Page 10

10

AREN

F inan clears his throat. “Was there a reason you broke your bed into so many pieces?”

“Kat doesn’t like the bed, so the bed goes.” I walk over to the pile of boxes on the floor. I’m still hungry and would have preferred not to leave Kat when she seemed to be in a chatty mood, but this is important. “Where’s the mattress?”

“On the wall.”

I take in the massive king-size bed leaning up against the wall, then I frown at the boxes. “I don’t remember the last one coming in so many pieces.”

“You wouldn’t,” Finan says, “since I built it.”

My parents had this room before they died. And even knowing as Alpha, that it would become my room, I slept in the bunkhouse with the rest of the pack, reluctant to claim a space that had once been theirs.

I’d known they weren’t coming back. I hadn’t thought I was the least bit sentimental, but removing all their things after a feral killed them was harder than I thought it would be.

Finan had been a friend from childhood, and naturally, there was no one else I wanted as my beta. It was his idea to gut the room. To reclaim the space and make it my own. So I asked the rest of the pack to pick out anything they wanted.

I donated everything that belonged to my parents. Other than photographs, I needed nothing else.

Once the room was bare, a bunch of us painted. I had so many volunteers I had to tell people I didn’t need that much help, but that’s pack. They pull together when you need them the most and they always have your back.

Everything is new. The bed. The closet, the dresser. All of it.

It took time, months rather than weeks, though not quite a year, before the space felt like mine and I didn’t look at it and think of my parents.

As I study the pile of boxes to build this new bed, I’m not sure how I escaped building the last. Did Finan and the others volunteer? Or did I see the stack of boxes, decide I wanted nothing to do with it, and pass the task onto someone else?

This morning, I opened my laptop and found a new bed from a local furniture store that a couple of my enforcers could pick up. Then I followed Kat outside to the creek where Leo had jumped on her and made her laugh. That laugh had done something to me. It had stirred something inside me, and I knew I needed to do everything to make her laugh like that again.

Assembling this bed looks to be at least a couple of hours of work and the instructions are already giving me a headache.

I turn to Finan. “Was it easy?”

“It was fine,” Finan says as he walks out.

“Where are you going?” I call after him.

“The generator isn’t working.”

“The generator is working fine. You’re just avoiding having to build this,” I call after him.

All I hear are the sound of his footsteps down the stairs. When I look out of the window, he’s fast walking away from the house, toward the generator, where he’s going to pretend there’s an urgent fault that only he can deal with to get out of building this.

I take in the pile of boxes for the new bed.

Patience isn’t my strong suit. It’s why I must have had Finan build this before.

And there’s no just replacing the mattress since I had the bright idea of breaking the bed frame entirely when I realized how I would show Kat that I was worth forgiving by getting her a new bed.

Now I have this mess to deal with.

“Fuck.”

Tagge walks in when I’m getting ready to set fire to everything in this room.

“Having difficulties?” he asks cheerfully.

“I’m fine,” I growl, returning to my task.

As long as I keep reminding myself it’s for Kat, then I won’t be tempted to open a window and fling everything outside.

When I glance over at Tagge, he’s leaning against the wall, arms crossed, watching me.

“How’d you meet the girl?” he asks.

“The girl?” I echo.

“Kat. I’m struggling to believe you thought she was a feral and locked her in your cage.”

“Well, I did,” I mutter, glaring at a piece of wood.

Everyone knows about the cage.

When I became Wolf King, everyone knows I made it my mission to solve the problem of ferals. The cage was a part of that equation. But it’s become a Band-Aid, a temporary fix, rather than the permanent solution I’ve spent years searching for. I’m not sure there is a solution, given that there will always be shifters who like to go around biting humans, and thereby creating ferals.

Not all bitten humans become out of control ferals who need to be killed, but enough do.

More than enough do.

Whatever the solution, I will find it.

“Tell me the story and I’ll help you with that.”

I look at him. “And will you also leave?”

He shrugs and walks over to me. “Eventually. That piece is the left.”

“How’d you know?”

“The screw holes are on the inside.”

“They should have just sent me a tree with instructions to cut it down,” I mutter. “Hundreds of dollars, and they make me do all the work.”

Tagge is more helpful than I thought he would be, given that I thought he was only up here to take joy in my misery. Because he is genuinely helping, I answer his question. “Someone was killing students at a college a few hours south of here. I thought it was her.”

“Ferals tend not to be female.”

I glare at him, though with his head down as he drills, he misses it.

“I am well aware of that,” I bite out.

“Did you try talking to her?” he asks, screwing two pieces of the bed frame together. The guy has barely glanced at the instructions even once, yet he already knows more about how to build this thing than I do.

“Three were dead. Another was killed as my men arrived. The situation needed to be handled.”

He nods. “Fair enough. I won’t ask why you sent your men out to bring her back and didn’t go yourself.”

“Because you know I’ll kill you?”

He lifts his head and meets my gaze steadily. “Because we all know what happened here. No one should lose family at the hands of a feral. And…”

“And?” I prompt.

“I heard about what happened in California.”

I had a run-in with a feral that looked so much like the one who’d killed my parents, and I lost it. It’s rare for me to lose control, especially to that extent. News like that would have made its way back to the Californian Alpha and to the other packs as well.

For the next several seconds, we focus on assembling the bed frame.

With two, the work is easier, but then again, that’s true of most things.

“The deaths were unusual,” I say, picking up the threads of our conversation. “Only men were being killed and there were days between the murders.”

I glance at Tagge.

He’s frowning as he scratches his bearded jaw. “The feral wasn’t degenerating?”

I shake my head. “Nope.”

His gaze is curious. “I see why you would want to bring the feral back instead of killing them immediately.”

“A couple of my enforcers picked up her scent almost immediately. That it was female was unusual, but it made sense when we found out all the males being killed had a link to her.”

“A link ?”

My wolf growls at this part of the story and, to be honest, I’m not happy about it either. “She dated them.”

Tagge halts before he can screw the frame. “ Dated ?”

“Yes.” I grind out. “No need to repeat it.”

The thought of Kat dating anyone makes me want to rip someone’s head off.

It shouldn’t piss me off this much to know Kat has been with guys before. She was a student living on campus, and she’s beautiful. Of course guys are going to be interested in her. It’s not like I haven’t christened my bed a time or two. It never bothered me to know the women I was with before had a sexual history. But with Kat, it’s different.

“When did you realize she wasn’t a feral at all?”

I stop building as I focus on the wood in front of me. “When she saved Leo from a rampaging and fucking scared shitless four hundred pound buck about to run him down.”

Tagge whistles between his teeth. “Four hundred?”

Troy, one of my enforcers, had startled the mule deer. He’d been setting a perimeter for the test Joy, another enforcer, had come up with to prove Kat wasn’t a feral.

I hadn’t believed Joy when she told me I was wrong about Kat.

It was my enforcer’s job to stop Kat from running off when she flunked the test and proved me right.

Kat had not flunked the test. She had seen right through the test, abandoning her escape to put her life squarely on the line by running at the deer and getting it to change direction so it didn’t trample a seven-year-old boy.

She had saved Leo’s life.

And all the little coincidences that hadn’t made sense at the time—my attraction toward her, my inability to stay away from her, the growing obsession I was having about her scent had coalesced into certainty.

She is my mate, and I hadn’t wanted to face up to it. By the time I’d realized it, I’d done so much damage she didn’t want anything to do with me. I keep trying to convince myself I haven’t fucked things up so badly that there’s no coming back from it.

I don’t know how to make things right. Or if I even can.

“I nearly killed her, and she saved one of mine,” I say.

My pack relies on me being right. Their survival relies on me not fucking up.

“So that’s the deal with the bed?” Tagge asks.

This bed will show Kat that I can make her happy.

“Just trying to make amends,” I say.

“You know, women like flowers and chocolates.”

I pick up the next piece of wood, determined to build the best damn bed anyone has ever seen. “After what I did to Kat, flowers aren’t enough.”

I don’t know what I was thinking before.

Scaling her apartment to give her flowers ? After I nearly killed her?

She’d have thrown them in my face, and I’d have deserved it.

I don’t know if this is enough, but I need it to be. Because I can’t lose Kat.

I can’t.