Filed To Story: Alpha's Regret: His Wrongful Rejection
I nod as much as I can.
He grunts. “Good. I wasn’t sure.”
I wriggle until his hand gives, and I can look him in the face. I’m not sure what I see there that makes my brain take the leap, but all of a sudden, puzzle pieces clink into place, and it’s impossible, but—
“You’ve done that before, right?” I ask.
His jaw hardens, and his face shutters. “No.”
My brain leaps again. “You haven’t done any of it before, have you?”
His expression is ice cold. No embarrassment, no defensiveness. “No.”
“But you knew what you were doing.”
He lifts his shoulder and then stands there like he’s bracing to get hit by an inevitable meteorite. My mind whirs through memories and moments. The time when we first started messing around, and he thrust into my mouth so hard that I puked on his shoes, and how afterwards—and how had I forgotten this part?—he’d made me chug the rest of his lukewarm bottle of sports drink, and kept saying, “Better now?” And I kept nodding yes while I desperately struggled to keep the fluid down.
I remember the meadow when I went into heat. His dick slipped to the wrong hole, and I had to guide him back on track. He was so confident, though.
“How did you know what to do?”
“I know how plumbing works. It’s not rocket science.”
“But you always had ideas.” My mind flashes back to him telling me to hold his cum in my mouth and show him.
“I’ve got internet on my phone.”
“Did you do other stuff? With anyone else?”
He gives his head the slightest shake.
He was never with Isla Sinclair. He might have had her dinner plate fetched and let her sit in his lap by the big furnace, but I’m the only one who touched him. Who he touched.
For a second, my heart lifts, but then I remember. “Because you didn’t want to do what your father did.”
It doesn’t matter that I was the only one. It doesn’t mean anything except he didn’t want a miserable mating like his parents.
“I was the only female who’d let you keep her secret.” Sadness bubbles inside me, useless and bitter, chilling me to my toes.
I wriggle back on the table, close my legs and cross my ankles, fold my arms. Across the cavern, a male hacks a cough. Alec glances over his shoulder, scowls, and with an exasperated sigh, throws the duffel over his shoulder and scoops me up like a bride.
“Alec?”
He ignores me, carrying me toward the dens, and I’m stiff and folded in on myself. From a distance, it must look like he’s hauling a piece of furniture.
He takes the tunnel toward the male dorms, but turns off before he reaches them, heading down a corridor I haven’t taken before. At the end, he drops me in front of a door hung with a plastic seashell shower curtain, and growls, “Stay here.”
He ducks inside, and I hear a thud as the duffel drops. For a few moments, there’s silence, and then there’s a yip, a whine, a halfhearted snarl, and then a muttered voice. A minute later, Pritchard’s big-bellied wolf noses his way past the curtain, a human twenty-dollar bill hanging from his mouth.
Alec pushes aside the curtain and holds out his hand. “Come on.”
I pretend I don’t see the hand and pass him, entering what must be Pritchard’s den. It reeks of wolf and stale beer. There’s a lamp sitting on the floor, plugged into an extension cord that runs into the hall. An unzipped sleeping bag, a black leather steamer trunk, and a tall red toolbox fills the rest of the space.
I pretend to take it all in, my arms crossed tight and my chin lifted. I won’t look at Alec, but I can feel his eyes on me. His wolf is making low noises, probably unhappy with the thick scent of other male in the air. My wolf is alert and watchful. She’s waiting for something from Alec.
Anticipating something.
Suddenly done with watching me pretend he isn’t right there, Alec growls, takes me by the upper arms, walks me to the trunk, and sits me down. He looms over me and starts to pace before he reaches a curved wall and remembers there’s not enough room. He shoves a black lock of hair out of his blazing eyes. Moments later, another lock falls, and he huffs it away.
Eventually, he plants his feet and glares down, his hands fisted and resting on his hips. When did he pull his shorts back up? Must’ve been a while back. I didn’t notice. There’s still an unmistakable bulge, but he doesn’t seem to be paying it any mind. He’s stuck in his head, wrestling with whatever it is that he wants to say.
I can’t help him. I have no idea what’s going on in there. I used to think I did, but I’m beginning to realize I shouldn’t try to read minds. People don’t all think the way I thought they did.
Finally, Alec takes a deep, aggrieved breath and says, “You weren’t a secret.”
I open my mouth, but for some reason, I give him one more second before I argue.
“You were mine.
My good thing. For me. Everything else—” He throws his head back and glares sightless at the low ceiling. “My days were never my own. Something always needed fixed.
Always. My future sure as shit wasn’t mine. I was gonna be alpha, which I didn’t want, or I was gonna be a bitch until the day I died. My free time wasn’t mine. I could never kick back, throw the ball around for fun for once. I didn’t dare lose, not ever, not once. Couldn’t sit one out. Not unless I wanted to hear it from every asshole in the pack.
You gettin’ soft? Gonna bend the neck
?”
He gives his head a shake, and a lock falls across his forehead, and he doesn’t bother with it. He looks at me, every feeling amplified with crystal clarity through the bond, his eyes burning with years of banked rage. “You came to me. You wanted me. You were soft and sweet and you didn’t want anything from me except to touch me. You were the only thing that made it worth it to get out of bed in the morning, and you weren’t my mate, and one day, some asshole was going to take you away, and I had no fucking choice about that, either, and it was going to kill me.”
Something’s cracking open in my chest. I press my palms over my heart and try to hold it in, give myself time, but it overflows, rushing out through the bond, flooding my veins. “Alec—“
“No.” He raises his palm. “I’m communicating.” He waits to see if I’ll listen. I lower my hands to rest in my lap. “And then I find out you are my mate, and the very next second, that you fucked Bram Blackburn.”
My skin burns, but he’s not done, and it’s not an accusation.
“And Iknow how to keep my mouth shut, Flora. I’ve been doing it my whole life. I learned how from listening to my father use his to lose rank and friends and females and work until the day he died. And all I needed to do when you went into heat was say nothing, and I couldn’t fucking do it. Fate handed me everything I ever wanted, and I threw it on the ground. For what? For what, Flora?”
He drops to his knees so we’re eye to eye. “It couldn’t have been pride. I don’t have any when it comes to you. I would follow you anywhere.”
He searches my face, and I don’t know what he’s looking for—understanding or forgiveness or an answer to his question—but I can’t help him. The world around me is reconfiguring itself again, and I’m upside down.
I was a secret, but not a shame.
And he was horrible to me, and I was his one good thing.
His one good thing.
But words shouldn’t count for anything. How can I let them count for anything when they’ve been hurled at me like knives my whole life—pig, whale, dog, disgusting, sad, embarrassment.
I can’t believe them, not even words that I’ve dreamed about. Longed for. Not even words from a male who’s sparing with them, who’s never bothered to lie.
My eyes burn, and Alec’s gaze lifts to the wall above my head, as if in his frustration, he’s been reduced to prayer. His hands curl into fists. My heart spills, useless, despairing, yearning, and broken long ago.
We are silent and stuck, powerless against the past.
And then Alec growls and leaps to his feet. “Stay here,” he snaps. “Don’t move.”
He’s gone for a matter of minutes. I’m still sitting on the trunk, reeling, replaying everything he said, when he comes back with an apple crate.
He sets it in a corner, reaches in, and carefully lifts out a big ball of white fluff.
Like magic, my heart lightens. “Harriet.” Impossibly, my lips lift.
He brings her to me. She’s sleeping, thank goodness. Even though she’s accustomed to Miss Nola and me, the thick wolf scent in here would definitely freak her out.
Alec kneels and lays her in my lap. I stroke her spine, run my fingers through the fur on her flanks, check to see if she’s lost weight and if all her bits are present and accounted for. She’s fine. Maybe even a little chunkier.
Alec sits back on his heels and watches me pet her. “I’ll need to build her a new hutch. I figure we should see how she does in the cavern first, if she’s okay with so many wolves. If she’s not, I can set her up outside. Make her a good insulated box.”
A hot tear dribbles down my cheek.
Alec blinks, worry immediately darkening his eyes. “I’m sure she’ll get used to being inside. She was chill with me carrying her all the way here.”
“You carried her?”