Filed To Story: Alpha's Regret: His Wrongful Rejection
“Thanks,” I say.
As we approach Leith, he straightens, still kneeling over Bram. He throws his head back, gasping for breath. The strands of his hair not coated in blood shine golden in the late afternoon sun. A wide, mad smile, gleaming as white as bone, breaks across his face.
“Oh god,” Tandie mutters, horrified. “He’s the alpha now.”
Leith’s smile fades as he lowers his head to stare at her. Bram groans. Leith casually slams another fist into his face, and he’s already drawing back to follow it up when Alec strides forward, hooks an arm around his chest, hauls him up, and drags him away.
There’s a moment after Alec releases him when Leith tries to go back for more, and Alec shoves him away with open palms. They square off, their wolves rattling their chests. Leith blinks first, grinning and gripping the back of Alec’s head to press their foreheads together in some kind of moment of masculine bonding.
Leith murmurs to Alec, but I can’t make out what he’s saying. He has visibly calmed, but Alec is still quivering with rage. Alec mutters something, no more than a word or two, and Leith shrugs, his smile widening.
“Too bad,” Leith says, loud enough for everyone to hear. “Unless you want to finish him, I didn’t leave any left for you.”
Leith slings an arm around Alec’s neck, and turns him so that Tandie and I are behind them both, and they’re facing the pack that’s been inching steadily closer, some to help their fallen friends, some to gawk at the new alpha or the sight of Bram Blackburn laid out on his back, splayed out like a starfish.
For a long moment, everyone looks to Leith, bending their heads, waiting for him to speak and cut the tension that thickens as each second ticks by.
When a voice rings out, though, it isn’t Leith’s. It’s Alec’s.
He’s glaring at the gathered crowd, as if he’s challenging them one by one, growing more enraged as no one dares to meet his eye until he finally breaks. “I rebuilt that,” he spits.
He lifts the sledgehammer and points it at the big furnace. “You didn’t bother to take care of it, and it crumbled, for years, and instead of fixing it, you stole the rocks to repair your own fences and pave your own driveways. And half of you didn’t take care of them, either.”
Folks shift and feet shuffle, but no one says a word, and no one lifts his head.
“I went up to the western ridge and quarried more stone. I hauled it back here, and I rebuilt this furnace, stone by stone, until it was stronger than the original, and you know what I learned about taking care of things? About how to keep the things that matter strong? How to protect them?”
He glares around the crowd. No one answers him.
“Nothing.” He shakes his head. “I didn’t learn a damn thing.” He drops the hammer to his side and looks at me. “Flora, I understand what I did. And what I didn’t do. I will spend the rest of my life rebuilding this.”
He gestures between us. My cheeks flush. Everyone’s staring from their lowered eyes, and I don’t know what to say. I want to go to him. Grab his hand. Tell him he doesn’t need to tell everyone. That I know.
Alec turns back to the pack and raises his voice. “My mate’s name is Flora, but it doesn’t matter, because you don’t talk to her. You don’t talk about her. Not now, and not later, after we’re gone. Not ever.”
He glares at the crowd, seeming to wait for something while giving the clear impression that he will destroy anyone foolish enough to speak.
“Do you understand?” he finally shouts, an echo ricocheting among the steep, barren peaks above us.
No one dares answer.
A terrible howl rips from his throat, and he explodes into action, lifting the hammer and swinging it against the slate. Mortar cracks, rock is pulverized to dust. He strikes again and again, demolishing months of painstaking stonework, splitting the mantel in two, smashing the hearth into jagged pieces.
Someone drags Bram away by the feet moments before Alec’s hammer lands, and Alec doesn’t even seem to notice. His face is dripping, stray black locks plastered to his forehead with sweat.
He works like he’s possessed, oblivious to the flying shards that nick his skin and the blood trickling from the cuts.
I don’t understand, not totally, but I think he’s letting something out, setting something free. Guilt maybe, for the ways he feels he failed me, but I bet it goes deeper than that, too.
He never did what I did. He didn’t leave Salt Mountain; he followed me. He never stood alone in the forest at night, and he never heard the world whisper that there’s more and better if he’s only brave enough to believe. Maybe that’s what he’s doing now. He’s freeing himself.
I walk closer, but I don’t get near enough to get hit by flying rock. I don’t want him to stop before he feels done.
The pack stares, eyes round and jaws gaping, and even though Brenda and some of the higher ranking Camerons and Munroes dart glances at each other, no one is stupid enough to open their mouth. Leith watches with his arms folded, a foot resting on Bram’s chest, an amused quirk on his lips.
By the time Alec’s done, there’s a fine coating of gray dust covering his dark hair, and his grimy sleeveless undershirt is plastered to his skin. There is a house worth of rubble where the big furnace has always been. Even when it fell into disrepair, its bones had still stood, but it’s gone now. It’s a pile of debris.
Alec lets the hammer fall to his side, and the head falls to the ground with a thud. He strides over to me, dragging it along, his breath ragged. He stops when we’re nose to nose.
“I am sorry,” he says, low enough so that only I can hear. “For what I said, and what I did, and what I didn’t realize, but should have. I’m sorry I didn’t rescue you, and you had to rescue yourself, but I’m so fucking proud that you did and that you’re my mate.”
I’m not sure if it’s the dust or what, but his eyes shine.
“You knocked the whole thing down,” I say, staring over his shoulder and marveling.
“I thought it’d prove the point.”
“What point?”
He shakes his head as if he hadn’t thought that far, and then he shrugs and says, “That they can fuck themselves.”
I cannot help it. A giggle sneaks out.
Alec holds out his hand. “Let’s find Miss Nola and get out of here,” he says.
I slip my hand into his, and as we walk away, the voices of the pack behind us rise from cowed whispers to a shrill indignation that grows in confidence the further we get. I can’t make out a word they say. I’m not listening anymore.
We’re all the way to the outskirts of the crowd when a stooped elder, leaning on a younger male for support, calls to Alec. “Hey, boy!”
Alec immediately leads us over. “Granddad,” he says. “This is my mate.”
The old male grins, revealing toothless gums. “Trevor here says her name’s Flora, but we’re warned to keep it out of our mouths.”
Alec grins back. “Not you, Granddad.”
“That my sledgehammer?” he asks, squinting at Alec’s side.
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, put it back where you found it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I suppose while you’re there, you’ll want to collect Miss Nola.”
“You know where she is?” I ask.
Granddad grunts, and it sounds exactly like Alec. “When we heard that Blackburn put her out, I figured you’d want her cared for, so I had Trevor here fetch her and bring her to my room.”
“She’s been living with you?” Alec is as gobsmacked as I am.
Granddad’s leathery cheeks darken under his bristly gray whiskers. “She’s had her privacy. I sleep in my chair. You know that.”
“How is she?” I ask Trevor.
He ducks his head as if he’s uncomfortable with the attention. “Fine. It took some doing to get her out from under the back porch, but she came.”
My heart aches. “You didn’t have to force her out?”
He looks up, fire in his eyes. “No. I waited. When the Blackburns got loud, she came out on her own.”
I want to go back and kick Bram in the ribs myself. Stomp his face in.
Alec reaches over, grabs my hand, and squeezes. “After we get Miss Nola to Old Den, we can come back if you want, and I’ll hold him while you kick him in the nuts.”
His lip curves, and he’s teasing, but I know he would if I asked.
We get to the four-wheelers, and Trevor helps Miss Nola onto one while Alec helps me onto the other. We ask Granddad to come with us to Old Den, but he says he hasn’t taught Trevor everything yet, and besides, he would never leave Shona’s cooking.
Once Alec gets himself settled and ready to go, I wrap my arms around his waist and burrow my face into his damp back. Under the scent of sweat and blood and slate, bubbling strawberry jam tickles my nose.
I remember the warm kitchen of my childhood in summertime, the windows open wide to welcome the breeze, my dam holding up a wooden spoon, her hand cradled underneath as she cajoled me, “Take a taste, Flora. It doesn’t get sweeter.”
And as we ride down the mountain to the Cameron compound, I remember other moments. Sneaking off to the woods, breathless, Alec’s dark eyes blazing when he caught sight of me, in that split second before he called up the strength to school his face.