Filed To Story: Alpha's Regret: His Wrongful Rejection
I was so distracted by her tits and being mad she wasn’t my mate that I didn’t notice.
What else have I missed?
Flora closes her eyes, scrunches her face, and with a smothered moan of pain, she becomes her wolf.
Her animal’s even bigger close up. She’s a beast. Easily the biggest female in the pack.
My wolf lunged toward her as soon as he heard the crack of bone, but her size gives even his giddy ass pause, so he’s frozen with a foreleg in midair.
She stretches her muzzle to the sky and lets out a few howls of unadulterated joy, and then she shakes out her coat and saunters down the trail, knocking my dumb wolf in the shoulder as she passes.
He overcomes his awe and goes berserk. He chases her, sweeping past and doubling back, growling, trying every trick he can imagine to get her attention, but not daring to get close enough to give her a nuzzle or a nip.
She strolls along, nose in the air, sliding him sly glances from the side of her bright eyes. She’s glorious.
My wolf gathers his courage, and as he trots past her, he bumps her flank with his forehead.
She lazily snaps her teeth at him. He takes it as an invitation, sidling up to prance along beside her so close that the pack on his back ruffles her fur.
She acts like he’s beneath her notice, but she slows to a leisurely pace so he doesn’t have to work too hard to keep up.
They travel along together, and soon, it’s like they’re old mates. When there’s a bend in the trail, my wolf dashes ahead to check things out, howling his “all clear” as he lopes back to her side. At one point, he hears a rustle in the woods, and he barks a sharp growl at her to stay put while he bolts into the underbrush to investigate.
She deigns to obey him, plopping onto her butt and taking the opportunity to lick her ruffled fur smooth. When he comes back, yapping a self-important blue streak as if he didn’t just rouse an elderly groundhog, she lumbers to her feet, utterly unimpressed.
Her wolf doesn’t hate me. Or rather, her wolf doesn’t hate mine. The bond flows sweet and clear.
How did I fuck everything up so bad?
Every decision I made felt right at the time, and in the end, I turned my back on the female I always wanted and spewed some bullshit because I couldn’t see past my bruised ego, and now I’m looking at my wolf and his mate and wondering if that’s all this is ever going to be.
The only conclusion is that I wasn’t right all along. But how the hell do you know what’s right, then?
I’m in my head, and my wolf’s glorying in the moment, when an acrid scent on the wind alerts us both.
Wolf.
Shifter.
Feral.
Instantly, my wolf snarls at Flora’s to stop. She snorts and keeps strolling. My wolf snarls again, infusing the sound with alpha command. Her yellow eyes turn to slits but she stops.
I lift my snout and sniff the wind. The scent is not much more than a trace, but it’s close. Closer than it should be for such a faint smell.
It doesn’t make sense.
Urgency surges through my veins, and I begin to tear the pack straps with my teeth. I slip loose, growl at Flora to stay put, and step toward the thicket where the stink is coming from. I don’t get further than two steps when a gnarled form rises from a hollow in an explosion of dead leaves and twigs. A mangled howl rings through the woods like a tortured scream.
I leap in front of Flora’s wolf.
The feral springs for us. It’s on two legs, but filth-matted fur covers it from head to toe, and its black lips are peeled back over a maw of jagged, yellowed fangs. The reek of rotting flesh fills the air.
Time slows as the creature swings, reaching over my head with its rust-stained claws, and I vault to intercept the blow, howling with my last clear breath for Flora’s wolf to run before I clamp my jaw on a gristly forearm and slam my body into its torso.
It outweighs my wolf, but I don’t dare let go of its arm to shift, so I lock onto its radius and ulna, grinding them together as I wrestle it to the ground, bracing my hindlegs and swiping with my front claws, writhing and bucking, holding my ground with momentum and will alone.
Foul copper blood floods my mouth, the stench of decay blinding my nose, so I don’t sense Flora’s wolf until I catch her from the corner of my eye. She’s still here, and far from bolting, she’s gauging the distance between us. She’s going to attack.
Hell, no.
I rip my fangs from the feral’s arm, stripping the muscle from the bone, and howl over my shoulder.
No.
Go.
Run.
Flora’s wolf howls back as she paws the dirt.
No, mate.
Move.
I’ll kill it.
My wolf and I lose our shit in a simultaneous burst of injured pride. We wheel backward at full speed to pick up momentum, and before Flora’s wolf can take the opening, we hurl our bulk at the feral’s solar plexus, knocking the wind from him. He stumbles, and we fix our fangs around his skull and bear down.
Bone splinters, piercing the roof of our mouth. We keep going, dragging the twitching carcass into the brush by the head, our sole mission to get it away from our mate before she messes up her perfect smell with its foulness.
As we lug it through thickets and over roots and rocks, it eventually goes lax and then stiff. The scent of fresh death overpowers the stink of old putrefaction.
My wolf pries his fangs from its eye sockets, and for a few moments, he sniffs the feral’s cooling form, instinctively searching for the scent of wolf, of pack, but whoever this used to be is long gone. The only clue that it was once like us are the remnants of blue jeans, legless but still buttoned around its emaciated waist.
My wolf abandons the body and spends some time kicking leaves and dirt onto it, covering it as best he can. He knows it used to be one of our kind. He wasn’t an enemy, more a tragedy, a wolf without a pack, abandoned or exiled or mad, with no reason to fight the sickness that makes us become this thing if we’re on our own too long.
And Flora just strolled away from the pack with a half-assed plan to throw herself on the mercy of some Moon Lake rejects who set themselves up in an old cave.
Rage surges up from my gut, spurring me to seize our skin and rise to two feet. Part of me is aware that this anger is the remains of fear and adrenaline, but the feeling is too glaring and loud to think around. I start for Flora, flinging branches aside, muscles clenching, my vision going red.
If I’d leapt one second later, the feral would’ve landed on her.
It would’ve taken one bite, one well-placed swipe of claws to slit her neck, no matter how big her wolf is. Her reflexes are sluggish as hell. She could have bled out here, and there would have been nothing I could do but watch.
And she blithely skipped town with a kitchen knife strapped to her ankle that takes her a good minute to get out from under her pant leg.
And she holds it like a fucking schoolteacher’s pointer. Say “A,” boys and girls.
Fuck.
I burst into the clearing, and there she is, standing like a tamed dog, ears pricked and indecision plain on her face. She’s got the survival instincts of one of those giant stuffed animals they give away at the county carnival.
“Shift.” I want to yell at her human ears so she understands every single word I’m saying.
She blinks, wariness finally crossing her face.
“Shift.” The alpha command rings out, echoes in the silent wood, clearer than it’s ever been before.
She hesitates a few seconds, just so I know she’s not doing it because I’m making her, and then she slowly shifts back into human form. She’s still new at it, so she whimpers as the bones snap and reconnect, and when she’s upright again, she’s unsure on her feet.
Her arm comes up to cover her tits, and it makes me even angrier. I’ve seen them a hundred times. She’s shown them to me a hundred times. I’m not her enemy. I’m not a piece of shit.
“Don’t you ever even think about doing that again,” I bellow.
Her eyes go round.
“Do what?” she whispers, her voice wobbling.
“All of it!” I stride for her. “You don’t ever attack a feral! You run! I say run, you run! Do you understand?” I grab her by the forearm and tow her down the trail, away from the thing I left to rot in the woods. It was so close to her. A few feet. Fractions of a second.
“Alec, the backpack—” She’s turning back, trying to tug her arm free. I let it go and seize her hand. It gives me a better grip on her, and somehow, it begins to take the edge off the rage.
“Fuck the backpack.”