20. Weston
Chapter 20
Her admission felt like a gut punch. It was a hard dose of reality.
I’d always wanted kids. Maybe not right now, as I was still helping to build the kingdom and flesh out the pack, but... someday. I’d always thought I’d find someone compatible, who’d complement me and who I’d complement in return. A partner.
Here I stood, looking at my true mate, and the barrier between us was as insurmountable as ever. It had never been clearer than when she said she wouldn’t dare have my child. That thought had me withering away. It curdled my stomach. I hadn’t even been thinking along those lines, but now that I had, this situation was ten times bleaker.
“Get this done,” I growled, standing too rigid. Feeling too rigid. I didn’t want this duty anymore. I didn’t want to be dealing with any of this. I wanted to go home and pretend like none of this had ever happened.
I couldn’t, though. Nor could I pretend that settling for an imperfect fit would ever be enough. After having met Aurelia, I knew that it wouldn’t. I’d never met someone so... intoxicating. No one’s touch had ever felt as perfect. No one had yelled at me with such fervor, or spent an entire day so thoroughly ignoring me. No one had ever dared to. I liked that Aurelia wouldn’t give in when she’d hit her limit. I liked that my power and position had no bearing on her.
I also liked how soft she could be, how pliant, letting me dominate when I needed to. I liked when she melted around me as though she couldn’t help herself, and how she gave in to her primal need even though she clearly wanted to throttle me. I just wished we could see eye-to-eye. She wouldn’t backpedal. She wouldn’t apologize for the drugs she had created. She had no remorse. The dragons would never grant her a pardon if she saw no blame in her creations.
Now here we were. I was going to allow my pack member to sample that product while a threat possibly existed somewhere out in the woods. Tanix and I had scouted the area. We’d found scents and followed them until it was clear they had taken off, but still, that didn’t mean they were done. They could double-back at any time. Had I lost my fucking mind?
But what choice did I have? We needed to see if I could form a bond with a wolf after they had ingested those tabs. Our strategy for protecting ourselves depended on it.
At least we had the healing elixir from Finley and her brother Hannon. We didn’t have much, but if something happened to Hadriel, we should be able to pull him out of it.
Aurelia looked in the cart. “Granny said she’d name the pregnancy one. I just called it Project X.”
“I like it.” Hadriel finished his glass of wine. “Which one is the hallucinogenic one? I want to try that one.”
Aurelia turned but I stopped her with, “Just the relaxant.”
“Poo,” Hadriel grumbled as Aurelia stepped aside.
Her eyebrows climbed slowly. “Well? What are we waiting for? I’m the hostage—I shouldn’t have to pull the crate out.”
“Right you are. Here, hostage, have some more wine.” Hadriel stepped up with the wine bottle.
“Dante, Sixten, get the crates,” I said, stepping aside. “What’s the name of the relaxant?” I asked Aurelia.
She frowned at me. “I thought you were supposed to be the expert on the horrors of my product. Don’t you know their names?”
“I know their market names, yes. What did you call them?”
Her frown increased. “They should be the same. Granny never asked me to change my labels.”
I sighed. “Did you turn a blind eye to literally everything outside of your little bubble?”
“We talked about this,” my wolf admonished as Aurelia said, “Uh, yes. I focus on doing my job. When the product is finished, I hand it over. I’m not the manager of this outfit, I’m the worker bee.”
“And you didn’t know Granny had changed all the names?”
“No.” She looked into the cart again, squinting with the dying light, trying to see through the encroaching gloom of the forest. “I wonder why...?”
“Tanix, run and get her lantern to help her see. She can pick them out for us.”
Her face lit up, gratitude seeping into her eyes. “You saved my lantern?”
“Love,” Hadriel said, “he brought your fucking spices. Of course he brought your lantern. He probably pawed through your drawers, sniffing —“
My look cut him off. The dragon king and queen allowed this wolf a lot of leeway and I honored their looseness, but I had my limits.
“Why did you bring my spices, by the way?” she asked me, for once curious and not accusatory.
Thankfully, before I could answer, Sixten asked, “Do you think she kept you in the dark in case you got captured?”
“She never mentioned if she did, but she definitely did not like me sticking my nose in. If I asked too many questions or pushed too hard, I was punished for impertinence.”
“And you were cool with that?” Sixten asked, crinkling her nose.
Aurelia shrugged. “I didn’t have any other choice. Granny could be funny about certain things. You just kinda learned when to butt out. Given most of her affairs didn’t concern us and she let me know if something was ever amiss with my product, I just kinda... bumped along.”
Tanix jogged back toward us and held out the lantern. “I couldn’t figure out how to turn it on. There’s no switch.”
“It’s magic.” Aurelia winked at him before explaining how it worked.
He did as she directed, trying a second time when it didn’t work. He shook his head and handed the lantern over.
She followed the same instructions with a smile and in a moment, a bright indigo burned within the glass.
“See?” Her smile widened and the light twinkled in her eyes.
I stared, entranced. I’d never seen someone so incredibly lovely in all my life. Her happiness beamed from within her, like a beacon.
“What kind of lantern is that?” Dante asked.
“A fairy lantern. It was a gift from Granny.” She turned and held the lantern up so she could better see the labels. “I’ve always been intrigued by fairies. I’d always dreamed of one day traveling to their lands and finding a handsome fairy mate with all his riches.”
Dante looked at me out of the corner of his eye. Everyone else looked straight ahead, suddenly stiff.
I let it go. Her comment hadn’t sparked even a kindling of rage. She didn’t really mean it, I could tell. More importantly, my wolf could tell, knowing her heart wasn’t in it. And then she glanced at me, nothing more than a quick look, and I knew why. Any other mate would be an imperfect fit, and now, after having met me, they would never do. She was in the same situation as I was, thrown together by some force of nature, unable to rationalize a way around it.
What a shitty fucking situation—her shitty life matched my terrible fucking past. We deserved each other.
“Here.” She pointed at one of the crates. “That’s the one. And then this one...” She lowered the lantern, pointing at the crate on the bottom left. “Product X. I hate naming things. She clearly thought I was no good at it if she changed all the names for market.”
Dante and Sixten got to work, moving things around so that they could pull out the crates she needed.
“No, don’t—” She jumped into the cart, reorganizing before looking into the crates to check their contents. “Some of these need to be stored in a specific way or they smush together and mess up the doses. The doses need to be precise.”
“No one is going to be taking them,” I growled. “They might as well go into the fire.”
“Someone will take them. As soon as you see that they aren’t lethal, people will want to try them.”
I pursed my lips and didn’t bother arguing, instead turning my attention to the crate Tanix was unwrapping. The same sort of tabs I’d seen earlier were piled in, all a slightly different shape but the same size. Tanix stepped back, still looking down on it all, as Aurelia finished up and then checked her Project X.
My stomach clenched and I turned away, unable to stop thinking about her carrying my child. Unable to stop the yearning. My wolf did the equivalent of whining in misery.
“Right.” Aurelia dusted off her hands and bent to the crate of relaxants. “How do you want to do this, Hadriel? Should I take half of one, and then half of another, wait a minute to prove I won’t die, and then you can take the same ones?”
Hadriel snaked between the others and then bent next to her. “You promise I’ll be okay?”
“I still promise that, yes. You’ll be fine.”
“Take it in wolf form,” I advised, turning back and avoiding looking at that other crate. “That’s how they did it.”
“Right-O.” Hadriel handed off the nearly empty bottle of wine, set down his glass, and quickly stripped.
“Good gracious.” Aurelia spun away to keep from looking.
“Sorry, love, I forgot you’re bashful.” His shift was fast, then he shook himself out before opening his mouth and sticking out his tongue.
“Just a thought.” Aurelia bent to pick up one of the tabs. “There were quite a few sprinkled on the ground. How do we know they took just one?”
She placed it on Hadriel’s tongue.
“There you go, good boy,” she said with a laugh, patting him on the head.
He growled a little, making her laugh harder, before eating the tab. I shed my clothes, tossing them away and noticing that Aurelia did not turn around this time. Instead, her eyes slowly drifted down my body, stopping on my cock. It twitched with the notice but I didn’t wait for the results of my rush of desire. I shifted as the others backed away, dwarfing Hadriel’s wolf with my own.
The bonds of the pack were all there, waiting. A quick check-in regarding the perimeter showed all clear. No sightings, no scents, nothing to cause alarm. All good news—for the moment.
Hadriel’s connection to the bond dimmed, turning elusive. My wolf reached for it, feeling it try to slither away from our touch. Nova was right, it was like running your fingers through water. My wolf tried again, mustering our power and determination, getting ahold of that bond and reeling it in tighter.
“He’s got it,” Dante said, reading my wolf’s cues.
“Ain’t no hiding from our alpha,” Sixten said with a smug grin.
“Should we try another tab?” Aurelia asked. “He can have up to five before he might throw it all back up. Five was my limit.”
“You tried five of those things at once?” Tanix asked her.
“Six, actually. I needed to see how my body would react if I took more than the recommended dose. I have been on some truly nightmare journeys with the hallucinogenic product, let me tell you. It’s what inspired me to learn that trick of shrugging off the drug’s effects. I didn’t want to keep subjecting myself to multiple doses without an ‘out.’”
Hadriel stuck out his tongue, ready for more.
My wolf rose his hackles but we let it happen, watching as she placed the tab on Hadriel’s tongue. He consumed it and we waited, our hold consistent but tenuous. In a handful of minutes everyone looked at me, then back to him. Nothing had changed. More minutes trickled by and still nothing changed.
“It should’ve happened by now. Another, or are we done?” Aurelia looked at my wolf. “If there was any sort of change, I’d suggest trying another. If there was zero change, I doubt you need to try more. Either the effect will be compounded or not at all. I’m guessing, obviously, but that stands to reason.”
She was so confident when she spoke about her product, so authoritative. So fucking sexy. I could tell she took pride in her work and knew every detail. I trusted her when she administered it and believed her when she spoke about its properties. The problem was, her small world view didn’t line up with the larger picture. There were some things I’d seen in person, and she had not. Not yet, anyway. We’d see what she had to say for herself when she did.
I made ready to take over, expecting my wolf to shift out of his form and hand back control. Instead, he looked at her, at her beauty, savoring her tantalizing scent and feeling that deep pulse within her calling out to him. Her wolf waited for him, and would ache to be with him once she was allowed out of the darkness. We both knew it. It’s how these things went, I’d heard.
His need to meet his true mate rose. He leaned a little harder toward that pulse within her and yanked, bringing it forward.
“What are you doing?” I hollered at him. “We talked about this!”
She gasped, grabbing at her middle. Her power throbbed, pulling everyone’s attention. Hadriel’s wolf stiffened, feeling another alpha in the vicinity.
“No!” I scolded my wolf. “She’s already unnaturally quick and vicious. If you let out her wolf, there’ll be no stopping her if she runs when we’re not looking. We can’t do this here. We have to wait until we get to the castle. You fucking know this! Stop thinking of yourself and think of her.”
“If she runs, we’ll be able to chase her.” I could hear his excitement and matching desire.
“Not if the enemy grabs her first. If she runs, we could lose her forever.”
It was only that which backed him down, I knew—the threat of losing her. I wouldn’t be able to shift when the dragons made their verdict. He would never let them hurt her. Despite his agreement that he’d do our duty, I knew when it came down to it he wouldn’t be able to. He’d sacrifice everything for her. Before being with her and getting to know her, there was a chance he could have resisted. But now—after smelling her, tasting her, burying inside her—the primal urge was too strong. I’d need to handle this situation with pure, rational thought. There could be no other way.
My wolf gave up control and I resumed my human form, straightening up slowly, watching her warily. Her power still throbbed within her, bleeding into the space around us. The others stood rigid, wary, probably ready to defend themselves if she reacted.
Seconds ticked by. Aurelia’s brow had pinched tight and then lowered, her hand tight to her chest. Her head cocked to the side and her eyes found mine. An accusation burned within them, and then slowly the power drifted away, her wolf plunged back into the abyss.
My wolf whined within me, hating that we had to do this to her. There was nothing worse than the feeling of your animal, your power, slipping away until only a void stood in its place... except maybe trying to use it without training.
“That was all on you,” I told him angrily. “I don’t want to hear one more lecture about hurting her. You can only hope she hasn’t realized what that was. Otherwise, she’s going to know we kept it from her. More importantly, she’s going to know Granny did. Talk about ripping her life apart little by little. She’s going to think we’re monsters by not going through with freeing her animal. If she knows, there’ll be hell to pay.”
“Well then,” she said slowly, her gaze piercing into mine. It looked like she wanted to peel back my forehead and have a look inside. “I guess that’s us done.” She bent and retrieved a tab as Hadriel shifted into his human form. “Maybe I’ll partake.”
She quirked an eyebrow at me as though daring me to argue before slowly slipping it into her mouth.
“I’m in.” Hadriel struck out his hand. “I didn’t feel a damn thing in wolf form except a sort of disconnect from the pack. I’ll tell you, Alpha, I didn’t much like that. It felt like my lifeline was disintegrating and I was left hung out to dry. Even when you managed to hold on, communication through the bond was hindered. Did you feel that? It felt like you were barely holding on.”
“That’s exactly what was happening.” I watched Aurelia, watching me back. “That drug is dangerous to a pack.”
“Only if you get power hungry and people want to break free, hmm?” She handed Hadriel the tab. “You won’t have the same power over people if they take that product. Does the thought of losing control scare you?”
A strange tone had entered her voice, as though she were speaking about something else. It probably had something to do with whatever had happened in that moment when her wolf had come to the surface, teetering on the edge of being pulled out entirely but unable to claw free. The human part of her had been kicked around and managed all of her adult life. She’d been scarred and scared during her childhood. Her life had made her somewhat pliant, willing to accept a harsh reality just to keep living. Her wolf, however, would be brand new. Fresh. There was no telling what sort of creature would emerge, and how that might change Aurelia’s willingness to calmly accept her current situation. Her wolf might’ve said something before being thrust back into the darkness, something that would clue in Aurelia to her situation.
I answered her as though I didn’t suspect any turmoil. “The thought of losing control of the pack does scare me, yes. It should scare everyone. I keep us together. I keep us operating smoothly. Through my bond, we are united, and when we are united, we are stronger. When we are at our strongest, we are at our safest. That bond is important to protect this pack, and jeopardizing it with chemicals jeopardizes us all, including you.”
She huffed, her eyes narrowing. “Jeopardizes me? You’re taking me to my death. How much more could I possibly be jeopardized?”
But a shadow moved behind her eyes. She feared something worse than her predicament with me. I wondered what it was.
I knew better than to ask. She’d shut me down hard and fast and probably never speak of it again. I was learning when I could push, and when I shouldn’t. She might often be pliant, but she could also be stubborn as all hell.
“Is eating going to ruin whatever this drug—excuse me.” Hadriel put his hand on his chest. “This product does to me? I’m starving.”
“No.” Aurelia started away, looping her arm in Hadriel’s and tugging him along with her. “Let’s sit, though. You’re about to get very lazy.”
“I love lazy,” Hadriel replied.
I hung back, hands at my waist, looking at the crate of tabs at my feet. The others were quiet, watching me.
“Thoughts?” I prodded, my mind scattered.
“What, uh...” Dante cleared his throat. “What happened there?”
“My wolf pushed when he shouldn’t have and I had to talk him back. He’s grown... fond of her. He wants to meet his other half.”
They nodded in understanding, but their stances were still uneasy.
“What else?” I pushed. We needed to have this out. Things were getting too complicated. They needed to know I was still fully in line with our goals and my duties.
“She has a lot of power,” Sixten said.
“Of course she does. She’s my true mate. She’ll match me.”
“If she shifts, will she then be able to affect a bond like you do?” Tanix asked. “Because, assuming you can’t talk your wolf back one day, we’d have some serious problems if she ever tried to disrupt the pack, which she might do out of spite. Or to get away.”
I took a deep breath. “In theory, she won’t be able to mess with the bond without training. There is a quality to being an alpha that is instinctive, but many of the details need to be taught. I’ve studied since I first shifted. She shouldn’t be able to do much damage right away.”
They nodded again, the tension of the group starting to drain away.
“This product is dangerous to the pack,” Tanix said, nudging the crate with his toe. “It sounded like Hadriel didn’t much like it, but it still weakened the bond.”
I nodded, looking down on it. “I have questions. Can it be tossed into a stew, for example, and fed to us without knowing? Can it be slipped to us in another way?”
“What happens if it’s you who takes it?” Tanix asked. “If it is slipped to you in your sleep?”
“He wouldn’t be in wolf form in his sleep.” Dante frowned at Tanix. “That’s a bit too far along Paranoia Lane, don’t you think?”
Tanix bristled. “Is it? If I were her, I’d do everything in my power to break this pack down and get away. We’re not dealing with a morally sound individual. We’re dealing with a woman who was just handing out drugs mere moments ago. She refuses to take accountability for what she has done, and she constantly pushes back on the alpha. Do you really think, when given the chance, she won’t do everything in her power to disrupt the pack and escape?”
“She doesn’t even know she’s magical,” Dante said. “Since we’ve taken her in our custody, she hasn’t tried to hurt anyone. She’s joking and having fun with Hadriel, for fuck’s sake. She’s not acting like a normal criminal.”
“Because she’s been dazzled with a true mate connection, most likely, and it hasn’t yet sunk in that we’re going to kill her?—”
“Enough.” I held up a hand, closing my eyes. “Enough. Pack this product away and make sure no one is allowed near it. Make sure someone is watching our food and water. This product is dangerous to our way of life, and we need to account for that.”
“Can I just...?” Sixten raised her hand. “Can I just point out that she has popped a random tab into her mouth on two occasions without flinching? She offered to take half of the ones Hadriel would eat. Is it just me, or is she not at all concerned with how dangerous they are?”
She wasn’t—not even a little bit. Her confidence in her creation was unparalleled. Even Finley, master plant worker, would sometimes pause when under scrutiny of a potentially dangerous mixture. Not Aurelia. She believed one-hundred percent that her creation was safe, validating it by taking it personally.
“Is it at all possible...” Sixten said haltingly, offering a small grimace, “that we possibly... have the wrong drug maker?” She held up her hands. “I know we found Granny’s lair, and I know the shoe fits as far as location and isolating these people and product supply quantity, but...” She grimaced again. “It’s just—this product looks a mess, doesn’t it? What we’ve seen in the market looks a lot different. Some of that is packaging, but... the color of it? The sizes? Those are different. So far this stuff really doesn’t seem dangerous. Their patrol ate it off the ground. The names are even all different!”
My breath caught with the implication but I wouldn’t allow any hope to surge. I couldn’t. If I let my barriers soften and opened my heart, I would be just as lost as my wolf. Not even my sense of duty or rationality would save me.
Dante stepped back into the cart, opening the crates and exposing the various products. All were a little lopsided, cut by hand or ripped, some resembling the color of those in the marketplace but all a little—or a lot—off.
“We already knew someone else was doing the packaging,” Tanix said, “and she’s only been blasé about the one drug. Who’s to say the rest of this stuff isn’t exactly as dangerous as we’ve seen?”
Sixten fell silent. That was a very good point.
In the back of the group, usually silent and reserved until it was time for action, Nova slowly raised her hand. “You shifted before Aurelia’s power dimmed. You pulled that animal close to the surface and it took a bit before it slipped back. I’d bet anything it was struggling to get the rest of the way out.”
“It had to be,” I affirmed.
“She would’ve felt that struggle. She might not know exactly what it is, but she’ll know something isn’t right.”
“And if that animal spoke...” Dante quirked a brow. “You might be in for a rough ride, Alpha. She won’t be pleased if she knows what’s up.”
There was no telling how she’d react. Or if she’d even figure it out. All he could do was wait and watch.