Filed To Story: Alpha's Regret: His Wrongful Rejection
“Pups?” Something quickens in my stomach, and it’s gone so fast, and I’m still so shaken from the past forty-eight hours that I’m not sure whether it’s excitement or terror.
He grunts and rises to his feet, offering me a hand. I take it. He helps me up and guides me through an arched hobbit door to a room with glowing wood floors and what looks like a homemade rocking chair, also polished to a shine.
“I thought this could be the living room,” he says. I rock the chair. It doesn’t squeak at all.
He leads me through a back door, up a pair of floating stairs to a platform with no walls, only a peaked roof and a carved railing. His battered trunk sits in a corner with a few crates and his rolled up sleeping bag.
“This is where I’ve been sleeping.” He doesn’t let us linger in this room, hurrying me on up a flight of circular stairs to a large room with a high ceiling. There are fairy lights wound around exposed wood beams, and with dusk beginning to fall, they make the space cozy and warm.
“There’s electricity?” I scan the floorboards, and yes, there are outlets.
“I had help with that.” He says it grudgingly, like he’d rather not admit it. “An outfit out of Moon Lake. When I finish the bath house and summer kitchen, they’re going to hook them up with plumbing, too.”
“There’s a bath house and a summer kitchen?”
“There will be.” Darragh shoves his hands in his pockets. “I’ve still got work to do.”
Darragh hangs back by the door, and I wander around, exploring. There’s a big brass four poster bed with no mattress and a dark oak bureau with a beautiful antique mirror. The silver backing has worn off in a way that would have sent eighteen-year-old romantic me into raptures.
On the far side of the bed, there is a stack of boxes. The instant I see them, my eyes prickle, my heart lifting like a balloon. They’re mine.
I sink down on the floor, cross-legged, and take the lid off the top box, already knowing what I’ll see.
It’s like a time capsule, everything as neat as I packed it. The embroidered wall hangings I traded a human woman for at the farmers’ market, one with every species of North American butterfly, the other with every variety of wild mushroom. The dried flower crown that Annie made me for my sixteenth birthday. My teacup and glass perfume bottle collections.
A hot tear overflows my lashes as my hands hover over my old treasures. It doesn’t feel like stuff I had a few years ago. They feel like artifacts from a lost civilization, the me before I got older and wiser, the me that knew things I can’t remember now, but wish with all my heart I could.
With cautious steps, Darragh crosses the room and squats so we’re on a level, the box between us.
“You took them from the commissary,” I say.
“Yeah.”
A tear dribbles down my cheek. Darragh tenses, a vein popping in his neck.
“You built this house for me.”
He jerks his chin.
“And for our pups.”
He nods again.
“You thought it would end up like this?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “Not in a million years.”
“But you built this anyway.”
He glances away, toward the open door. “If you don’t want to live all the way out here, I can build another one. Closer to camp.” His brow creases. “Trees aren’t as tall down there. I might need to dig the pit.”
I gaze up at him in profile, marveling, memorizing the strong lines of his nose, his jaw, the stubbornness of his chin, the piercing ache of his warm brown eyes. This male belongs to me.
He came for me.
He bailed, but he didn’t leave me. He’s been around.
I sit back flat on my butt, dig the crown out of the box, and set it on my head. Baby’s breath falls like confetti on my shoulder. Darragh looks at me like I’m a terrifying and unpredictable creature that could bring him to his knees at any time.
Slowly, he follows my lead and lowers himself to sit on the floor, too.
I take a teacup out, unwrapping it from the brown paper I packed it in. It’s bone china with blue roses and a gold trim that’s rubbed off in places.
I hold it up. Darragh duly considers it, his mouth a straight line, brows contracted.
“This was my nana Doreen’s. She was my dad’s mother.”
He nods, very serious. It’s so strange, a male as dominant and rough and weathered as him, sitting on the floor with me in this girly room, intent on whatever I say. It makes me feel strange.
Cracked open.
Precious.
“I never met her. She passed from grief a few years after my da was killed. Anyway, that’s what my ma said.” An elder brought a box of her things to our cabin, but Ma wouldn’t touch it. She told me to take what I wanted and haul the rest down to the white elephant table at the commissary.
“I didn’t know her. She kept her distance.” I turn the cup in my hand. Besides being well-used and old, there’s nothing special about it. The gold is probably paint. “I don’t know why. Maybe she was ashamed of what her son tried to do to me. Or maybe Ma held her responsible somehow.”
“He’d gone moon mad, hadn’t he?”
I blink up. How old would he have been back then? I was a baby. He would’ve been seventeen or eighteen. When did he move out to the shack in the foothills?
“Were you living in camp when it happened?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “I heard tell of it.”
“I guess he was moon mad. He was definitely drunk. Ma always cursed him for what he did. She wouldn’t have if he was sick.”
“He attacked you and mauled Una. Either way, it was his fault.”
I hear him, and I know he’s not talking about my da, or at least, not just about my da.
“I don’t blame you anymore for what your wolf did.”
Darragh’s teeth clench. He doesn’t respond, doesn’t meet my eyes. It’s clear, he doesn’t give himself any grace.
“I don’t think he’d do it again.” I’m not sure why I think it, but as soon as the thought pops into my head, my gut knows it’s true.
His wolf isn’t mad. He’s ferocious and bloodthirsty and unmerciful, but he does things for a reason, and he likes my wolf. More than likes her. And he’s not stupid. He would understand that hurting me would hurt her. He wouldn’t do it.
A growl sounds in Darragh’s throat, and by the timbre, I can tell it’s him, not his wolf. Now, his flashing eyes find me. “No,” he says. “You’re wrong.”
“How do you know?”
He strikes his fist to his chest, hard, and scowls. “He’s in here, isn’t he?”
I tuck my hand between the buttons of the worn flannel I’m wearing, pressing my hand to my own chest, to the place where the bond flows between us.
“He’s here, too,” I say. “Isn’t he?”
He’s already shaking his head. “No, Mari. Don’t get ideas. I’ll keep him away. You don’t worry about it.”
I raise myself up on my knees, pushing the box to the side so it isn’t a barrier. “He’s part of you. That means he’s mine, too.”
He’s going to argue. His lips are forming the words, but then his brain must catch on to what I said.
“He’s yours, too?” The gold rings around his irises light up.
I nod.
“I’m yours?” He rumbles the syllables.
I nod again.
For a second, we balance on a precipice, lungs frozen, gazes locked, trying to read the truth in each other’s eyes. Longing to believe. Scared to reach out, scared to hold on.