Chapter 58
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Mal
A Plan
Part of me wants to pace while I wait for someone to tell me what’s going on even though I know that won’t accomplish anything except force me to focus on the fact that I have no clue what will happen in the next little while.
Meaning I force myself to play a game on my tablet, although—unsurprisingly—it’s not holding my interest.
I feel Todd’s presence close by, likely in the house, but I can’t hear his thoughts. I don’t know if that’s because of the walls between us or he’s trying to shield his thoughts from me or what.
When I hear what I assume is Jax’s truck arrive a few minutes later, I struggle to stay put and not head next door.
I’m certain when it’s my time in the hot seat, I’ll be summoned.
Maybe twenty-five minutes later, I hear another vehicle arrive, a smaller one, not a truck. A few minutes after that, I sense Todd’s presence grow closer, and I’m already opening the apartment door before he can knock.
He looks…grim.
That fills me with a low-key terror threatening to upend my stomach.
But he pulls me in for a kiss that doesn’t feel…desperate.
He finally smiles. “We’re not in trouble. Come on.” He laces fingers with me and leads me back to his house, where Jax and Shawn sit at the kitchen table.
Todd doesn’t release my hand until we’re both seated, me on his left, Shawn on his right, and Jax directly across from Todd. On the table in front of Shawn are a closed laptop, a pile of papers, and a notebook.
Before I can speak Jax holds up a staying hand. “We have a lot of info to go over right now, Mal. No, you’re not in trouble, and neither is Todd, so please relax as much as you can while we cover everything, all right?”
Todd reaches over and squeezes my hand as I nod.
But relaxing is damned difficult, let me tell you what.
Todd also looks worried. “You sure about this, sir?” he asks Jax. I realize that since he’s using the title it means he’s switched from talking to “Jax his friend” to “Jax the pack Alpha” and the man Todd willingly takes a knee to.
“Yes.” Jax focuses on me, and I recognize concern furrowing his brow. “I need you not to panic.”
“That’s not a conversational intro that keeps me from panicking,” I snark.
“There have been several developments,” Jax continues as if I didn’t interrupt. “Firstly, I’ve heard…rumblings,”
“Rumblings?”
“I shipped your phones to a buddy of mine, Sawney, who’s the pack Alpha of the Empire Pack in New York.
He took them to Maine for an overnight hunting run.
When he arrived, his first night there he stayed at a hotel near the coast. That’s where, early the next morning, he turned them on, unlocked them, and played all your voicemails, as well as logged into your email and social accounts.
I guess the voicemails were on the older one. ”
A cold chill fills me. “Oh shit.”
“Yeah.” He glances at Todd, then focuses on me again.
“He copied everything and sent it to me, but I don’t think you want to read anything, much less hear the voicemails.
He shut the phones off after twenty minutes of fucking around on the internet with them, doing random Maine-related searches.
Then he left instructions with a friend of his who runs a shop in town.
Guy doesn’t know my friend’s a shifter, but this guy was Special Forces.
Sawney told him about the phone and said it belonged to a friend of his whose dad and brothers were fucking assholes and wanted to kidnap and possibly kill him to get their hands on a huge inheritance they were iced out of, and that they keep lying about him when they look for him.
And he wanted to see if the family was still trying to locate him. ”
“What happened?”
“The guy’s friend kept watch. Sure enough, late that afternoon, a couple of guys from out of town sniffed around asking questions.
Before you even ask, Sawney picked his guy because he’s a human who can take care of himself and wouldn’t smell like a shifter, just in case they got too close.
They stayed in town overnight and into the next afternoon, poking around, searching in the same area where the cell pinged the local towers.
And they had a picture of you. Sawney’s guy pretended to be completely clueless and snapped a picture of the picture and said he’d call them if he saw you.
He also surreptitiously took pictures of the guys. ”
“What’d they tell people about me?” I’m afraid to hear this.
“That they’re afraid you’ll hurt yourself.
They didn’t mention anything about shifters, but they said you’re the son of a congressional candidate and you have a history of mental illness and have tried to hurt yourself before.
Told them you’re off your meds and escaped a residential treatment facility where you were being treated as an inpatient.
Even offered a generous reward for info. ”
“Shit. Let me see.” He shows me pics on his phone and I swear again. “That’s Paul, one of Dad’s henchmen. Beta wolf shifter. He’s the one who tracked me down several times. Other one’s my brother, Harrison, an Alpha. He’s the youngest of my three older brothers.”
Fear threatens to choke me. They’re still looking for me, meaning nowhere is safe.
Also meaning I’ll likely never be able to talk to my mother again.
Jax squeezes my shoulder. “Sawney doesn’t know you’re here. And he hates your dad almost as much as you do.”
“But a reward—”
“Means nothing to any of us. Unfortunately, this isn’t the bad news.”
I’m certain I misheard him. “I-I’m sorry, whut? How is that not the bad news?”
Jax looks positively grim. “First thing this morning, I had an unexpected sit-down with Morning Caldwell.”
“Who’s that?” I ask.
As Jax recounts what’s happened that morning…okay.
Yeeeah.
I can see how that’s way worse news than my father’s still actively hunting me.
Todd holds my hand throughout this revelation, his thumb lightly stroking the back of my hand, trying to comfort me but also not mentally speaking to me, probably so I can focus on what Jax is saying.
“So what happens now?” I numbly ask. “Do I have to leave?”
“No,” Jax says. “We’re well beyond that. Luckily, you and Todd having sex works in your favor. But I need you to be honest with me—do you want to be part of this pack and stay here? For good?”
I meet Todd’s gaze, squeezing his hand. “Absolutely. If Todd wants me.”
“Do you feel you have a mating bond with Todd?” Jax asks me.
I nod. “Yeah. I can’t explain what happened earlier this morning as anything but that.
And it’s not just this morning, either. It’s a feeling that’s been growing more intense over the past couple of days, but this morning it felt…
It felt like a missing piece slipped into place and I was exactly where I needed to be, and with the guy I should be with.
” I look at Jax. “I’d rather you kill me than banish me because the thought of being without Todd makes my entire soul hurt. ”
And it does, too. Just thinking that so that I can verbalize it to Jax yanks on deep-seated fear and pain and sends it gurgling to the top of my brain in a toxic soup that also threatens to make me heave chunks.
“No one’s getting banished, much less killed,” Jax says before he looks at Todd. “Do you feel it’s a mating bond you have with Mal?”
“Yes, sir,” he says. “I really do. I’ve never felt like this before.
About anyone, ever. He’s right that this morning something inside me…
transformed. I felt it, too. I mean, you know me, Jax.
You’ve known me nearly all my life. You know I don’t get hung up on a guy like this.
I don’t fall in love and never have. Like a guy?
Sure. Fuck buddies? Absolutely. But in love beyond friendship?
I don’t think there’s anything to explain what I feel except that it’s a mating bond.
” He meets my gaze, and my heart does that somersault again.
“It has to be,” he softly says, “because the thought of ever losing you shreds me. I’d rather die than lose you. ”
I squeeze his hand as I blink back tears.
“Good,” Jax says. “I’m not ordering you to marry Mal, but he needs a—”
“Yes,” Todd says, still looking at me. “If he says yes.”
Jax smirks. “You didn’t let me finish. At the very least, Mal needs a protector, a declared sponsor. And you need to be his first during his first heat. To ensure—”
“Yes, Jax,” he insists, his gaze never leaving mine.
“What?” I ask, confused.
“He wants me to help trigger your first mating heat,” Todd says, his smoldering gaze churning my insides into molten need.
“And for me to rut you during your first heat. Since you’ve never been through a mating heat, whoever fucks you first during that heat, you should end up smelling like them and it’ll dilute your birth pack scent.
By the time we both come down from that, you’ll smell so much like me that after the pack finishes with your initiation, no one will be able to tell you weren’t part of the pack from birth.
Also, you’ll smell more like an elk than a wolf. ”
“Will…will that work? Have you done that before?”
“We haven’t,” Jax says, “But we’ve already asked Father and Dad and others for advice.
We learned another pack successfully did something similar for someone.
Although in that case, it wasn’t the omega wolf’s first heat, and their partner was a bison.
The omega was being pursued by his birth pack, and triggering his heat allowed him to mask his scent. ”
I fight the urge to squirm over the thought of Todd railing me. Again. “I don’t know how to trigger my mating heat.”
We all look at Shawn, who’s remained quiet this whole time, sitting back in his chair with his arms crossed over his chest.