Page 15 of The Wild Wolf’s Rejected Mate (The Five Packs #5)

12

ANNIE

Run!

Yes. Don’t need to tell me twice. I’m already gone.

I leap from the swing, landing hard, jarring my ankles, and I bolt, sprinting past the banked ashes of the females’ fire, deaf from the blood rushing in my ears.

Heat.

No.

Hell no.

Faster!

I cut across the packs’ curving, worn paths, making a beeline for the exit, pushing harder and harder until every muscle in my legs screams. As I pass the bonfire, I hear a male say, “Alpha?” But by the time the sound reaches me, I’m yards away.

Don’t look back!

I won’t. I feel Justus on my heel, his breath hot on the back of my neck.

My gown comes untucked, so I gather the fabric and clutch it to my chest, freeing my legs to pump faster. The pecking voice shrieks in my brain, dragging memories from the back of my brain to flog me with so I’ll go faster.

My brown flannel shirt, sweat soaked and reeking of cum.

A sad nest of dry leaves.

The cold, rushing river.

What a sad female you are.

I don’t want such a pathetic coward for a mate.

What would my pack say if I brought you back?

You smell more like food than female.

You stink like prey.

A female like you would make weak, spindly young.

I want to puke, but I don’t dare slow down, not even a little so I can bend over and retch. Justus’s steps thud behind me.

I reach the narrow camp entrance and burst through, instantly losing my footing on the steep, rocky trail that leads down to the woods below. My arms windmill as I desperately try to find my balance. Justus growls.

“Easy, easy,” he says, so close, too close.

I don’t have time for balance, so I lurch forward, surfing the loose pebbles down the slope, keeping upright by staggering from tree trunk to boulder. Almost at the bottom, I trip on an exposed root and crash to a knee. I cry out, scrambling forward on all fours until I can scrabble back to my feet.

I’m out of my mind, and I can’t stop.

Sightless eyes.

Green and white checkered tiles.

Red blood.

The voice hurls bombs at me, dredging deep in my memories, like horror is fuel, like that’s what I run on.

Camphor.

Rattling lungs.

A white sheet almost flat except for the knobs of Ma’s knees and the ridges of her hips.

The voice scrapes the very bottom.

Declan Kelly at our door, smirking, with a palmful of fangs. “Sorry, Aileen. This is all that’s left of him. Had to pick these out of my leg. The rest of him is in my belly.”

Ma falling to her knees as Declan Kelly belched.

Why am I back here again? I’ve already lived through all this. I grew up. I’ve come all this way, miles and miles from where I started, and here I am, fleeing, but back , not away from , and I can’t stop. My momentum has the force of a super magnet.

The trail levels, and I find my stride again, even though I’m favoring my right leg since my left knee is scraped and bleeding. I’m not running as fast as I was, but Justus isn’t gaining on me. The trees become sparse, fields of wildflowers opening on either side. Their stalks and new buds are dark outlines in the moonlight.

Where am I even going? I can’t outrun my own body.

But I can’t stop, either. The voice has hijacked my control center—I don’t even know where my wolf has gotten to—and I’ve never learned the trick of calming myself down. Box breathing, balloon breathing, visualization, counting items, listing colors, naming a thing I can see, smell, hear, taste, and feel, plunging my face in cold water to stimulate my vagus nerve—I can panic through it all.

I’m doing it right now, slow jogging through this field of bluebells and Jack-in-the-pulpits and Dutchman’s breeches. I can see the past clear as a picture—me, out of my mind, naked in the dirt, ass up in the air. I can smell my shame, hear the river, taste the blood from where my teeth bit through my cheek.

I can’t do it again.

My fear spikes, the scent charring my nostrils. I trip over my own feet, cry out, and pitch forward.

A howl rings out. Something darts around me.

I land hard, face down, on a huge heap of fur, the air knocked from my lungs.

Freeze!

I do not need to be told.

I’m lying across a wolf. Justus’s wolf. He’s on his side. I’m sprawled on top of him. He slid underneath me while I fell like a baseball player stealing home. He’s very quiet and very still except for his flank that lifts and lowers me as he breathes.

I tilt my head so I can see his face. He’s already craning his neck to look at me, his soulful wolf eyes watchful and guarded.

I haven’t seen this wolf in years. A fist squeezes my heart.

He caught me a goose. He made himself a pair of alien antennae out of sunflowers. He sat beside me on the porch. Before he figured out what was wrong with me, he tried to hunt down my bad mental health.

I’ve missed him, and I didn’t even know it.

With his eyes locked on mine, he slowly rolls under me so he’s on his back, so I’m lying on soft belly. He slowly sprawls his legs in an X, rests his head back on the ground, and lolls his long tongue out of the side of his mouth. He’s pretending he’s dead. Like I killed him when I fell.

I giggle.

He snuffles and picks his head back up so he can see me. Wolves can’t smile, not really, but it sure seems like it, with his golden eyes dancing.

“Hi,” I say, softly, and try to push myself up without squishing his belly by accident.

He rumbles, lifts his head, and licks my face, chin to forehead. Right up, in, and over my nose.

“Oh, gross!” I roll off him, landing on my butt. He scrambles to his paws, backs off maybe three feet, and sits on his haunches. Was he always this huge?

I draw my knees to my chest, doing my best to cover myself with my mess of a gown. A strip hangs off where I stepped on it, and there’s mud on the hem and grass stains everywhere.

Justus’s wolf flops onto his belly, laying his chin on the ground and gazing up at me with his golden eyes. Did they always glow like that?

His tail thwaps the tall grass behind him. I startle. He drops his tail with a whump.

I watch him. He watches me.

He slowly folds his ears back until they are flush against his head. He looks almost like a pup. A gargantuan, razor-clawed, sharp-fanged, oversized pup.

Very, very slowly, he raises his right ear. Just his right ear.

What does he hear? There’s a mouse rustling in the underbrush and a bullfrog croaking over in the woods, but otherwise, there’s nothing but the wind and our breath.

I frown.

He slowly lowers his right ear and lifts his left.

What is he doing now?

Even more slowly, he lowers his right ear and simultaneously lifts his tail straight up in the air like a handle.

He’s kidding around. I’ve lost my mind, run a mile in a bedsheet, and now I’m sitting in the dirt, and this wolf is joking with me. Oh, and lest I forget, I’m in heat. Explains why the other females today were enjoying their hot cups of tea by the fire while I was desperate for a breeze.

I can’t do this again.

My panic rises, and Justus’s wolf whines. He drops both tail and ears and wriggles forward on his belly, his furry rump working side to side.

I stretch my legs straight, my shoulders slumping. He’s not going to hurt me. He’s a sweet wolf. Justus is sweet.

I’m the problem.

Justus’s wolf sidles up and plops his head on my thigh. He stares up at my face, the angle making it look like he’s giving me a rueful smile.

“I wish I wasn’t like this,” I tell him, my eyes prickling with tears.

An owl screeches in the distance, and I glance away. In that split second, the wolf disappears, and Justus is there instead, sitting cross-legged beside me, knees up for modesty.

I hang my head, my cheeks heating. I was talking to the wolf. I didn’t mean to say that to him .

“I don’t wish you were any different,” he says, gruff and gentle.

I sniff. “You can’t possibly feel that way. I don’t.”

He shrugs. “We see things differently.”

That’s his story now. “‘Pathetic coward,’ remember?” I spit at him. “‘A female like you would make weak, spindly young.’”

I don’t want to be bitter like this, not anymore. I know I’m throwing his words from years ago in his face, and he’s apologized, and I believe he meant it. I don’t want to make him feel sorry again. I just want him to be honest.

His head bows forward, his long hair falling in his face. My stomach knots. I don’t want to hurt him. I don’t want to hurt me , either, but I’ve got a multi-tool in my brain, and it’s all knives, and every edge is serrated.

His bare chest rises, and he lifts his head back up, skewering me with his gaze, shining gold in the dark. “Something happened to you,” he says.

My lower lip trembles. I don’t have to answer. He’s not asking.

“You survived.” He takes a deep breath, and his nostrils flare. “I hadn’t found you yet, and I wasn’t there to protect you, and you survived. Then I found you, and like an idiot, I walked away, and you kept surviving. Our young will be tough as hell. They’ll be so, so strong.” His deep voice is too ragged to be bullshit.

I mash my lips together to stop the trembling, but all that does is make my chin wobble.

“And they’ll be fast as hell on two feet,” he says, his lips quirking, coaxing me, inviting me to believe his fairy tale where the tiny thumb-sized female ends up riding a sparrow to her prince rather than being eaten by any one of the monstrous goldfish or butterflies that stalk her like dinner.

We can run.

The pecking voice sidetracks me for a second. For once, it’s not an order or a warning. Is it bragging on us? Is it agreeing with someone? A male?

I give my head a shake to clear it and then look around to distract myself from the need to answer him. When I fell, we left the trail and landed in the wildflowers. The air around us is sweet from the stalks we crushed, the night air punctuated with honey from the goldenrod, vanilla from the milkweed, and carrot from the Queen Anne’s Lace.

Justus sits alongside me, facing south while I face the opposite direction. We’re surrounded by tall grass and new spring blooms, blue and purple in the dark. Even this close, butt naked and sitting cross-legged, he’s clearly a dangerous dominant male who smells like alpha no matter what he says, with wild hair and tattoos, fearless and assured—in the middle of a bunch of buttercups and bluebells.

He gazes patiently at my profile, waiting for me to say something.

“You were following me,” I say. “You could have caught me at any time.”

“I wasn’t trying to catch you. I was following you wherever you were going. I’d follow you anywhere.”

Is he sweet-talking me? Males don’t talk to me like that, but I’ve overheard Tye with Kennedy, and Ivo with about every unmated female in the pack.

I scrunch my toes in the dewy grass and clutch my gown tighter to my chest, balling the fabric right above my heart. “You say that.”

After we mated by the river, he bolted like his tail was on fire and stayed gone for years. Although that’s not what Diantha said. She said he came back to Quarry Pack to check on me. The thought calms my heart.

Justus reaches to his side and picks a panicle of aster from its peduncle. The only reason I know the scientific terms is because when we were pups, Abertha would call us things like panicle and peduncle and bugbane and warty goblet . I thought they were weird witchy nicknames. I didn’t realize until I was older that they were real words for plant parts.

Why am I thinking about that now? When Justus is reaching over and offering me the aster?

While moonlight is falling on his face, illuminating his expression like a spotlight on a dark stage, and the bond shimmers and flows between us?

He wants , he hopes , but he can’t let on, and he doesn’t—not by the cast of his jaw or set of his mouth or even by the look in his eyes. He has to be above desire like a monk. The stakes are too high to put any skin in this game at all.

I know how that feels.

His longing and mine both thump in my chest, off rhythm, a staccato beat that feels familiar and new and scary and right. I splay my palm flat on the hot skin above the gown.

“Can you feel me there?” he asks.

I nod.

“I feel you, too.” He fists his empty hand and presses it to his chest.

“What’s it like?” I ask.

He takes a breath. Swallows. Lowers his hands to rest on his knees. “Like I’m not alone,” he finally says, eyes lowered, shoulders braced, muscles tensed.

Defenseless.

I don’t want to leave him alone, but I can’t change. Fate knows I’ve tried, but I can’t—not the past or the voice or who I am. But I don’t have to, do I? He’s not asking me to fix myself. He’s just offering me a flower.

The aster is dangling from his hand like an afterthought. Like I’ve left him with it.

How can I leave him like that? When he’s mine? When all I need to do is reach out my hand?

I get a good grip on the gown with one hand, and careful not to move too quickly—he’s a big male, after all—I reach over and pluck the aster from his fingers.

He glances over, surprised.

I tuck my knees closer to my chest, trying to hide from a sudden feeling of exposure.

A smile like a sunrise breaks across his face.

I delicately sniff the flower because that’s what you’re supposed to do. “Thank you,” I say and smile politely.

“You like that one?” he asks, his whole manner changing, his shoulders relaxing, the furry tips of his pointed wolfish ears perking up.

“I do. I like asters.”

He reaches into tall grasses around us, plucks another flower, and offers it to me, grinning. “How about this one?”

“Queen Anne’s Lace.”

“That’s what it’s called?” he asks as I take it.

I nod. “Sometimes you’ll hear folks call it wild carrot.” That’s the name I learned from Abertha. Queen Anne’s Lace is what the humans in Chapel Bell call it, but I think the name is prettier.

“You can eat it?”

“There’s a little root, and you can, technically, I guess, but I wouldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Looks too much like poison hemlock, and it doesn’t taste good enough to risk the mistake.”

He growls low and says, “All right. Give that back here.” He takes the Queen Anne’s Lace, tosses it into the field, and picks me a new flower. “What’s this one?”

I take the delicate stem that he nearly crushed to a pulp when plucking it. “That’s Blue-Eyed Mary.”

“Can it kill you?”

I giggle. “No, it’s just pretty to look at.” I pair it with the aster. The blue and purple complement each other well.

“That makes two of you,” he says and holds another flower, a snow trillium, under my nose.

I roll my eyes and take the white bloom with the yellow in the middle. “You’re as silly as your wolf, aren’t you?”

“He’s much worse. He has absolutely no dignity when it comes to you.”

He picks and passes me a bluebell and another aster. I arrange my little bouquet and blush. My skin is hot, the night air is cool, and the heat from Justus’s body warms my left side.

“I like him,” I say softly without looking up from my flowers.

“He likes you, too.” Justus’s voice is tinged with wolf.

I glance over. He’s already looking at me. Our eyes catch.

I feel so small beside him, but not in an intimidated way. More like how it feels to curl up with a book and my lunch at the base of the huge red oak that grows by the greenhouse at Abertha’s cottage.

A wave of mellow warmth washes from my head to my toes. My lower belly twists. This is really happening. I’m going into heat again.

Like he senses my panic gathering, Justus leans over and presses our temples together. I close my eyes and breathe him in.

“I’m scared,” I whisper.

“Me, too,” he says.

I draw back so I can see his eyes again. “What are you scared of?” It’s not a challenge; it’s a serious question.

His face darkens, but he doesn’t look away. “I can’t do it—I can’t make you hate me again.”

“I didn’t hate you,” I say. “Neither of us had a choice. I knew that.”

“I would never have chosen that ,” he says. The pain and shame, the damage , in his voice are jagged claws, and they snag my heart and slice me open. I wouldn’t have, either. I wish I could have saved us both.

“What do we do?” I ask.

He’s quiet for a moment, wrapping his arms around his knees and staring into the distance. His bicep brushes my upper arm. Some kind of gravity urges me to lean into him, but I don’t dare.

Eventually, he clears his throat and meets my eyes again. “When we scout, we go in pairs,” he says. “We could do that. We could be scouts together.”

I understand what he’s saying. If we’re going to do this—and we have to do this—it can’t be like before. There can’t be a bad guy. So we’ll be in it together. “Okay. How do scouts work?”

Some tension leaves his body. “Well, usually, one of us keeps an eye out for threats while the other looks for signs of prey.”

“Dibs on being the one who keeps an eye out for danger,” I say.

He smiles. The tightness in my chest lightens. I made a joke, and he got it. This is good.

“Good. I’m really good at tracking.”

“Elspeth told me.”

“She did?”

“She said when you were little, and Max was teaching the pups to hunt, he had to put out a decoy trail for you so you’d leave some animals for the others.”

He smiles, bashful but clearly pleased. “I wasn’t that good. I was just a bad listener. Max probably figured I’d learn better on my own and out of his hair.”

His arms loop loosely around his knees now as the atmosphere has eased. He is so unlike Quarry Pack males. They take compliments as their due—or at least they act that way. Modesty is weakness.

And no Quarry Pack would sit beside a female in a field of wildflowers, not unless he was about to mount her.

My face catches fire, and I catch a whiff of my slick in the air. I immediately clamp my thighs together, my gaze darting over to Justus to see if he noticed.

He is very obviously pretending that he didn’t. His pupils are blown, the gold only a thin ring, and his muscles strain again, his cheekbones coloring. He makes a great show of sifting through the tall grasses at his side, humming under his breath.

“Here’s a good one,” he says, plucks a geranium, and passes it to me. “See, I’m a good tracker. You don’t have that one yet.”

“It’s a wild geranium.”

“Yes, he was. Very wild. He was a very wily foe. Don’t expect me to bag you one of those every day, now.”

“I’ll keep my expectations low.” I struggle against a smile.

He leans over, plucks another, and gives it to me. “Not too low,” he says.

I stop fighting and grin at him. His mouth curves, mirroring mine. “Okay, mighty hunter,” I say.

“Now we’re in accord,” he says, rising to his feet, brushing bits of grass off his hairy, bare thighs. I quickly avert my eyes.

“Ready to go back to camp, Scout?” he asks, low and gentle. “We don’t have to decide anything tonight. It’ll keep for tomorrow.”

I guess it will. I clutch my bouquet in one hand, hold my gown closed with the other, and let Justus help me up by the elbow.

“Okay,” I say.

I let my mate lead me back to his den, and I am bad at my job because the entire way, despite the pecking voice’s best efforts, I don’t dwell on any dangers.

I hold my flowers, and I walk beside my mate in the moonlight.