Chapter Seven
Brodie
C arys was giggling her head off at something I’d said, when I realized Kye had gone through the door in the back. I turned to go make sure he was safe, when I heard the sound of something crashing and his yelp.
By the time I crossed the family room and burst through the door into the sunroom, I could smell his blood.
“Carys, bring the big flashlight!” I yelled.
She’d joked about it when she’d seen I bought one earlier, but right now I was glad I had done that and put it in the charger as well.
The floor beneath me groaned, and I backed away as I tried to peer into the room.
Carys got there seconds later, thrusting the flashlight at me. “Here!”
I turned it on and swept the sunroom, realizing there was a gaping hole in the floor.
Carys gasped. “Oh gods!”
“Stay back,” I told her, then inched forward until I could see how deep the hole was. The edges were jagged, rotten wood and whatever else they’d used to build the floor back in the day.
I could hear Kye, then.
“Aw, fuck,” he grunted in a pained tone. “Don’t you two fall in, too.”
“You okay?” Carys asked, and I realized her human senses didn’t tell her that her brother was bleeding heavily.
“I’ll be fine.”
“Be careful.” I managed to get close enough to see him. The gash somewhere inside his long hair had turned it and any skin it touched blood red. “Ouch, that looks nasty. Did you hurt anything else?”
“What did he hurt?” Carys asked immediately.
“My head. It’s fine.”
It probably was, but he was bleeding too much to not make my wolf anxious at the scent. I’d always been good in a crisis, levelheaded and able to calm others down, and I tried to cling to that instead of letting the wolf control the situation.
Kye got to his feet, wincing as he glanced around. “I think I’m in a crawlspace. It’s a bit deeper than I’d expect, but there’s some old furniture here. Let me just….”
Please be careful. Please don’t get more hurt. “Okay.”
I needed to trust him to be able to take care of himself, especially in a situation where I was too fucking heavy to go close enough to pull him out.
Actually… “Carys? Can you come here and maybe we can human chain? I’m too heavy, but you’re not.”
“Yeah, of course.”
I held the flashlight with one hand and guided her into place with the other. She gasped when she saw all the blood but didn’t say anything. I squeezed her hand.
Kye pulled what seemed like an old desk right to the edge of the hole and clambered on top of it. Then he looked at us, his head poking out of the hole.
“Oh hi,” he said brightly, while blood ran down the side of his face. “Fancy meeting you here.”
Jesus fucking Christ, my mate would be the death of me one day.
“Stay put,” I ordered them, and backed away to grab one of the rugs from the family room. As I lifted one, I saw that Carys had used it to hide a weird stain in the thin, barely there carpet underneath.
I went back and maneuvered the long rug in front of her, then placed about half of it over the edge of the hole.
“Let’s step on this end so it stays put,” I told her, and we placed our feet carefully on top of the rug and hopefully not too close to the edge. “Okay, I’ll hold onto your arm and you reach down to grab Kye.”
She nodded and we did exactly that. Kye, appearing gruesome as hell, grabbed her wrist and she his.
“Now what?” he asked.
“Now you guys hold on while Kye jumps and I yank you back.” They nodded, and I counted down. “Three, two, one, jump!”
It was tricky to be gentle enough while using my strength to pull them both. I couldn’t hurt her, and they still needed to be able to hold onto each other.
My wolf wanted to go all in, and I knew I was leaving behind bruises over the healing ones on her arm—I hated that so much.
I pulled hard, stepping back to give them space, and watched as Carys and Kye were tugged out of the danger zone. We ended up in a haphazard heap on the floor that was still creaking.
They were laughing breathlessly, relieved, but I urged them to move.
“Come on, we need to get out of here.” I held out a hand for Kye and pulled him up. He reached for Carys, and we quickly backed into the family room.
“Holy shit, Kye!” Carys lifted her hands as if to touch her brother, but then didn’t know where it was safe to do so.
“It’s only a cut, it’ll be fine,” he tried to reassure her, but with the blood still dripping—albeit sluggishly, thankfully—it wasn’t working.
“Okay, how about you go fix dinner and I’ll take your brother upstairs and get him cleaned up. I didn’t buy that big first aid kit for nothing, after all.” I gave her what I hoped was a reassuring look, then widened my eyes theatrically. “Do you think I jinxed it?”
She smacked my arm and shook her head. “Oh fuck off. Your house broke him so you get to fix him.” Then she flounced off to the kitchen.
“She’s more affected than she thinks she’s letting on,” Kye murmured softly.
“I know.” I sighed and smiled at him. “Come on, let’s go fix you up.”
He followed me into the main bathroom, where I grimaced at the state of his clothing. “How about you shower first? But obviously don’t get the cut wet.”
He mirrored my expression as he glanced at himself in the mirror. “Oh I’m such a horror show. My hair will be disgusting!”
It would be. In fact…. “Here’s hoping we don’t have to shave any of it.”
The horror in his eyes when he snapped his gaze to mine was kind of funny.
“That’s not funny!”
“It is. Kinda.” I grinned. “I’ll bring you some of your clothes. Get in the shower.” I stepped out of the bathroom and almost stumbled when he called out “Yes, Alpha,” after me.
He’d put his bags in the bedroom earlier that day, so they’d be out of the way. Then he’d piled some of his clothes on top of the dresser by the door. I grabbed clean underwear, pajama pants, and a T-shirt from his selection, and walked back into the bathroom.
It hadn’t occurred to me that he might feel awkward with nudity, because wolves didn’t really care about such things and frankly I saw submissives naked more than I saw them clothed at the clubs.
“Uh,” he managed to say, standing there in the nude, his hand on the shower faucet. The shower was adequate, but the water took time to heat up, and I supposed he was about to turn it on for that.
I quickly put his clothes on the edge of the sink next to the first aid kit I’d already brought out from under it. “Sorry. If this is too awkward for you—”
“No, no. It’s not that. I guess it’s less weird to you?”
I chuckled. “Well, for one, there’s very little modesty within a wolf pack. I’ve tried to be polite about it around you and Carys, but expect me to forget at some point when I need to shift.” I kept my gaze on his face the whole time. As much as part of me wanted to look my fill, this wasn’t the time.
He turned the water on and moved to examine the cut in the mirror again.
“I think the nudity is a similar thing to listening in to others’ conversations,” I continued. “It’s all about living together as harmoniously as possible. That brings some challenges, and you need to be courteous of others’ privacy.”
He hummed thoughtfully, then smiled slightly. “Explain that to me?”
As he stepped back to the shower, this time all the way under the stream while dodging it at the last moment so as not to get his hair wet, I let my eyes wander downward.
He had the cutest bubble butt I’d seen in a while. It was incredibly biteable, and I tore my gaze away at the last moment before he glanced at me questioningly.
“Well, people want some modesty, right? So we don’t stare at others while they’re naked, unless invited to look,” I explained, smirking a little. His blush had little to do with the hot water and that made my wolf preen even though it probably didn’t quite know why it was doing that. “And as for the listening in… well, our hearing is much better than humans’. So we get exposed to things early on. Hearing conversations we shouldn’t, hearing what people do behind closed doors, that sort of thing.”
“Oh… Oh! ”
I laughed at the horror in his voice. “Yeah. Let’s say you learn to close your ears for a lot of the noises you hear in the night.”
“I have so much to learn about werewolves,” he said as he started to scrub some of the blood off his neck. “It’s a whole other culture, for one.”
I hummed thoughtfully. “I guess it is. We were even more different centuries ago. More secretive and most packs lived in total seclusion.”
Kye snickered. “What do you call this house?”
“Okay, but most of the other modern packs I know don’t live quite this remotely. They do tend to live on large properties or adjacent to large nature reserves, though.”
“Well, personally I’m looking forward to learning more. That was what I was going to do tonight after dinner, but we’ll see if my brain has enough energy after all this.” He gestured at his head.
“Yeah, blood loss and injury take a lot out of you.”
He wet a washcloth and turned the shower off. “Can you get the rest from my hairline?”
“Sure, come sit.” I handed him a towel so he could cover himself a bit, and waited until he sat on the toilet lid.
He handed the washcloth to me and tilted his head so I would have a good view of the area where the cut hid inside his thick, dark hair. The issue was that the way he tilted his head made the wolf perk up.
I froze, torn between what the wolf wanted and what I needed to do, Kye’s hazel eyes opened.
“What?” he asked.
Clearing my throat, I shook my head. “It’s uh….” I felt awkward suddenly. Vulnerable. It was a weird feeling to have.
He put his hand on my hip and tugged the hem of my T-shirt. “What is it, Brodie?”
I loved my name on his lips. Almost more than I loved it when he called me Alpha.
I took a deep breath and let it out, then smiled self-deprecatingly. “It’s the way you tilt your head.” Completely unable to stop myself, I ran my fingers along the graceful arc of his neck. “It’s….”
He licked his lips. “Ah.”
“Yeah.” I couldn’t take my hand away or tear my gaze from where I was touching his pale skin. “It’s… a wolf thing.”
I could see the corner of his mouth lift, and then he tilted his head even more.
I rasped out a chuckle. My body was responding to him like it hadn’t to anyone in a very long time. “You’re playing with fire, boy.”
He tongued his lower lip slowly, then whispered, “And what if, sometimes, I like to burn?”
I almost got a head rush from his tone alone. “I’ve put submissives on their knees for lesser reasons.”
His head jerked a little and my gaze locked with his. There was surprise in his eyes, but something else, too. An expression I had seen many times before.
I swayed toward him, but caught myself at the last moment. I cleared my throat and pointedly nodded at his head. “None of them have ever bled in the beginning, though.”
Kye let out a snicker. “So what you’re saying is that you’re one of those Doms who sometimes make subs bleed?”
Smirking, I cupped his jaw with one hand to hold his head still, and started to rub the blood off his face. “Absolutely. All you have to do is ask.”
“Noted.” He closed his eyes, but smiled as I continued to scrub the dried blood off his hairline.
Luckily the moment passed, but it left a seed of something hopeful under my breastbone. Like maybe this could work when I told him the truth about our connection.
The cut turned out to be small and there was no debris inside. I still made sure it was cleaned to my standards, even though Kye whined at me.
By the time I was done and I helped him get dressed—getting the T-shirt over his head without disturbing the cut was a challenge he hadn’t counted on—Carys was hollering at us from downstairs.
We went downstairs and had one of the best meals I had in a while. As we were eating, Kye’s phone dinged.
“An email,” he explained as he checked it. For a moment, he appeared surprised, then he threw back his head and laughed.
“What?” Carys asked, amused.
“Well, they’ve just let me know that I didn’t get the job I interviewed for a few hours before I started my drive here.”
I snorted and continued eating.
“I, for one, am happy for that,” Carys said and beamed at her brother.
He put his phone away and picked up his fork and knife again. “Me, too.”
This time, when he looked at me, there was something more in his gaze. Something that my wolf couldn’t understand, but I certainly did.
S ince Carys had cooked, we told her to go shower and relax while we did the dishes. We really needed a dishwasher, but that was put way down the list in my mind. We could deal, when it was just the three of us.
Kye put on some music from his phone and we cleaned the kitchen together. He hummed along to a raspy-voice singer, and I got stuck on the lyrics.
I could hear my future self in those words. About a man losing control when his person wasn’t close to him. Because whatever else Kye was, he was my mate, and that was everything to a wolf.
Later, when we all retreated upstairs to go to bed, Carys chose to sleep in a T-shirt and a pair of Kye’s drawstring sleep pants she had to roll up some. I had decided to wear a tank and boxer briefs because I ran hotter, and Kye wore the clothes he’d put on after the shower. At least that way there would be less skin contact during the night.
“We need to get you clothes,” Kye told her as he pulled the new duvets back so we could climb in.
“That’d be great,” she admitted, blushing a little. “I didn’t have many things when I got here.”
“I’ll make sure there’s a clothing fund for the pack,” I said easily when I climbed into bed first, as they were clearly waiting for my cue. “Until then, you can use my card.” I knew Kye didn’t have money and that she would feel awkward using Rian’s money for something so personal, so I punched my brand new pillow a few times without looking at them and added, “That way you can go to Target or get something online. I’m sure once Rian gets here, he’ll try to buy you the moon, but you know, let’s start small.”
She giggled and climbed in, settling to the other side. “That sounds like a deal.”
Kye stood next to the bed and observed us thoughtfully. “So it would seem I’ll be spooned no matter what I do.”
Then he managed to crawl over his sister and get under the covers sort of halfway under both of our covers.
“What do we think about the light?” I asked, because there was a lamp on the bedside table on my side and the ceiling light had been turned off already.
“Can we leave it on?” Carys asked in a small voice.
“Absolutely.” I made myself comfortable and realized I was facing Kye. “Hi.”
He grinned, then gestured at his head. “I need to remember to sleep on this side.”
Right. If he turned to face Carys, he’d sleep on the cut.
Carys’ hand slid under his arm as she plastered herself against his back and yawned. “You’re the little spoon until your head heals.” She giggled tiredly. “Does that mean Brodie is your little spoon?”
Kye grinned. “I don’t know. Does it?” He raised a brow at me.
I shrugged as much as I could lying down. “I don’t know. Might as well?”
Then I rolled over and moved back until I could feel his body heat behind mine. I left a sliver of distance between our bodies.
“Good night,” I said, and got a mostly-asleep hum from Carys.
Kye slid his arm around me and placed his hand over my heart. “Good night, Alpha,” he murmured.
I fell asleep to his breath caressing the back of my neck every now and then, both the wolf and I the most content we’d felt in a long, long time.