Page 43 of The Alpha Dire Wolf (Bloodlines & Bloodbonds #1)

Sylvie

“S ylvie!”

I ignored the shout, walking on. I didn’t run. I just kept walking. Away from the meeting area. Away from the hate.

Away from him.

“Sylvie, wait!”

I didn’t. If he wanted to, he could catch me, so why should I slow for him? My car was in sight. I could get in it and leave. Just go home.

Only if you ignore the storm and how it wants to kill you.

How that was any different than staying, I wasn’t so sure.

“Sylvie, please stop.”

He was right behind me now. A second later, he was in front of me. Blocking my path. I stepped around him and kept going. I’d gotten three more steps before Lincoln appeared back in front of me. He grabbed my shoulders, stopping me.

“Please—”

“Don’t touch me,” I hissed, shaking his hands free of me. “I want no part of your plan.”

“You don’t understand,” he growled, twisting to keep facing me as I moved around him once more.

I stopped, facing him. “You’re right, I don’t!

” I shouted in his face. “Because nobody will tell me a damn thing, including you. I thought you were, but it was just lies. You didn’t even have the decency to tell me that you were using me to get closer to me.

You had a plan to take me to bed because somehow that would prove whether I was evil or not to some senior citizen wolf who probably can’t even see me! ”

Lincoln’s mouth opened, but I didn’t let him get a word in. Not yet. He could damn well wait.

“And to think,” I said quietly, the anger fading, replaced by cold disdain, “I was starting to care for you. To think that maybe, somehow, there was something between us.”

“There is something between us,” Lincoln insisted.

“Yeah. A wall. One I’m never tearing down,” I said coldly, walking on and trying to ignore the feeling of his eyes on my back.

“Sylvie,” he said, jogging after me. “You’re operating with only half the truth here.”

“Am I?” I asked, meeting his eyes without flinching at the blue and gold fires. “Did you, or did you not, hide the truth from me?”

His face screwed up in a grimace. “It’s not that simple,” he protested.

“Yes,” I said softly, “it is.” Then I kept going.

“You claim you want to know the truth. Now you’re walking away, refusing to hear it.”

I laughed. “Your problem is thinking that I could believe a word that comes out of your mouth. You would say anything to get me in bed, it seems. What would you have done if you got me there? Checked my hymen? If it’s intact, was I a good enough girl for you?

If you broke it, would you be my savior?

Bad news, mister wolf, it’s long gone. Guess I’m the bad girl now. ”

I hadn’t even lifted my foot from the ground when the darkest, angriest snarl I’d ever heard erupted from Lincoln’s throat. It was the first time he’d ever directed it at me, and I froze, basic human fight-or-flight instincts kicking into high gear and urging me to run .

Lincoln stalked up next to me and around the front. “Hate me if you must,” he said with bared teeth, “but don’t you ever suggest that I would use you for sex like that.”

His chest was heaving, his eyes narrowed to slits.

“Maybe I didn’t tell you everything. But I had reasons for that.

I’ll tell you, if you’d like to hear the whole story.

Or you could claim to want to know but walk away anyway.

Judge me on half the information. Just like my people tried to do to you until I came up with this plan . ”

I ground my teeth together at the challenge in his voice.

“A plan, by the way,” he added in a calmer, less threatening voice, “that was designed to try to prove you innocent , by the way. Though I’m sure that gets in the way of your fun little narrative that I was doing everything in my power to bend you over and fill you from behind until you screamed your throat raw with pleasure. ”

His eyes bored into me the entire time, giving me no room to breathe, no room to conceal the primitive, need-driven reaction that occurred deep within me at his words. A reaction I could not control, though I did not desire it.

“Fine,” I said hoarsely, able to only inject a fraction of the sarcasm I wished for, “tell me the real story.”

Lincoln eyed me for a second or two and then nodded once. “Let’s go.”

“Where?”

“Back to my cabin. Where we can sit and talk, like civilized people who are willing to actually listen to what the other has to say. Instead of shouting in public.” He gestured around us.

“These are my people. They don’t need to see my dirty laundry aired like this.

They have enough problems and fears of their own right now.

I need them to know I will solve them all as well, if cooler heads prevail. ”

The care for his people was admirable, even through my anger. I could not take that from him.

“Fine.” I set off for his house, not waiting to walk there with him. It was a handful of minutes’ walk, and we made it in silence.

“Any water?” he asked, doffing his shoes and heading right for the kitchen.

“Okay.”

He served us a pair of glasses filled with cold, clear water, putting them down on the table. We sat stiffly, facing each other.

“Where should I start?” he asked. “What do you want to know?”

“Everything.”

“A simple question. A complex answer.” He drank.

“On the one hand, my part with you is quite simple. Ever since the first time I saw you, my wolf and I have been drawn to you, like a magnet to metal. I don’t know why or how it happened.

But something about you calls to me, Sylvie. When I’m not around you, I …”

His fingers curled around the table until the wood creaked. He glanced down, and with visible effort made himself relax.

I took a sip of water, looking away and trying to stay composed. Being alone with him like this, despite everything, was more difficult than I’d expected. Especially when he went ahead and said things like that to me.

“All I knew,” he continued eventually after recomposing himself, “is that I needed to spend more time with you. That was a problem, however, in the eyes of the elders.”

“Elders.” I chewed on my lower lip. “That would be the group of retirement home men who looked like they should be playing shuffleboard, not fighting evil?”

Lincoln snickered. “Shuffleboard. Oh, yes, I’ll have to remember that one.”

“I don’t understand, though,” I said, placing both hands on the table. “I am fairly confident that I’ve never met them before. Any of them. And I know I certainly have never done anything to offend them so badly.”

“I know.” Lincoln’s eyes softened with unexpected compassion, throwing me wildly off balance. “They’ve never met you either, not before tonight. But they have met your grandmother.”

“What?”

He nodded. “They’re convinced she was an agent of evil.

Thus, through her, you are too. Which is why they didn’t want me to spend time around you.

Which was not an option for me. That was the one thing I knew I had to do.

So I told them my plan was to get close to you, to verify that you weren’t this agent of evil they suspected. ”

“So you were using me. Lying to me, just to prove something.” I sighed.

“What?” Lincoln cried. “No. That’s not it at all. You’re not understanding.”

“I think I am,” I told him. “You had ulterior motives while seeing me.”

“But that’s not …”

I leveled a finger, quieting him. “You did too, Lincoln. You pried into my life. You asked questions that weren’t natural conversation. You needed to know things about me. You were trying to figure out if I was using you.”

“Fine! Yes. I was.”

“I thought so.”

He waved his hand dismissively. “You’ve still got it all wrong, though. I was trying to figure it out.”

“Figure what out?”

“If what I was feeling was genuine, or if you had put me under some sort of spell.” He laughed bitterly. “I lied to my pack for you, Sylvie. So that I could spend more time with you. I’m their alpha, I’m supposed to lead by example. But instead, I lied to them, to see more of you. Because I—”

His fist came down, smashing the table and cracking it.

“It was a lot less scary to believe you had enchanted me than it was to think I was falling so hard and so fast for you naturally. All right?” He tossed his hands in the air helplessly, not something I saw often from him.

“There. You have the truth now. All of it.”

I sat back, thinking of what to do next. He seemed so passionate. So honest, and most of all, so … unsure. Had he never fallen for someone before?

“So,” I asked, taking one thing and latching on to it. “ Am I an agent of evil?”

He snorted. “I’ve been convinced you weren’t since the first time we exchanged words in the forest. But that wasn’t enough.

You know the secret I must protect now, the people I lead.

I had to make totally sure. For them too, not just for me.

If you have to hate me for that, so be it.

But I won’t do them more harm. I already lied to them. ”

I didn’t want to hate him. Just the opposite. But it was hard. I’d suffered a lot. The betrayal of my most recent romantic relationship, of course. Losing my grandmother. Nearly being killed several times. The revelation of this whole new world.

“Tell me more about the Chained,” I said. “And why do your elders believe my grandmother would be aligned with it? She was a good person.”

“The Chained,” he echoed, pausing to take a drink of water and emptying his glass this time.

“What is it?”

“We don’t know,” he admitted. “We know it’s an evil entity of some sort.

Centuries and centuries ago, it came to this land, intent on ruling it and making it over to look like its home.

Our ancestors fought back. They won, eventually, but they were not strong enough to kill it.

Instead, they harnessed the power of the very forest itself and bound it together, creating a tomb at the heart of the forest that kept it contained. ”

“They didn’t do a great job, it seems.”

He smiled tightly. “Some of its power leaks through. We don’t know why. But it gathers over time. Pooling, until it’s ready to act, to try to free itself. Like a hundred and fifty years ago. When it attacked the village. Your village.”

“Is that where my grandmother comes in? I mean, she wasn’t that old but her grandparents could have been, I suppose? Great-grandparents?”

Lincoln looked uneasy. “Take a drink of water.”

I frowned at him, but did so.

“Was there ever anything unusual about your grandmother? Anything maybe, special?”

I thought it over, but it didn’t take long to know what he meant. “Our intuition,” I said.

“Intuition?”

“We can sense danger. I didn’t know she could do it too, until I read a journal entry recently. But I have a sixth sense for danger. My body warns me if it’s coming.”

Lincoln nodded slowly. “That’s how you knew something was out there in the forest that night.”

“Yes.”

“I wondered how you could know before me. Now it makes sense. It also confirms my thoughts that it was after you, not me, if you were sensing danger.”

“What does that mean, though?”

“It means your grandmother wasn’t human. She was a witch. An extraordinarily powerful one, at that.”

I stared at him for a long time. Then I laughed. Hard and long until my stomach hurt and my cheeks were stained with tear tracks. “Yeah, right!”

But Lincoln wasn’t laughing.

“Wait.” I shook my head, staring at the table and trying to process everything he was telling me. “But if that’s the case. If she was a witch, wouldn’t I also be one?”

“Now you know why my people were worried about you and me. They thought that perhaps you had cast a spell on me. Twisted my mind. Made me fall for you. They thought your grandmother was in league with the Chained, and therefore you are too.”

“But I’m not a witch.” I looked up at him. “Am I?”

I looked at her. Waiting. Her face slowly opened wide.

“Holy shit, Lincoln. How much else have you been hiding from me, lying to me about? You knew all this time I was a witch and said nothing?”

“I—”

His response was interrupted by a heavy knocking at the door.