Chapter 6 Settled
Settled
Monte
Married life was extremely uneventful. It was a shame I couldn’t bring Nena along with me.
At least then, I wouldn’t feel so cut off.
We spoke every now and then, but phone calls only did so much.
That was the way of our kind, though. Once we married into a new pack, we left the old one behind.
It was supposed to shift our loyalty to the new pack completely.
It wasn’t boring, not exactly. To a certain extent, I was ignored by Felix. But I hadn’t expected the reasons to be so inarguably legitimate as to why he ignored me and was absent from home so often.
I only realized once I woke up the morning after the wedding to an empty house.
On the day of the wedding, I had been sucked into a whirlwind and been taught far more about the Redrow pack dynamics than I’d ever expected to learn on my first day.
Among other things, I understood that my now-husband worked as a physician at the local clinic, in addition to faithfully attending to his duties with the high council, where he dispensed wisdom and delivered judgments to all the cases brought before him.
I’d learned those facts, but I hadn’t really considered their implication until I sat alone in my house, as the new member of the pack, with my husband nowhere in sight.
He spent nearly every waking hour away from the house, and even when he took his meals at home, he remained engrossed in his work.
I felt a bit like an invisible shadow wandering the halls, but things could be worse. A lot worse.
A week after the wedding, I sat across from my husband at the breakfast table, pretending to focus on my eggs and sausage while secretly watching him frown over a stack of documents.
I was beginning to figure out which scowls meant he was truly frustrated, and which indicated that he was trying to wrap his head around a tricky concept.
His hand reached out, grabbing for something, but he didn’t look up from his reading.
Fascinated, and honestly irritated as hell that he hadn’t even spared a glance my way, I pushed the salt in his direction.
When his fingers closed over the shaker, he looked up with a surprised frown, as if he’d forgotten that I was present.
He grunted out something in the vicinity of a “thank you,” and absently salted his food as he returned to his reading.
It was an odd sensation, to be sure. I felt like I was growing to understand him quite quickly.
What I’d first interpreted as a targeted hatred toward me in particular had turned out just to be a generally prickly nature and a single-minded drive to overcome each obstacle before him.
Once I started looking at things from that perspective, I realized just how frustrated he must have been by the Hunter debacle.
The plans for this marriage pact had been in place for a long, long time, and I was only now beginning to grasp how much his brother had jeopardized.
Feeling a little playful, and emboldened by his begrudging gratitude over the salt, I leaned forward, propping my elbows on the table and resting my chin on my crossed hands as I watched him more intently.
“You know, this is rather different from the honeymoon I expected,” I mused.
Felix finished reading the page he was on, then paused, glowering at the paper.
Slowly, he looked up at me, as if my words were just sinking in.
His brow furrowed into one of his thinking scowls.
I felt he surely must have been preparing a scathing retort about how I should have expected nothing more and nothing less than this.
Or perhaps he was going to say that I should be grateful not to have been thrown back to my family, abandoned by him and shamed by the truth.
But whatever he was going to say, he thought better of it, and simply gave me one of his “I don’t want to talk” scowls.
“I have a meeting to attend,” he grunted as he rose to his feet, gathering his papers before striding from the room.
Just like that, he was gone.
I fell back in my chair, wondering whether I’d just made a mistake or not.
It didn’t feel like I had. I was finding it increasingly impossible to resist these little pokes and prods, to see how he reacted to different conversational or situational gambits.
Perhaps something was wrong with me, because no matter how much I jabbed or pried, Felix always reacted with the same stoic indifference.
He couldn’t be provoked to shout at me or grab me or anything.
He barely did anything, other than grunt and go about his business. But I was finding great satisfaction in learning the subtle differences between all his grumpy little tics.
I really should have felt more indignant over being treated like this, but it was hard to be resentful when this was pretty much the ideal state of affairs for me, at least under the circumstances.
Hunter was gone and Felix was mostly absent as well, so I was attacked with neither paws nor scathing words.
With a sigh, I finished off my breakfast and rose to go about my day. Whether or not Felix had made up the meeting he had to attend, he did have a full day bursting with responsibilities. The same could not be said for me, and that was a gross understatement.
In my room, I found Ara struggling to make sense of the makeshift bed that Felix now made and remade on the floor every single night. The poor Beta servant was on the small side, so the massive mess of blankets nearly smothered her.
She shot me a sheepish, grateful grin as I lent her a hand, quickly sorting out and folding the linens.
I’d met her on my very first full day at the house, and we’d spent most of our time together since then.
In theory, she was assigned to attend to my every need, but since I didn’t have many of those, we mostly just kept each other company as she assisted in the maintenance of the estate.
I couldn’t stand just sitting around doing nothing and being of no help, so I was glad to keep busy.
“How does he even…” she trailed off, then shook her head and returned to her work.
I grinned. She was a diligent, loyal wolf, but Felix’s bull-headed ways had even her questioning what, precisely, he was doing. As she plucked a scarf out from behind a dresser, where Felix had tossed it while disrobing, I couldn’t help but agree.
It was odd. Ara was really nothing like Nena, graceful and dainty while my sister was all bristling claws, but I found myself drawn to her nonetheless.
It was like she was another little sibling who I wanted to watch over.
In the past week, it felt like we’d built up something of an understanding, perhaps even a solid, trusting bond.
Now, I wondered if I might be able to pry a little bit.
“Ara,” I began carefully. “Do you know why Felix is… the way he is?”
She froze, the poor thing, her ears twitching as if she were a cornered rabbit.
“Sorry, I’ll rephrase,” I said quickly. “I’m just wondering why he’s so relentlessly intense and duty-driven. It’s like he thinks he’s the only one who’s capable of carrying the responsibilities, and burdens of the pack. He doesn’t trust anyone else to do it.”
Ara exhaled, in relief and nodded emphatically. “That’s exactly how it is, Omega. For the longest time, he’s only been able to rely on himself. But now he has you, so everything should be better.”
I tried to give her a reassuring nod, but my gesture was strained by the weighty sense of foreboding in my gut. If Felix had to rely on me, then the state of things in his pack—my pack too, now—was a lot worse than I had known,
“Did he inherit his ways from his parents?” I managed to ask without wheezing, as I lifted the bulk of the laundry.
Ara protested my efforts, though she soon accepted the help, only pouting slightly as she picked up the remainder.
We both knew she would probably collapse under the combined weight of Felix’s bedding, which must have contained enough quilts, duvets, sheets, and pillows to make the master bed five times over.
It wasn’t until we had carried our loads to the laundry room to air them out that Ara finally answered my question.
“I suppose he did inherit his sense of responsibility from his parents, in a way,” she began with a heavy sigh.
She absently chewed her lip as she gradually disappeared into thought, until she conceded her internal argument with a shrug.
“But it would be more accurate to say that he’d had to become responsible.
Otherwise the whole pack would have fallen apart. ”
My own ears perked up then. I’d overheard snippets of whispers about the fraught politics within the Redrow pack back home, but never anything concrete.
“It started about twenty years ago,” Ara said. “A little before I was born, when Felix’s father was the Alpha. He’d been in poor health for quite some time, and when Felix was sixteen, his father’s sickness took an incurable turn for the worse. And then, before anyone expected, he died.”
She looked around, making sure that nobody else was nearby, then stepped closer and lowered her voice.
“There were whispers at the time that it wasn’t exactly a natural death.
With Felix not yet of age, it followed that his uncle Rufus became regent.
One of the accusations circulating was that Felix’s mother was responsible for the poisoning, so she fled back to her birth pack and took her sons with her.
Of course, that only intensified the rumors.
Why would she flee if she wasn’t guilty?
And why would Felix and Hunter go with her if they weren’t complicit? ”
“Because they feared for their lives,” I answered, incredulous at the question. “Was that not obvious?”