market sometimes wearing fake tails, headband ears, and shirts that show off their breasts. Human males are all over them—and Quarry Pack males would be as well—but these Last Pack males keep their distance from her. She has an invisible fence around her, too, like Justus and I do.
The males closest to her are all standing at attention, their chests as puffed as possible and their stances so wide it looks like they’re about to do the calisthenics that Quarry Pack males do before they go on patrol.
My wolf eyes Justus. He’s not puffing anything, and his gaze is well above the female’s neck, but my wolf isn’t happy. She wants to bare her teeth, but the pup is watching.
“Annie, this is Diantha,” he says. “Diantha, there’s nothing wrong. Annie’s just—she’s quick to alarm.”
“She’s alarmed?
I’m alarmed,” the redhead mumbles. “Wait ’til Killian Kelly gets here. Everyone will wish they were more alarmed then.” Despite the incessant smack talk, his head is still bent, and his neck is bared.
Justus growls a warning, not very loud and no longer than a second or two, but the redhead snaps his mouth shut right quick.
My wolf and the pup startle. The pup whines. My wolf snaps her teeth at Justus.
He raises his palms and smiles at my wolf as he says to the redhead out of the corner of his mouth, “Weren’t you the one who traded all our pelts and steaks for three Quarry Pack females just last year? That was you, wasn’t it, Alroy?”
“He tried to,” the male with the drumstick calls out, helpfully. “Wouldn’t call it a trade, though, when y’all came back with nothing but your tails between your legs.”
“I learned my lesson,” the redhead—Alroy—mutters. “More than I can say for some. And it was Khalil’s idea, too.”
“Don’t bring my name into it,” Khalil says quickly.
“I don’t think she should smell that way,” Diantha says to Justus as if neither of the pack males have spoken. “You need to do something about it.”
The other females murmur in agreement. It’s strange—as the males manspread, they also made more room for the band of females in their center. The females are fanning out now, and I can make out more pups among them, in both skins and furs. They must shift then. My mind is boggled.
“What do you suggest I do, Diantha?” Justus asks, his voice dry, but not so dry that it’s blatantly disrespectful.
Diantha props her hands on the lavish mounds of her hips. “I don’t know. You’re the alpha. Make her smell better.”