Filed To Story: Alpha's Regret: His Wrongful Rejection
ALEC
“You best get in there,” Aunt Shona hollers from the porch as I pass on my way to my crib. She’s palming a vape in her hand, but there’s no hiding the smoke. It stinks like burnt apples.
“I need a shower.” I keep walking.
“Your uncle ain’t lettin’ no one bunk down ’til he’s had this out,” she calls after me. “Granddad’s near fallin’ out of his chair in there.”
I stop, my spine going stiff. Every muscle in my body aches from reining my wolf back for the past eight hours, and at the end of the run, casting him out of our skin like an exorcism.
“There’s nothing to have out,” I shoot over my shoulder.
“Tell him that.” Aunt Shona takes another puff, slips the cartridge in her apron pocket, and huffs back into the kitchen. All the lights are blazing in the main house. If I put this off, it’ll just be left for later, and I don’t put shit off.
I square my shoulders and head around to the front. The sooner this is done, the sooner I can crash.
Or run. My wolf is wearing a path from pacing back and forth inside me, anxious to get loose again. He should be zonked out, but he wants to go back up the switchback to the old lady’s place. See what Flora’s doing. If she’s there.
She’d better be there. Where would she go, anyway? She keeps her head down, keeps to herself. Mostly.
Except for Bram Blackburn.
Fuck.
I dig my nails into the flesh of my palms, inhaling so deep that I can feel my lungs stretch. What I don’t do is throw a punch at the moldy siding of the house. The strips are so old, it’d crack to pieces, and the wood beneath has surely been ground to dust by termites, so I’d end up putting a fist through the wall, and I’d have to hear about that, too. And then I’d have to hear it from my crew when we fix it.
Fuck.
I bend over, brace my hands on my thighs, and breathe. What I don’t do is lose it. I’m not an animal.
I stand up straight, pull it together, and walk calmly around to the front of the house. I trip up the steps like I’m not a stray spark away from combusting, and stride into the common room. The pipe tobacco’s as thick in the air as the smell of bacon. The Cameron males sprawled around the table fall silent, but there’s still a lot of hacking coughs and forks clacking against plates.
Uncle Fraser pushes back from the table, his chair screeching as it scrapes the linoleum. At the sudden noise, Granddad sputters in his chair in the corner, but he doesn’t wake up. At least someone’s covered his knees with a quilt. Probably Trevor, the exile from Moon Lake who showed up a few years back and didn’t leave after Aunt Shona made the mistake of feeding him.
“Where you been?” Fraser barks.
“What? I report to you?” I puff my chest. Since that shit with Flora went down, I’ve been swelling. The cuffs of my shirt are cutting into my biceps. If I move the wrong way, I’m gonna hulk out of this shirt.
“I’m the head of this family.” Fraser tries to stare me down, but he can’t help but shift his gaze to the side.
I toss a shoulder. His face flushes red all the way to the hairline clinging to the back of his skull, and he bares his yellowed fangs. I snarl, flash my own longer, sharper, white teeth, and wait for him to sit his ass down.
He might be head of the family, but I have Salt Mountain’s last great alpha Malcolm Shaw’s blood in my veins, and Fraser has never wanted to test his luck against my genes.
His wolf rumbles, but he lowers himself back to the table and jerks his chin at my seat. I deign to take it.
“Shona!” he hollers.
I glower at my gathered cousins and uncles while my aunt bustles in with a plate heaped with creamed chipped beef on toast and sausage links. Trevor keeps his head down as he wipes his plate clean with a piece of toast, so I skip him over.
“You don’t bring him bacon?” Fraser snaps at her when she passes.
“You lot done ate it all,” she says, side-stepping the lazy swat Fraser aims at her. She drops my food in front of me. I grunt.
“Coffee?” she asks.
I grunt again. I’ve already got a forkful in my mouth. Despite the full body ache and the weird thing stabbing me between my pecs, I’m starving. My dick’s also at half mast, and it has been since I left Flora up the hill, but if this crew and their combined odor of sweaty jock and dirty socks doesn’t fix that in short order, I don’t know what will.
Like I dared it, an image of Flora on her knees in the woods—her big, brown eyes gazing up at me, warm and soft— flashes into my mind. Blood rushes to my cock. I scoot closer to the table and focus on shoveling chipped beef into my gullet. Aunt Shona returns with a cup for me and the coffee pot. I mutter thanks.
A handful of males hold up their empty cups in a wordless demand as she passes them on the way back to the kitchen, and she refills them, checking on Granddad before she goes, pressing the back of her hand to his forehead. He’s not looking great. Kind of gray. He still runs with the pack, but it takes it out of him.
I swallow the last of the toast, clear my throat, and cross my arms. Let’s get this over with.
Fraser’s bloodshot eyes telescope into tiny black beads. “That lard ass Ritchie slut? Really?”
What I don’t do is flip the table. It’s a twelve-seater, made in the old country by males who knew their craft and shipped over on the boat that brought all our people here. It’s the only thing worth anything in this room. Except for Granddad.
Instead of crushing my uncle with a slab of Scots pine, I raise an eyebrow.
He bellows louder. “And she’s been fucking a Blackburn? Did I hear that right?”
Not a
Blackburn. Bram Blackburn. That stupid, no-neck, useless fucker, always lifting weights in the gym when he hasn’t once lifted something that needed lifting in his whole damn life.
When did it happen? Is she still letting him?
She get on her knees for him?
My stomach lurches as my wolf howls, lunging for our skin. I brace myself, hands curled around the arms of the chair until the wood splinters in my palms, holding him in. He always wants to do what he feels. That’s not how the world works.
I force myself to let the chair go and relax like I don’t have a care in the world. “You got a point?”
“Yeah, I got a point. Your chance at alpha just went from sugar to shit.”
I shrug. “I don’t see how this changes anything.”
“Don’t you?” He elbows Uncle Hamish who, as always, is sitting a little too close to Fraser’s side. “He doesn’t see how it changes anything.”
They both sneer down the table at me, but if I stood and bared my fangs, we all know how long it’d take before they bent their necks.
Sometimes, I think I should just do it. Whup Fraser’s ass, take the chair at the head of the table, and tell everyone to shut the fuck up. Sometimes, I think he’s waiting for me to do it. He probably thinks it’d show Shaw that I’m alpha material.
Who’d want to be alpha of this pack? It’s only a matter of time before climate change or our chronic lack of investment in infrastructure causes the whole damn village to slide down the side of the mountain. And what a loss it’d be, the entire county’s market for banquet beer and blowup dolls destroyed in one fell swoop.
“It’s nobody’s business,” I say, wiping my mouth with the hem of my shirt. The napkin holder is empty again.
Fraser slams the table with open palms. Granddad jerks and then resettles with his head tipped all the way back, his gray nose hair fluttering with his snores. He should be in bed. He’s almost ninety-two, for Chrissake.
“That fat idiot claimed you in the middle of a pack gathering,” Fraser sputters. “She made it everyone’s business.”
My chest rumbles, but it’s not my wolf. He’s given up on freedom, so he’s lounging on his haunches, licking the spot where his leg meets his crotch. In general, my wolf has no time for the family. He can outrun, outfight, and outhunt them all, so he basically sees them as dumb animals too slow and weak to bother with. He’s not far off base.
I flex my pecs and bear down until the rumbling fades.
“It’s not anyone’s concern,” I say. Maybe if I repeat myself using different words it’ll sink in.
“You think any Blackburn or Munroe would accept that pig as alpha female?” Fraser asks.
“If she’s not lowest ranked in the whole damn pack, she’s got to be next in line,” Hamish adds his two cents.
“That Boyle female who cleans the Blackburn place has got something wrong with her face,” my cousin Wallace pipes up.
“Yeah, but she’s not fat,” my cousin Lyle points out, his mouth full of mashed chipped beef.
“Evander Scott got knocked out by that skinny pup from Quarry Pack,” my cousin Knox offers from where he’s cracking a window by Granddad. Guess he’s also getting alarmed by the old man’s wheezing.
Hamish taps his pipe against his coffee cup and relights it. “Evander Scott is male. He’s nowhere close to the lowest ranked.”
Rank. They’re obsessed with it.
This family has a few crumbling buildings on the side of a mountain, they own at least a half dozen vehicles in various states of disrepair without a single working engine among them, and all they talk about is pussy they can’t get, stuff they’ve never actually done, and rank. The Blackburns and Munroes are no different.
Except Bram. He wasn’t lying about pussy. I saw it on her face. Flora let him fuck her.