CHAPTER 10

A rmand

She’d rather die than actually talk to me.

Watching a woman throw herself off a train mid-shift is an absolutely insane sight. She takes her wolf form while in midair, and by the time she lands, she does so on powerful paws and massive legs that absorb the shock and take the momentum, using it for propulsion.

Stopping the train with the emergency pull cord yet again, I bound into the dark after her. My life seems to be consumed by chasing my mate and wondering what the hell happened to her before we met.

I don’t have the patience for the chase, so I go all out, frustration propelling me at greater speeds than usual. I overhaul her in around five minutes and bring her down with a bite to the ruff of hair at her neck, bringing her down with me in a tangle of limbs, forcing her out of her animal form with a rough bite that does draw blood.

I’d usually be gentler, but I am at the limit of my patience with her recklessness, and she will heal up almost immediately in her human form anyway. I want there to be some rough animal pain for her to contend with, a consequence for turning this pleasant day into another mess.

“What’s wrong with you!” I snarl the question down at her, teeth flashing at the end of her nose. “Do you want to die?”

“What’s wrong with you!” she screams back, unafraid and twice as furious. “Why do you only fucking care about what’s been between my legs?”

“I don’t care about that. I do, but because I want to know what your life was like before me. I want to know what happened.”

“Liar! You don’t ask questions about anything other than sex,” she throws back, slapping me in the face for good measure.

The blow shocks me, angers me, almost makes me retaliate, but sense takes the place of violence. What the hell am I doing? I love this woman and this is how I am trying to find out more about her?

“Just… stop running. You’re going to get yourself killed,” I growl down at her as we lie panting in the grass. I slide off her, but I sling a leg on top of her to stop her from getting up again. She’s incredibly powerful in her wolf form. So am I, but I am not used to having to chase down my lover.

“Stop asking,” she says. “Stop asking about my past, about all of it.”

“Fine. I won’t ask again. Just please stop fucking jumping from the goddamn train or I’m going to have to start strapping you down when you’re aboard.”

She looks up at me, naked and beautiful and terrified in some way that I can’t touch. I don’t think she’s afraid of me. I think she’s afraid of me knowing her, which is worse.

I can’t rush this. If we were normal people, we would barely be one date into knowing one another. The fact that we are mates means everything has happened on an accelerated clock. I can’t expect her to trust me deeply yet.

“I’m sorry I asked again,” I say. “You’re right.”

“I am?”

She looks surprised.

“Yeah.” I sit up. “You hardly know me. We both have secrets. It’s going to take time to build the trust necessary to share all of them. I’m going to let you move at your own pace.”

“Okay,” she says, her voice smaller. “Armand?”

“Yes?”

“Can I make my own way home?”

“You want me to leave you in the wild in the middle of the night?”

“Yeah. I need some time to think. I need some time to myself. I can’t think at the chateau. It’s too… it’s not… the place fills my mind.”

I nod. I don’t want to let her be out here on her own, but I also don’t want to make her feel like she can’t breathe.

“Very well,” I say. “I will give you two hours. Be safe.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Really. Don’t do anything silly.”

“I promise not to do anything silly ,” she says in a tone that makes me wonder if this is a good idea.

I have to show that I trust her. I have to show her that she has enough space that she doesn’t have to run like crazy. The chateau is her home, not her prison. I am her mate, not her captor.

So I let her slide into the night.

I follow at a distance, downwind so she can’t scent me. I’m not leaving her to her own devices, obviously. I’m going to make sure she is safe.

She goes back to the village, moving at quite a clip in her wolf form. She seems to have something in mind. I consider whether or not I should stop her. I have a feeling that she is up to something I will not like.

But she hasn’t done anything wrong yet.

And I said I’d trust her.

So it doesn’t matter that every instinct I have is screaming at me to stop her.

She pads into town, sticking to the shadows. This is not good. As a general rule, it is not allowed for members of my pack to take their shifted form in front of humans. I don’t think she’s been told that, but I make a mental note to let her know.

She stops in the shadows outside the tavern. She waits as people leave, mostly too drunk to notice her. I see her wagging her tail and lowering her nose to her paws. She’s putting on an act, appearing to be a dog, curling up on herself and making herself look small. I look for a chance to come and chivvy her out of the place, but there are too many people around, and while one wolf playing small might pass unnoticed by the largely drunk people leaving the tavern this late, two almost certainly won’t. People keep coming at awkward intervals, giving me no clear shot to get in and herd her out.

And then the man she must have been waiting for emerges. Her ears perk up. She follows him. I follow her, trying to push away the sense of jealousy that rises in me. What does she want with this older heavyset villager? She follows him down a path and into the town square proper.

And that is where she does something so brutal, so violent, and so vicious that the sight will stay with me for the rest of my life.

I watch, horrified, as she savages a complete stranger by the fountain in the middle of the town square. A wolf can kill a man in seconds. She has done enough damage to destroy him and take him to literal pieces in under a minute. Then, with her victim publicly dismembered in the very heart of Fontlune, she flees.

There’s nothing I can do. He’s already very obviously dead, and running into town naked is not going to help. I have to follow her. She runs for the chateau like a wild thing. I give chase. This time I do not bother to hide the fact of my presence.

I run alongside her, terrified that the villagers will go for their guns and get in their cars and…

Sure enough, a matter of minutes after the death, headlights start to bounce across the plains as my fears are instantly realized. When a wild animal attacks inside a human encampment, humans respond as they have since time immemorial—they get a hunting party together and they chase the animal down with an eye to put it to death.

She starts to move in such a way as to put bushes and undergrowth between her and the lights. She’s been chased by hunters before, clearly. The stories this girl is not telling me must be absolutely legion.

Running from hunters is all about eye line. They need a clear shot, and over the next few miles we do our best not to give them one. Shouts of confusion indicate they’re not actually sure if they’ve spotted us or not. Some say we’re foxes, or deer, or dogs. That doesn’t stop a few hot heads taking shots anyway, bullets singing around us as we run for our lives.

This is the last time she goes anywhere alone. This might be the last time either one of us goes anywhere at all.

* * *

Beatrix

Armand is going to be so very mad. I don’t care. The moment I bit into that man’s neck I knew I’d done a good thing. The waitress and every other female he thinks about like he has a right to them just because he wants them will be safer now.

We are getting shot at, and that’s not great. Those cars are bouncing around like ships at sea as they rumble over the terrain at the highest speed they can manage, and we are zigging and zagging for our lives. The fact that there are two of us further splits the shots.

There’s just one problem. The chateau is miles away, we haven’t lost them yet, and I am starting to tire. There’s only so far that adrenaline can take you. If I can’t keep running, there’s nothing Armand can do to save me.

In life, you’re always on your own. Whether it’s surviving an orphanage or being chased by furious villagers who want to shoot you for savaging the village despoiler, other people can only help so much.

Armand sees that I’m slowing.

He slows too.

No! I want him to run. I want him to escape.

He slows more. He falls back behind me.

I know instinctively what he is doing, and why. He’s not tired. He’s a lot fitter than I imagined.

He’s sacrificing himself.

For me.

When you’re running from a predator, you don’t need to be faster than the predator, you just need to be faster than your friends. Except Armand is going to let himself die. For me. For a girl he’s known for a week, for someone who won’t even talk to him about her past and keeps flinging herself off trains.

I didn’t know it was possible to feel guilt while in wolf form. That has never happened before. Suddenly I am absolutely flooded with it.

I want to tell him to stop, but without the benefit of speech all I can do is get slower as well, and that will make him slower still, so really what I have to do is run like hell so that him being behind me does not mean he is caught.

I’ve never really thought of myself as lucky before, but that changes as Fate steps in to spare us.

I hear the hiss of a radiator impaled on a branch, and a crunch of an axle breaking over a rock within seconds of each other as the two cars come to an untimely end with their cargo of incensed villagers.

We continue to run full tilt all the way back to the chateau, arriving exhausted, muddy, and somehow against all odds, alive.

I fall into my human form at the foot of the stairs, and Armand does the same, his hand grasping the back of my neck as he ushers me up the staircase.

I know he’s very much furious with me, but he does not say a word.

* * *

Armand

I shouldn’t ask. I shouldn’t bother to even form a question. I should remain silent and simply…

“What the Hades…”

I can’t help myself. It’s impossible, after such an experience, to not ask a single question or say a single word.

“You said you weren’t going to ask,” she says, her voice a low whisper, as if she doesn’t really want to be flippant, but that phrase was preloaded in her brain.

“Go to bed, Beatrix. I cannot deal with you tonight. Bed. Now.”

She slinks off without another word, knowing she’s created the kind of mess very few people could ever hope to emerge from unscathed.

I can imagine the argument that will ensue in the morning. I’ll lecture her for killing someone, she’ll tell me that she saw me murder someone first. I’ll say I had a good reason. She will say she did too. Then she won’t explain why she did it and I’ll have to accept that because I promised not to ask any questions.

I am not ready for bed. I am exhausted, but keyed up.

I pull on a robe and go to my favorite lounge, where a good cognac awaits, as well as a good friend. The best friend, I mentally note with some irony, because he will not ask too many questions.

“I almost died tonight, Daniel.”

“Oh?” He looks up over his book with mild interest.

“Yes.”

“Glad you didn’t,” he says.

“Me too.”

“Was it anything to do with your mate?”

“Yes.”

“Figures. Women.”

“Women,” I agree, downing a good four fingers of whiskey.

It is not enough.

I sleep in the lounge that night. Someone puts a blanket over me, someone who understands about women, I imagine. When I wake up, Beatrix is apologetic in the shape of her body, but not in actual words.

I will deal with her, but only when I am ready to.

Life has already begun to absorb her at the chateau. I have a hard time imagining the time before Beatrix was here. She is a bold presence in the pack, never shy with an opinion, but with a sense of care for the pack that is as innate to her as breathing. She truly was made to be an alpha’s mate.

But she also appears to hunt and kill men for sport.

I retire to my office to think and to do business. It feels like a much safer and reliable thing to put my effort into.

“ Ma?tre , we have a problem.”

If only he knew what an understatement that was. Antoine is supposed to be investigating the mystery of my mate, but he is back for some reason, something about consulting with the librarian.

Antoine is one of the higher-ranking members of the pack’s administration. He is a solid, soft-spoken wolf with dark hair and eyes so light brown they almost appear red in certain lights. He is older than I am, as many of the upper ranks are, but he has never made the mistake of speaking down to me.

“What’s the problem?”

“Someone is killing in the village.”

I clear my throat, my first instinct being to cover for Beatrix.

“Why would that be of concern to us?”

“A man was carried off in the night then disemboweled in the town square, his chest opened for the vultures who made their meal in the early morning light. I am told it was a disturbing scene for all those who viewed it.”

Antoine’s version of events certainly is dramatic, but that is how these stories go. Every retelling will add some embellishment. The vultures are a nice touch.

I draw in a deep breath. I knew this was going to come up.

“If it is not overstepping to make the assumption, your little bride has a talent for dispensing a very primal form of justice, Ma?tre .”

I draw in another breath. Breathing has very much become something I must manually control in this moment in which I seem to control nothing else.

“It is not overstepping. I do not like disrespect, but I do not deny that there is a chance she could be involved.”

I do not like that I am effectively lying to my pack. I do not want them to know what happened, but it seems they have already put two and two together and come up with a bloody corpse.

I can avoid the matter no longer, and so I summon Beatrix to the office. We need to discuss this one way or another. It may as well be here and now.

She comes looking sheepish. The irony is not lost on me as she looks up under her lashes at me. I know she is guilty as sin. She knows I know. Antoine knows. I would say there are cubs in the pack who already know. The question is what charade of justice and discipline will play out here. Killing humans is deeply taboo, for obvious reasons.

“Beatrix, you killed a man last night,” I say.

She smiles, looking almost proud. Antoine’s brows rise as he takes in this expression of hers. He will remember this and add it to the story, I am sure. So much for a tearful, repentant mate.

“Yes,” she says.

“I want to know why.”

The smile slips away, and her eyes go flat the way they do when she has no intention of talking. This vault of hers is the thing that most frustrates me. In moments like these she seems entirely impenetrable.

“Thank you, Antoine,” I say. “I will handle this.”

“Yes, Ma?tre ,” he says, bowing out of the room.

“Beatrix, you have to stop doing that.”

“Stop doing what? Murder?”

“No. You have to stop going inside and locking yourself away. There is nothing you have to hide from me. I need you to understand that. You cannot disappoint me, or anger me, no matter what you do.”

“That’s not true,” she says immediately. “There are plenty of things I could do if I wanted to make you angry.”

“Do you? Want to make me angry?”

She doesn’t answer that. She just looks at me with that impenetrable expression, half-blank, half-ominous. There is power in this young woman. She is young, but what she draws on is ageless. The energy in the room does not emanate from her alone. I can feel her unknown ancestry with us so keenly I can practically smell it.

“You can’t publicly kill people in the village,” I say. “It will cause terror among the people.”

“Good. I want them to be afraid. If they are hurting others, I want them to stop. I want them to know that there is a consequence. Not something that might happen once they die, but something that will happen to them here and now, something that will take everything from them.”

“What did the damn man do that warranted a public mauling and execution?”

“He wanted to take a waitress against her will. He was talking about it in the tavern. I decided to kill him.”

I try to hide my reaction, and fail. I am deeply impressed. I like where this impulse comes from. I like how strong she is, and how obsessed she is with bringing justice. Most I know are eager to offload that responsibility to anybody else. It is a very good trait for an alpha’s mate, or it would be if it could be tamed into something a little more civilized.

I try a new tactic, impressing on her the very real stakes I do not think she has considered, even under a hail of gunfire.

“You could be hurt. We could both have been killed.”

She gives a little shrug. “If it happens, it happens. I’m sorry you were involved. I didn’t know you were there. But I don’t care what happens to me.”

“I need you to be safe,” I tell her. “I did not wait all my life to meet you, to finally love you, to lose you in a matter of weeks because you don’t think your life has value unless you are protecting someone else.”

“What are you? A therapist?”

“No. But that might be a good idea for you,” I say. “I should look into bringing one to the chateau.”

She groans. “I regret saying that.”

That makes me laugh. She doesn’t regret the murder. But she regrets the notion of getting help. I can’t imagine a therapist who would be able to handle her, if I am to be honest. It would have to be someone capable of defending themselves, mentally, emotionally, and potentially physically.

“You’re putting more people at risk than just yourself, or me,” I tell her. “The villagers will defend themselves from what they think are wild animal attacks. You put the whole pack at risk of being shot if they are seen in their wolf forms. And then what? Then more rumors of wolves being shot and dead men being found. I won’t have you die because you’ve decided you are an avenger of the downtrodden. And I won’t have the pack becoming hunted on their own land. If you insist on sneaking out and murdering people, I will have no choice but to shackle you in the dungeon.”

She smiles. She tries to hide it, but it is there. I get to see her genuine smile so rarely, it is hard not to enjoy it, even though it comes from a rebellious place.

“That was a real threat, Beatrix. You will always be my mate, but you do not always have to be free if you cannot control your impulses.”

“The same way you controlled yours when you spent ten million on me and then dragged me out of the orphanage? Or the same way you controlled yours when you killed that man the other night?”

“That was different.”

“Why?”

“Because neither of those actions had any risk to my life or anyone else’s, Duplante’s aside and he forfeited his.”

She shakes her head. “No,” she says. “You’re just as bad as me, but you grew up wearing fancy suits and you think you’re better.”

We have reached an impasse that I can tell will not soon be bridged. I love my mate with all I am, but I cannot seem to get through to her. I need help. We need help.

“I am going to find us some kind of therapy,” I tell her. “But before that happens, I am going to whip you for what you did last night. I watched bullets fly over your head…”

“It was fun, wasn’t it.”

“No. It was not fun. It was dangerous,” I growl the words while secretly agreeing, yes, it was fun. It was fun in the way things that can never happen again are fun.

She smiles at me sweetly, almost innocently. I really feel that she did what she thought was right. But we almost died. And it was reckless, stupid, and it could have been handled in a sane way.

“I don’t even know where to begin disciplining you for almost getting us both shot,” I snort.

“Maybe don’t? Maybe I’ve learned my lesson?”

I walk around the desk, sit back against it, then lean forward and run my fingers under her chin. “Have you, Trixie? Have you learned anything? Did it frighten you when you heard those bullets?”

“No,” she says. “But it scared me when I saw you dropping back, trying to save me. That scared me a lot. I am sorry. Really. I never want you to be hurt. I don’t care what happens to me, but you are you, and you have a whole pack and…”

“Beatrix, you matter as much as I do! I feel for you as you feel for me, do you understand? If anything was ever to happen to you, I’d be ruined forever. My life would never be the same.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, her face crumpling. “I just wanted… he was going to… I didn’t know you were there. I didn’t think you’d be in danger.”

I believe her. I stayed hidden. She did not know she was almost getting me killed. One way to look at this would be that I almost got the pair of us killed by letting her go into town. I should have stopped her when she started breaking the rules, not once she had already killed someone.

“In the future, when you hear something like that, you come to me. You let me handle it. I will ensure justice is done as it should be done. You have seen me do it, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” she whispers. “But I wanted to do it myself. I wanted him to… I wanted to be the one who made him feel like prey. I wanted his last moments to be knowing in his bones that he is not the one who decides what happens to others. I wanted revenge.”

I kiss the top of her head. Who am I to say that any of these impulses were wrong? We cannot have a village full of bits of people, but her reasoning is impeccable.

“Talk to me first,” I say. “Please. So I can keep you and the pack safe.”

“I’m sorry I almost got us killed. You shouldn’t have come for me. You should have let whatever was going to happen, happen.”

“Absolutely not.” I grip her chin and force her to look at me. “I would die a thousand times for you on your worst day, do you understand? There is nothing more important to me than protecting you, no matter what you do.”

Tears well in her eyes. “I don’t deserve you to love me like this.”

“Yes,” I say. “You do.”