Filed To Story: Alpha's Regret: His Wrongful Rejection
He takes my hand to lead me across camp and blood roars in my ears. Is he taking me back to the guest cabin from the night we mated?
But we turn off past the commissary and up the path to the garage, and I calm down, but not entirely. My wolf is on edge, too, pacing our boundary, whining.
It’s late in the afternoon, and the sun is lower in the pale blue sky. It’s a perfect fall day, yellow and red leaves rustling, air so clear that the caws of crows ring out like bells.
When we get to the garage, Liam’s there as usual. He gives me a wave, but instead of wandering over like he usually does when I come by to borrow a vehicle, he hangs back by the truck he’s working on.
Lucan and Fallon followed us from the lodge, and unlike when they escorted me earlier, now that I’m with Darragh, they hang back, too.
I can actually scent their unease. It’s not fear, exactly, but it’s damn close. They keep Darragh in their sights, and like the males at the lodge, they give him a wide berth.
It strikes me, hard in the sternum, how freaking lonely it must be to be him. It stops me in my tracks.
Darragh pauses, too, stopped short by my hold on his rough hand. He casts me a concerned frown. I squeeze his hand, as tight as I can, my small hand enveloped in his, his grip easily strong enough to crush my bones, but so gentle, so careful. His lips curve, bemused.
“Don’t be scared,” he murmurs in his deep, gruff voice. “It’s safe. Killian has doubled patrols, and we’ll take the pups with us.” He means Lucan and Fallon.
I watched this male decimate a half dozen trained, armed men in a matter of minutes. I’m not scared of any humans, but it’s not because of the “pups” and their guns.
We must be leaving camp, though. I’m grateful. The pack’s attention—and the studious distance of the males—is fraying my nerves.
Darragh goes to speak to Liam, and in short order, Liam rustles up keys to three of the ATVs that the pack keeps in an outbuilding behind the garage. Lucan hops on his first and guns his engine, shooting off to the north like he knows where he’s heading.
Darragh mounts a four-wheeler and offers me a hand, helping me climb on behind him.
“I haven’t ridden one of these before.” I laugh, nervous.
My thighs are cradling his hips, and unless I suck in my stomach, which I can’t with all the aches and pains, I can’t help but press my front to his back. He smells like soap and dust motes floating in a lazy ray of sunshine. I have no idea how that scent is stored as a memory in my mind, but it is, and it’s the perfect description.
I rest my cheek against his shoulder blade. He revs the engine, but he doesn’t tear off like Lucan. He drives carefully, zigzagging to avoid ditches, making the path as smooth as he can. Fallon follows us at a distance. He zigzags, too, but he does it so he can hit more jumps.
It’s a long ride, but I don’t mind. Pretty soon, I realize that we’re heading toward his shack. I’m not super excited about going back there, but we’re almost alone again, and that soothes the unsettled feeling I’ve had since we came back to Quarry Pack territory, and he left me at the infirmary.
As we approach his clearing, the trees are thick, so I don’t see what he’s done until we’re there, and he’s cutting the engine. I stare up and up, squinting, shading my eyes as I half slide, half push myself off the wide seat. My jaw drops.
I gape, and Darragh comes to stand beside me.
“You built a treehouse,” I mutter, gobsmacked.
He grunts, strides forward, and looks up at what he’s done.
It’s amazing. The shack is still there, leaning starboard, mushrooms sprouting from the moss on the roof, but in the tall oaks in the tree line beyond it, a freaking treehouse rises from the stout branches. And it’s not the sort of thing a male would make for a pup or like you’d see in a picture book, nothing like that.
It has levels. It has architectural details.
I saw a movie once at the Moon Lake school when the teacher was sick, and they’d wrangled a random elder to watch us. The movie was about a family who was shipwrecked on a deserted island, and they built a treehouse with a skylight and running water and a parlor with a piano.
This is like that if it’d been made by a lone wolf shifter and not a set design crew.
Like the shack, the steep-pitched roofs tilt a little to starboard. The eaves are hung with white gingerbread trim. On the lower levels, the design is a simple scallop, uneven in places, but at the very top, the design is as delicate and as elaborate as snowflakes.
It’s like a nursery rhyme treehouse. The shutters and siding are a motley mix of bright red, yellow, and green, and at the top, there is a round turret with a big window and a flower box filled with gold mums.
Darragh turns to face me, his expression battened down, his shoulders squared, his spine ramrod straight.
The incongruity strikes me, searing the image into my mind. This male with his gray-threaded hair and bristly beard, rugged in his worn jeans and scuffed boots, strong and proud despite the obvious toll of the years, standing tall, almost defiant, in front of this fairy tale cottage he’s built with his own hands.
The hands that tore apart the men who hurt me.
“You built it for me,” I say, my voice strangely soft.
“I got the idea the first time I noticed you,” he says.
I remember what he said earlier. “Not the morning at Abertha’s?”
He shakes his head. “No. Way before that. Down in camp. I was heading out from dropping off a kill. You were up in a tree with a book.”
Oh, I remember. “You gave me a dirty look.”
“You were hiding up a tree to sneak something on your phone. You were so fucking young.”
“You knew then?”
His jaw clenches. “I stayed away.”
I crane my neck to check out the top of the treehouse. It’s mostly hidden by leaves, but the very tip top clears the canopy, and above a white cupola, there’s a copper weathervane, tarnished green, and where there should be a rooster, there’s a mermaid, her tail pointing east.
It’s everything I would have loved back then. Before.
I don’t know what to say if I don’t want to cry.
I approach the hanging rope ladder. Darragh holds it taut so it’s easier to climb, but I’m still short of breath by the time I reach the first platform. I sit on the edge, dangling my legs over, to catch my breath. Darragh lowers himself beside me.
We’re silent for a while. Up this high, I can pick out the lodge’s roof and some of the more exposed cabins in camp from the fall foliage. In the far distance, the steeples of the churches in Chapel Bell rise into the washed out blue sky.
Lucan and Fallon’s vehicles are parked down by the shack, but they’ve made themselves scarce.
It’s peaceful out here, but it’s also lonely, being able to see camp, but too far to make out packmates walking about their business or scent them on the wind.
Again, my heart hurts, thinking about all the years Darragh spent out here alone. I shift so my leg presses against his. His thigh tenses, but he doesn’t move.
After a few more minutes of quiet, he exhales, and like I’ve drawn a confession from him, he says, “I needed to build something where you’d be safe from the wolf. He can’t get up the ladder.”
The ache in my heart stings a little worse. “You meant for me to move up here?”
He growls low in his throat and stares straight ahead. “I didn’t know how to talk to you, so I just kept on making it bigger.”
I twist my neck. The crooked levels rise into the branches like something out of a picture book. The words “you could have talked to me” come to my lips, but for some reason, I bite them back.
He could have come by the cabin. He could have ripped his trauma open for me to see, so I’d understand, so I’d forgive him. So that maybe, I’d never look at him without pity in my eyes again.
The male who’d exiled himself to protect the pack, but who never left, who ranged the foothills protecting us despite everything—he could have sat eighteen-year-old me down and explained to the girl knee-deep in daydreams and her own unresolved grief that sometimes we cannot be other than what we are, even when it breaks our hearts.
That the past has claws. That it casts a long shadow. That its shackles feel unbreakable.
Would he have been able to make me understand?
I don’t know.
I don’t really know how I’m getting it now. It didn’t come over me all at once. There was no epiphany. But when I try to track it back, I think about how he never quite disappeared. I remember a hundred packages wrapped in white butcher paper with my name printed in careful block letters.
At first, I threw them in the trash. Then, I tossed them in the fridge with the rest, called it guilt, counted it for nothing.
I never questioned.
Because I knew about the past, didn’t I? I learned from my mother about its claws, its inescapable shadow. How impossible it is to carry your own pain and the pain of the person who hurt you at the same time.
But I understand now.
I wind my arm over Darragh’s and twine my fingers in his. Through the bond, I feel his tension seep away.
He couldn’t talk to me, and I couldn’t listen. A fated pair.
He coughs. “I was going to dig a tiger pit. With stakes, you know? But then I thought that wouldn’t be good. If there were pups. They could fall.” Darragh’s head bows as he considers the ground beneath our swinging feet.