Page 32 of The Alpha and the Baker

Castiel

Cut and Run

I ran.

My entire world came crashing down with just a few words, and all I could do was run.

The second I’d fastened my pants, I split, sprinting out the front door and leaving my car behind. I couldn’t think, couldn’t calm down. I had ruined everything. Not just for myself, but for my whole family.

Fuck.

Fuck, fuck, fuck!

The expletives repeated in my brain as I burst into my wolf form in an alley and ran all the way home, panic pumping through me in a sticky, awful sludge. What-ifs flooded my mind like acid, burning me from the inside out.

What if Felicia was a hunter? They were incredibly rare, more like boogeymen that we told children about to make sure they behaved, but I’d heard stories about them tricking shifters and wiping out entire packs, or scattering them by taking down the alpha.

I couldn’t imagine sweet, kind Felicia being anything like that, but what other explanation was there for her knowing exactly what I was?

What had tipped her off? I thought I had been so careful! Clearly, I was an utter moron, because she’d somehow puzzled it out before our first date. Had it been something at the reunion? That was the only thing that made sense to me.

I didn’t stop, didn’t slow down, until I reached Chris’s house.

I barreled through his front. Normally, I had the good sense and manners to knock, but this was far from normal.

Truthfully, I didn’t even remember entering.

One moment I was a wolf, all four feet pounding against the ground while terror and stress rolled through me, the next I was a human stumbling into my beta’s living room.

“Cas?” I heard Chris’s uncertain voice call out to me.

Shaking my head, I came back to reality enough to realize that my best friend and second-in-command was standing in his kitchen, a jar of pickles in one hand and a glass in the other.

“I fucked up,” was all I could say, because how could I even begin to explain how monumentally I had ruined things?

Ever since I was young, I’d wanted to follow in the footsteps of my father to be the best alpha that I could be.

I wanted everyone in my pack to feel safe, supported, and help us continue to flourish the same way he had.

But now I had possibly invited calamity and extinction right to their door.

And for what? For a woman I barely knew?

But even as I thought that last, vicious sentence, a large part of me objected to it. It was like my mind couldn’t unify the idea of Felicia being a bloodthirsty murderer of Wild Folk with the woman I’d gotten to know.

Clearly, I was biased. Far too biased and a danger to my people.

God, I was so ashamed.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Calm down. What happened? Did the date go poorly?”

I collapsed on his couch. If Bethany was awake, she would hear every single word of my failure, but I didn’t care. My pack deserved to know how I’d doomed them. Like an idiot.

“No, it was actually amazing. Maybe the best I’ve ever had.” My heart ached at the thought. I really had been flying high, beyond cloud nine, only to come slamming back to Earth so hard it felt like my spine was still lying in shattered pieces around me.

Chris put the pickle jar back in the fridge, then crossed over to the couch and sat beside me. “What’s going on, then? I gotta admit, you’re freaking me out. I haven’t seen you this panicky since you had to hold your first funeral as an alpha.”

Ugh. That had been intense. It wasn’t like I hadn’t seen my father preside over nearly ten of his own as alpha, but it was rather the magnitude of giving a beloved pack member who was much older than me a proper send-off that honored their legacy and helped the remaining members of our pack heal.

I had indeed been a wreck, unable to sleep and racked with worry.

But this was so much worse.

“She knew what I was.”

I could smell Chris’s anxiety spike and hear his heartbeat pick up. “You mean…”

“Yeah, she knew I was a shifter. A wolf, specifically.”

“How did this come up? Did she corner you with it? Try to attack you?”

I shook my head and replayed the entire scene in my head.

Unfortunately, thinking about that made my mind naturally drift to what had happened right before.

The soft sighs that had escaped her beautiful, full lips, those thick, strong thighs I had gripped under my broad palms. The silkiness of her skin, the way she looked at me— all of it.

Surely, that couldn’t have been an act, right? She’d have to be a sociopath to pull that off.

But what other explanation was there?

“No, nothing like that. We were actually talking about her perfume.”

“Wait, her perfume? I’m a little lost.”

I let out a dry, bitter chuckle. “She smelled so good that I asked her what she was wearing. Like I would buy her a bottle or something. She told me it was fucking shaved pieces of Irish Spring that she’d put into her lotion because a nature documentary said a lot of wolves like that scent, so she figured I might too since I was a wolf. ”

Chris didn’t say anything, and I shot him an uncertain look, prepared for the condemnation. But he looked more incredulous than anything else.

“I’m sorry, I must be hallucinating. Did you say Irish Spring, as in the bar soap?”

I nodded, and now that I was saying it out loud, it sounded really fucking stupid. “Yeah.”

“There’s no way that’s true. She’s gotta be full of shit or was messing with you.”

“I dunno, man,” I said, more than a bit exasperated. “Look it up if you want!”

What a strange thing to joke about. That made even less sense than wolves loving bar soap in the first place. But I stayed locked in my thoughts while Chris fiddled with his phone.

“Would you look at that! It’s true.”

“Huh?”

He turned his phone toward me and sure enough, I saw a montage of wolves going ham and rubbing themselves all over various pieces of enrichment buildings. They looked pretty into it.

“And that’s all because of soap?” I asked, yanked out of my spiral by the sheer incredulousness of it all. Wolves were apex predators, a combination of majesty and terror that helped balance entire ecosystems. They weren’t supposed to be like kitties reacting to catnip.

“That’s what it says. How did we never know this, but a human did?”

The dread slammed back into me. “Do you think she’s a hunter? That she used it to, I dunno, lower my defenses or something?”

No , my wolf practically snarled. Not in so many words, of course, as he didn’t speak English per se, but it was more an overwhelming wave of contrary opinion that rolled through my mind.

“I mean, I don’t think she needed bar soap to do that.

” My beta could tell that clearly wasn’t helping my mood, so he stood and fetched his laptop from the dining room table.

“Why don’t we look her up? Do a little research.

If she doesn’t have social media or anything in her background, then we can surmise she’s a hunter. But you know how rare that is, right?”

“I do. It’s just hard to think of any other reason she’d clock me so easily.”

Chris raised his eyebrows.

“Wait, what’s up with that face?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know it doesn’t work when you try to play dumb with me.”

He let out a good-natured sigh and sat back down, putting the laptop on the coffee table in front of us. “I know you were running around like a chicken with your head cut off, but a lot of us weren’t exactly… subtle at the reunion.”

That came as a surprise to me. “What do you mean by that?”

“Well, you have people transforming right and left, especially the young ones. And according to several others, Gammy McCallister literally referenced fairies. I know the baker got into the punch, but she didn’t seem completely out of it when I talked to her.”

“Wait, when did you have a chance to talk to her?”

Although the first part of the day had gone by insanely fast for me, everything had definitely slowed down once I got to spend one-on-one time with Felicia.

If somebody asked me, I could recall every minute we’d spent together.

Every word. Every micro-expression that had crossed that beautiful face of hers.

“Dude, multiple times. Especially since Arietty kept running up to her for some reason.”

Ah yes, Arietty. The whole reason we went on a date in the first place. Now that I thought about it, it probably was pretty darn suspicious for me to just pop up in the middle of the city with three giant dogs in tow.

Was I that oblivious? Or did I just have a blind spot when it came to gorgeous bakers?

“I see.”

Chris patted my shoulder. I appreciated the comfort, even if now I felt stupider than ever.

“Hey, I know this isn’t ideal, but it’s not like you’re the only one who dropped the ball.

Besides, maybe you’re not the only shifter she knows.

She handled the reunion so well and was super chill about lying in a pile of wolves.

Maybe she’s the one who bungled telling you she knew about our world. ”

If that was the case, then I’d really embarrassed myself by bolting out like that. Still, the possibility was comforting, because imagining Felicia was a serial killer who hunted my kind made my stomach twist and my mind rebel. “Let’s look her up.”

“Shouldn’t be too hard if she’s a regular human.”

I wanted to argue that there was nothing regular about Felicia, but I figured it wasn’t really the time. Especially if she did turn out to be a hunter.

First was a general search using the standard engine, and a lot of information about her bakery came up.

There was a small article in the paper as well as some advertisements.

I had a hard time believing that a prolific hunter of shifters, fairies, and other magical folk would be running Facebook ads for cakes.

Still, I supposed stranger things had happened—such as wolves and Irish Spring—so we pressed on.