Filed To Story: Alpha's Regret: His Wrongful Rejection
I hate playing Fate.
After two minutes of shaking, I let the jar sit for the requisite two additional minutes. While the last of the bees give up the ghost, I survey our little kingdom.
Abertha is off on her travels, so her cottage windows are shut despite the warm weather. There’s no one around except her cat Appollonia, although she’s nowhere to be found at the moment.
These days, Una works down at the new greenhouse that Killian built for her near the commons. He wants her close to home, and now that she has a pup, she doesn’t fight him on it. Mari still comes up here sometimes, but she lives with Darragh in a treehouse out in the woods, and since that’s closer to our shop in Chapel Bell, she spends most of her time working there.
If Kennedy’s not on patrol or training with the males, she’s usually trudging around, doing something. She’s handy, and she knows what needs doing, but she refuses to be pinned down to a schedule. It’s always a surprise when I show up and the garden is tilled, or she’s got buckets set up with spawn for a fresh crop of oyster mushrooms. I don’t see or smell her now, though. I’m alone.
Always alone.
The hole in my chest aches, like cold water is pouring from it, but I can stand loneliness.
It’s better this way. Safer.
It’s beautiful up here at this time of year. Tender shoots and leaves and buds tremble in the breeze, and the ground is soft and dark and rich. There is a feeling that things are about to begin.
Not for me, of course, but for the world at large.
It’s better that way.
Sometimes I find babies in the wildflower field or the woods. Bunnies. Squirrels. My wolf always hunts them, ferreting out their nests. Not to eat. She just likes to watch them nestle. The same with Una’s baby. My wolf likes to watch him kick and coo. She stares, and then later, when we’re alone at home, she paces, restless.
I pick up my jar of dead bees and tumble it, counting out another two minutes in my head.
I’m actually calmer than my wolf these days, now that Una is the alpha female. We don’t have to hide our phones or the business or our trips to Chapel Bell anymore.
Of course, my brain has no trouble finding other things to worry about, but there’s one hundred percent less sneaking around in my life now, and that’s made a huge difference. My stomach ulcer is healing. I can eat Old Noreen’s chili again.
I put the bee jar down and set up a filter in a funnel. Then, batting away the few bees that escaped the reaping, I screw a mesh lid on the jar and empty the dead bee water through the funnel. This is the part of varroa mite testing when the rubber hits the road. I take the filter, hold it up to the light, and examine it carefully. Nothing. Sweet.
I breathe a little easier. Varroa mites are the stuff of nightmares. They feed on the bee larvae and pupae, and then when the bees emerge as adults, they’re missing chunks of their bodies and wings. You can treat for the mites, but that doesn’t do the bees flying around with holes eaten out of them much good.
Justus’s pointy wolf ears have jagged edges like they’ve been bitten. That’s my mate’s name—Justus. I finally learned it during last year’s failed kidnapping attempt. He tried to trade for Kennedy, Mari, and me, but he acted like he didn’t know me. Like I was no one to him.
He recognized me, though. I saw the hate before he shuttered his face and focused elsewhere.
Sad female.
Coward.
A female like you would make weak, spindly young.
The voice recites her favorite chorus. I let her. If I argue with her, she shouts over me.
After the showdown between Killian and the Byrnes at the old dens, when Justus shifted and ran, I saw his ears, and they looked chewed up. He looked rougher than he did when we mated. Bigger. More weathered. More scarred.
In my memory, he wasn’t young when I met him, but seeing him now, I realize he hadn’t even grown to his full height then. He was Fallon’s age when we mated. Maybe eighteen or nineteen.
He’s different now. Hard. Unforgiving.
I think a lot about his wolf, every time I have my tea on the back porch and look at the garden. I imagine him with his flower antennae, so worried about what was frightening me.
Does his wolf hate me, too?
My heart beats faster, and my hands shake as I unscrew the jar and walk over to the compost to toss the bee carcasses on the pile.
Regardless, the man doesn’t want you.
The voice reassures me.
Sad female. Coward. You would make weak, spindly young.
He’s the alpha of the Last Pack. I am his best—likely only—chance for pups, but when he saw me, he acted like he didn’t know me.
I felt him in my chest, though. He is still so angry, angrier than he was when we mated. Despite the weakness of the bond, his rage seared.
I didn’t know his name before that day. In my head, I called him the Last Pack wolf, and as soon as I thought about him, I thought about something else. And it worked. For a long time. Until Una mated Killian, and everything changed.
Kennedy is allowed to train and patrol now. The traitors who Killian let live are now on kitchen duty, so I’m expected to sit with the pack at meals. Una insists I sit with her, so I have a front row seat to the pups wandering up after dinner to show her the treasures they’ve found during the day or to give her baby crafts they’ve made for him—flower crowns and rattles made from pebbles in used plastic bottles.
And I’m happy for her—Iam
—but by the time I can excuse myself without causing concern, I’m sliced to ribbons. No one will ever love me like Killian loves Una, and I’ll never have my own baby to love like Una loves Raff.
But you’re safe. The voice is stubborn. Argumentative. Right.
I am safe, and it feels like cold, dirty dish water.
There’s no sense in dwelling on what can’t be changed. I shake it off and rinse out the jar now empty of dead bees. The sun is inching closer to the peaks of Salt Mountain. It’s time to go home to change before I head for the lodge. I don’t need to rush, but I should get going.
There’s never a need to rush anymore. There’s no one at the cabin hogging the bathroom. The days of us racing each other to the bathroom are over. Kennedy usually showers at the pack’s gym.
Why am I so moody and mopey today? It’s not that time of the month. I just finished my period.
I shake it off again, for real this time, and dry the testing jar before tucking it neatly in the metal toolbox where I keep the testing supplies. I peel off my beekeeping gear, hang it up on the hook on the back of the shed door, and tug my long skirt back on over the bike shorts I wear in the suit. The cool, early evening air is bliss on my sticky skin.
If I hurry, I have time for a cup of tea before I’m expected at the lodge.
Or.
The weather is beautiful. Patches of stark blue sky are framed by the low, stout clouds shaded gray from the fading daylight. The cottage’s clearing and the fields and woods around it have settled into the kind of quiet that’s punctuated with a rustling breeze and the dwindling calls of birds as they wind down and return to their nests.
Like I said, I don’t have to rush.
I could walk home along the river.
My heartbeat quickens.
I always take the same path home—along the tree break beside the wildflower meadow and then down our well-worn track through the wood to the ridge behind the charred foundation of our old cabin. The traitors burned it down as a distraction on the day they tried to trade us to the Last Pack.
I know the way home like the palm of my hand—every exposed root, every place where the dirt washes out the trail when it rains. I know to the minute how long the walk takes. There’s no section of the path that’s exposed. If I had to run, I know exactly where I could hide.
The voice in my head is silent. She doesn’t think I’ll do it. Even the idea is twisting my stomach in knots.
The land beside the river is wide open. A few years ago, Killian cleared it all so the patrols have a clear view. Going along the river would actually take me away from the commons for about half a mile before it turns south. The river and its far bank are our territory, though. After the humans kidnapped Mari, Killian expanded our boundaries all the way to the rural route a mile to the north. Our territory is safe.
The voice snorts.
I have no reason to go home a different way today.
So you better not.
There she is. She can’t let me make a decision without her.
Ferals can swim.
I can’t even consider taking a slightly different path home without my brain conjuring the worst-case scenario.
Humans can swim. They have boats. Guns. Numbers.
What would happen if I didn’t torment myself for once? An aquatic attack of swimming ferals and a fleet of gun-toting humans in boats? Beating myself up with my fears has no magic power. It can’t stop Fate. Bad things still happen.
Remember last time by the river. You begged for a knot on your hands and knees in the dirt.