Chapter 8 Arik #2
The enemy shaman looked around frantically, as if hoping more reinforcements would appear out of thin air, and started to back up—right into Angelo, who collared him with strength that would’ve surprised anyone who didn’t know him.
The lawyers ran for the cars, but instead of trying to drive off, they dived into the back seat of the closest one and stayed there.
It was all over within thirty seconds. The pack councilors had rushed down the steps and past me to join the fray if needed, but Matthew and Ian were barely even breathing hard, and Calder could’ve been standing there to take the air.
The guy Ian had thrown across the driveway was still lying there stunned.
Calder’s two victims had started to stir and groan, but they weren’t exactly raring for a continued fight.
And Diaz had stopped screaming and started cursing up a storm, writhing in the muddy gravel as his broken limbs started to heal.
I knew exactly how not-fun that was, and I couldn’t have been happier to watch him experience it.
Matthew turned his head and met my eyes, and I gave him a quick nod. I was fine. His shoulders relaxed a fraction.
“Well, that was fun!” Angelo said, with a shit-eating grin.
Fucking vampires. He hadn’t even done any of the fighting.
He let go of the shaman with more force than strictly necessary, which at least counted for something.
“Don’t move, or I’ll have to catch you. You won’t enjoy it.
Diaz, anything to say for yourself? Since you assured my boss that you were coming here to present a legal case and peacefully see that your rights were respected? ”
“Fuck,” Diaz moaned. “Fuck, my leg!”
“It was magic,” the shaman spat, and pointed an accusing finger at me. “He made them do it!”
I stepped forward and came to stand beside Matthew, who proved for the hundredth time that I’d chosen the best alpha on earth to mate me by keeping his mouth shut and letting me answer for myself.
The impulse to gloat rose up strong. Damn it.
I’d have to save that for my post-mortem with Nate later on.
It might be momentarily satisfying, but it’d erode our moral high ground.
Besides, that little fucking asshole already knew I’d beaten him at his own game.
“It’s not my fault that your magic backfired.” I offered an insultingly nonchalant shrug and had the satisfaction of watching the shaman’s face turn carmine with rage. “I simply defended my pack by placing a barrier between them and your assault. It bounced off.”
“You reflected it back on purp—” He cut himself off, standing there frozen with his mouth open…but too late.
Matthew stepped smoothly into the ringing silence that followed, interrupted only by the grumblings of Diaz’s healing goons.
“So you attacked us with magic, my pack’s shaman tried to keep the peace by successfully preventing us from attacking you physically, and then your own plan resulted in these assholes trying to kill us?
After you lied to Angelo’s boss, like he points out?
That wasn’t your smartest move, by the way. ”
“Not at all, he’s killed more impressive assholes for less,” Angelo put in, his tone filled with the kind of cheer that should’ve had Diaz and his people running for it like the lawyers had.
They’d finally reappeared, but they still hovered by the car, half in and half out of the doors.
“You will, I have no doubt, be leaving here alive, because Armitage is a man of his word. Unlike you. But I’m not sure you’ll be glad to be alive once Fenwick’s done with you. ”
“We’ll leave,” Diaz grunted, finally getting himself up to one knee, resting his arms on the other, “as soon as I get what’s mine.”
What was his? As if they were his property. To hurt, and to use, and the only reason I hadn’t been sent back to a hell like Jessica’s was that Matthew had fought and nearly died for me.
“You’ll leave without laying a hand on them.
” My voice came out betrayingly thick, full of memories I couldn’t suppress: chained and forced on a dirty floor, running through the night and using my magic to hide the blood I left behind me, Matthew choking out what had almost been his last breaths.
“A violent, lying, cheating son of a fucking bitch like you shouldn’t be anywhere near them.
You planned this. All of it. Or something like it.
Your shaman helped Jessica get away from you so that you could follow her, lie about her, and make it look like she’d lost her mind. ”
Matthew’s brows rose, and I caught a murmur of approval from the pack council. Wait until Nate heard I’d been the one to figure it out—he’d be either delighted it’d been one of us, or livid that I’d gotten there first, or both.
Diaz pushed to his feet, eyes dark with rage, jaw working. He didn’t even look at me, gaze fixed on Matthew. “He’s fucking lying,” he spat. “You call yourself a pack leader and an alpha, Armitage? You let your bitch do the talking for you?”
Matthew’s hand flexed at his side, showing a glint of claw, and even though he tried to throttle his side of the bond so I wouldn’t feel it and be distressed by it, his anger nearly overwhelmed his self-control.
“You’ll leave without laying a hand on them,” Matthew said.
“Because a violent, lying, cheating son of a fucking bitch like you shouldn’t be anywhere near them.
Hope that clears things up for you. And make it quick, because I’d like to keep Angelo’s good opinion of me for being a man of my word, but I’m this fucking close to changing my mind about that. ”
“They belong to me,” Diaz snarled. He kept his presence of mind enough not to charge at Matthew again, but his fangs had dropped and blood dripped from his fisted hands where his claws had slipped out into his palms. Calder and Ian both shifted their weight, and Diaz’s guys took a step back.
Diaz looked around him wildly and noticed his lack of support.
“What the fuck is wrong with you? You!” He’d turned around enough to glare at the lawyers.
“The fuck are we paying you for? Get over here and tell this fucking bloodsucker that they’re gonna be alphas, they need to be raised by their werewolf father, not some human cunt! ”
“They’re babies,” Ian scoffed. “How the hell do you know they’ll be—”
“You say they’re alphas?” Paul’s voice cut Ian off, and I jumped, reaching up to rub at my ear, because he’d pushed between me and Ian and practically shouted.
You had to in order to talk over Ian, who tended to boom.
“Shut up, Ian, he wants to believe he’s too much of a man not to father alphas, let him hang himself with his own delusional rope,” Paul hissed under his breath, quietly enough that only those of us next to him could hear.
“You’re right,” he went on at a more normal volume.
“Traditional shifter law lays out several rules for the custody of alphas, to make sure they get the training they’ll need to use their powers as adults.
I read about it.” He shot Matthew a meaningful look, and Matthew waved a hand at Paul as if to say, Your show, go on. Paul nodded. “Mr., ah, Marin?”
Angelo stepped forward, sketching a slight bow that somehow looked natural. Right. He’d probably been raised when men still bowed to people to greet them. Fucking vampires.
“At your service, and you are…?”
“I shouldn’t have to be doing your job for you!” Diaz shouted to the lawyers. “Get over here!”
“Keep your mouth shut, or I’ll shut it for you.” Calder didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. Diaz stopped talking, showing the first sign of intelligence I’d seen from him.
“Paul Rafferty, Armitage pack councilor, entirely at yours,” Paul said, not missing a beat.
“I assume Mr. Fenwick’s going to tell the shifter council, based on what you’ve seen here, that Mr. Diaz shouldn’t be given custody of children, and that his pack clearly colluded in this.
Since the shaman and lawyers were provided by the pack? ”
“Mr. Diaz definitely told Fenwick that he’d come here with the full support of his pack leader. And Mr. Diaz is going to be lucky to keep custody of all of his internal organs,” Angelo added, with a genial smile and nod in Diaz’s direction.
“I happen to know you can do fine without a spleen,” Jared called out. “There’s hope for you yet!”
Ian started to laugh.
Matthew glared at them both, eyes flashing gold, mouth like someone had shoved a particularly sour lemon into it—that lemon being the realization that he bore a close genetic relationship to them.
“Under shifter law, these children cannot be left in the custody of Mrs. Diaz,” one of the lawyers piped up at last. “She’s human. The law is very clear on this point. You have no grounds to deny Mr. Diaz—”
“Mr. Diaz isn’t an alpha,” Paul said. “Unless we missed something?”
The lawyer opened his mouth, closed it, and shot a speaking glance at his colleague over the roof of the car.
Ferret Number Two chimed in with, “Our alpha pack leader will be more than willing to assume temporary custody of—”
“Except that he knew you were going to come here and attack us on our own land under false pretenses, and he almost certainly knew his shaman had helped Jessica leave in the first place.” Matthew’s clear, decisive voice cut across the lawyer’s, and his alpha strength and determination rippled through the air around him almost tangibly.
Gods, but I loved him. All the time, but particularly when he took charge like this.
Or maybe it was when he took responsibility, a subtly different thing that only my brother and Matthew, among all the alphas I’d known in my life, had always done without hesitation.
When I got Matthew alone later, he wouldn’t know what had come over me.
Diaz and his lawyers had all started to protest. “I’m not done,” Matthew said, in a tone of command that silenced them all.
“I’m going to call the shifter council. I’m going to tell them this was a premeditated act of war.
Fenwick’s going to agree with that assessment.
And in lieu of reparations, I’m guessing your pathetic excuse for an alpha pack leader’s going to be happy to make us, and Jessica and the kids, go away. ”
“The shifter council will appoint a suitable alpha guardian!” Ferret Number One sounded like he’d finally hit his stride. “They’ll choose someone related to Mr. Diaz. This is pointless.”
“Unless an alpha from the Armitage pack volunteers to become their legal guardian.” Paul shot another glance at Matthew. “Ideally someone the shifter council would see as suitable.”
Silence fell for a half second before everyone burst into an uproar: Diaz raging, the ferrets arguing, Ian saying something about Paul having lost his mind, Jennifer trying to ask Angelo if he could get Fenwick on the phone, probably desperate for one other person with some common sense to help her restore order.
But it all faded away into background noise for the pounding of my heart and the stunned expression on Matthew’s face as he turned to me.
Become their legal guardian.
Adopt them, that meant.
Matthew would legally be their father, responsible for them—not that he’d take any power away from Jessica, I knew him better than that. He’d be there to give her legal cover, not to usurp her rights.
But we wouldn’t be the two of us anymore.
We’d be a family of five. An extraordinarily odd family of five—and with one extraneous person in it, if you looked at it through the lens of what a pack leader was supposed to do according to these shifter laws and traditions we were arguing over.
Nate and I had similar worries, something we rarely talked about but often talked around: that our alpha mates would want more than we could give them.
Or something different than we could give them.
Jessica and her children were exactly what we pictured in those moments.
Instant family, just add water and a few legal contracts.
If I told Matthew not to do it, he’d respect my wishes. That would be the end of it.
And I’d know, for the rest of my life, that when I had the chance to save someone the way I’d been saved—twice, both by my brother and by Matthew—I’d let fear overcome my morality and my decency and my sense of karmic balance.
I’d never forget the type of desperation and despair that had led me to flee my captor and run to California, ending up entangled with Nate’s psychotic asshole father and Sam Kimball, and then finally finding a safe haven with the Armitages.
The kind of desperation and despair that’d lead a woman with no resources to take off with her kids, leave everything behind, and pray for a miracle she didn’t really believe in.
I’d gotten my miracle: Matthew. Now I had to help him be someone else’s.
We could be someone else’s.
Matthew took a step nearer, and then another, leaning down until he was close enough to kiss, eyes clouded with worry and brows furrowed. “We don’t have to,” he said softly. “We can find another way to keep the promise we made to keep her safe.”
I couldn’t believe him sometimes. I couldn’t believe how lucky I was. “We,” I repeated. “We? I made that promise. Without consulting you. You weren’t even angry. And now you—” My voice cracked. And now he’d chosen to take equal responsibility the way he always did.
Oh, gods, I’d be giving him the fuck of his life tonight.
I wanted to climb him like a tree right this fucking second.
In lieu of that, I wrapped a hand around the nape of his neck, pulled him down that last two inches, and held him in place for a searing kiss, hard enough to bruise even an alpha’s lips.
“You said we,” I finished, whispering it against his mouth. “That’s all that matters. Yes. We’ll do it. Thank all the gods Jessica’s going to do all the work, though. I’d bail the first time someone cried. And the first person to cry might very well be me.”
Matthew laughed, and I knew down to my bones that light in his eyes had nothing to do with the prospect of becoming the legal guardian of a pair of snot-nosed kids and the legal co-parent to a nice woman, and everything to do with me. He swooped back in; another kiss sealed the deal.
“All right,” he said, and his hand found mine, our fingers tangling together, his big and strong between my slimmer ones. We fit perfectly, the way we always did. “Let’s go kick their asses the legal way.”
We turned to face what came next together—as we always would.