Chapter 31
Everything hurt.
Robbie couldn’t remember the last time his body ached like this. Maybe that last fight before he left the MMA circuit, where he’d gotten his ass literally handed to him with his opponent’s compliments. But even that hadn’t been like this.
His bones and muscles and tendons were angry and sore. JJ said that this would get better every shift, that muscle memory would develop and he’d be able to flip back and forth with no more discomfort than a sneeze.
Growing pains, he’d called them. Like Robbie was twelve and about to hit that big growth spurt.
He knew JJ was right, but this was more than that. It was the shift, sure, and the long night of running. But it was also the fact that his heart was broken. His chest ached. His throat was raw from crying, from howling.
After the run, when everyone had gone home to put their pups to bed, he’d stayed in his wolf.
He’d sat by the shore of the lake and howled his anger and agony to the moon.
JJ and Rose had stayed with him, lying on their bellies just beyond the tree line, their scents a familiar comfort that kept him from losing himself completely to his grief.
Eventually, he’d lost his voice, exhausted, and they’d helped him get back to his cabin.
“Shift, pup,” JJ had commanded, and with a yip that turned into a shout of pain, Robbie’s body obeyed his Alpha.
JJ had coaxed him to his feet and helped him to bed.
He’d fallen naked onto the mattress and straight into a dreamless sleep.
JJ had woken him up the next morning with a mug of hot coffee.
“Shower, pup,” he’d commanded, and Robbie had woodenly gone to the bathroom and turned on the shower.
Standing facing the spray, water cascading over his face and chest, he felt as if he’d been hollowed out and petrified, like his body was there but that everything inside, everything that made him him was somehow missing.
He’d washed his body and growing hair and shut off the water. He’d dried himself and brushed his teeth and put on the clothes that JJ handed to him. He’d drank the coffee and put his feet into his shoes and shuffled down the path after JJ.
The hall was loud, but Robbie hardly noticed. He went to the couch in the back corner, the couch where he’d lain, insensate, that first day. Had it really only been two weeks? His whole life had changed and then been upended again since then. He’d been changed and upended.
He stared into space, only half paying attention to the pack filing in and grabbing coffee from the big percolator. He vaguely registered Rose chasing the pups away from the donuts, telling them that three each was plenty.
He’d meant to make donuts from scratch, but then he’d come home to an empty cabin and didn’t know how he’d mean to do anything ever again. Rose must have found packaged powdered donuts in the pantry and put them out.
It was time for the council meeting, his brain dimly remembered. The council meeting where they would vote to banish him from the pack because he was an unmated male. What would become of him then?
He could go back to World’s End, but it would feel as empty and hollow as he did.
Sure, his friends were there, people who loved him, but she wouldn’t be.
She wasn’t even on this mortal plane anymore.
And anytime he drove past her office, which would be unavoidable, he would be forced to think of her. It would kill him.
He’d been so happy in World’s End. For the first time in his life, he’d felt as if he could put down roots, as if he could stay.
But that was impossible now. He hadn’t missed moving around, taking odd jobs around the country and couch surfing where the wind took him.
It had been lonely. But he’d done it before. He could do it again.
Or maybe he’d finally listen to his mama and “just come home already.”
He winced as JJ pounded a fist on the table at the front of the room.
“Alright, alright, you chaos goblins. Let’s get this thing started,” JJ said in that beleaguered tone he used when talking to the whole pack, as if the mantle of responsibility weighed as heavy as Atlas’s earth, though Robbie knew that he wouldn’t have it any other way. JJ was the Alpha.
That was most apparent in how quickly the room quieted, as if now that JJ had acknowledged that he was the Alpha, everyone else could, too.
JJ started recapping the last meeting, and Robbie closed his eyes.
He loved it here. Even more than he’d loved it in World’s End.
He’d loved feeding the pack and running with the pack.
He’d loved living with a huge family, how everyone was in everyone else’s business all the time.
He’d loved the freedom. He hadn’t had a cell phone in two weeks, and apart from wishing he could tell Callum and his friends that he was okay, he hadn’t missed it.
He’d woken with the sun and gone to sleep when he got tired.
He run and cooked and laughed and—he squeezed his eyes shut tighter as the memories of her careened into his brain.
Because in addition to running and cooking and laughing, he’d kissed and hugged and fucked and made love and dreamed of a future.
More potent than any of those things, he’d fallen in love.
He’d fallen hopelessly in love with his fated mate, and from the pitying looks he had seen from the rest of the pack, everyone knew it. He’d found the magical “one,” and she’d been taken from him. A gift of fate followed immediately by the turn of the wheel, which then crushed him.
The pack might pity him, but it wouldn’t be enough. The rules had been clear.
He was so tired, but the thing about wolf hearing was that he couldn’t turn it off now that he’d turned it on. He heard as JJ called for new business.
“I move that Robbie gets to stay even without his mate,” Rose said loudly to the assembly.
Robbie opened his eyes and saw when JJ’s sister, Agatha, rose to her feet.
He’d not often seen her out of her wolf form, but she was here on two legs today, clad in a pink sundress, her hair in a long braid down her back.
He didn’t know what had happened to her, only that the thing that had happened was one of the reasons for the “no unmated males” rule.
His stomach sank. She would remind everyone of the rule—and would be well within her rights to do so—and that would be that.
Agatha’s voice was soft, with a gentle rasp, when she said, “I second the motion.”
Robbie didn’t so much sit up as he did rocket upright.
Rose looked over at him, her eyebrow tilted as if to say, “I told you so.”
JJ smiled. “Let’s put it to a vote, then. All in favor of Robbie being allowed to stay and join the pack?”
Every hand in the room rose, joined by a few yips for the members still in their fur.
“All opposed?”
Robbie held his breath, his whole body very still, as if a single twitch from his corner would cause someone to change their mind.
“The ‘ayes’ carry. Robbie is now an official member of the Dismal Falls Pack. Is there any other new business?”
Robbie felt as if he were hearing the remaining proceedings from underwater. There was a loud whooshing in his ears, and everything felt very distorted. He was so frozen by his shock that he didn’t notice Agatha’s approach until she carefully lowered herself to sit at the opposite end of the couch.
The meeting was over. Agatha’s daughters were braiding JJ’s hair.
The pack began shuffling out of the hall, though some stayed, sitting at round tables and drinking coffee out of white diner mugs.
When he’d first arrived, they’d stowed the tables after every meeting, but since Robbie had come, since he’d started cooking for the pack, the tables stayed out so that people could eat together whenever they felt like it.
Rose was wiping down the table where several children had been coloring, washing away little scribbles of marker that had escaped their coloring sheets.
Robbie turned to look at Agatha. She was older than JJ, he knew that much, and her eyes were wreathed in tiny wrinkles.
“Why?” Robbie asked, his voice a dry croak.
Agatha smiled softly. “Because you’re pack.”
“I’m an unmated male.”
“That’s not what the gossips are saying.”
“What are they saying?” he couldn’t help but ask.
“That you met your fated mate, and then fate took her away from you.”
He swallowed against the lump in his throat, a lump he worried would never go away now.
“We never made it official. So she’s not my mate.”
Agatha leaned back against the couch, looking less guarded than he’d ever seen her.
“She’s still your mate, whether you bit her or not.”
“Well then, fuck me, right?” Robbie said with a humorless laugh.
She snorted. “I guess so.”
Agatha twisted the fabric of her dress in her hands and bit her lips back. Robbie rubbed his hand up and down the rough fabric of the couch’s arm.
“Can I ask you something?” Agatha said after a moment.
“Sure,” he said.
She took a deep breath. “What does it feel like?”
“Hell,” he said humorlessly.
“Not now,” she said with an eye roll. “What did it feel like before?”
Robbie thought back to the morning before, to waking up with Nadja’s hair in his mouth and then skimming his fingers over her skin, which had gleamed like a pearl in the pre-dawn light.
He remembered how quiet his brain had felt, how at peace, how at home.
And then she’d opened her eyes and looked at him and it had felt as if his heart would stop beating in his chest, preserving that moment forever, the heartbeat where she smiled at him in the early morning just before he kissed her, ignoring every one of her protests about morning breath because he didn’t care about anything but loving on her.
“It felt like—” he began, unsure whether or not he even had the words.
“It felt like home. Like no matter where I might be, no matter what happened around me, as long as she was there, I’d be home and I’d be okay.
It felt safe. It felt like I’d known her my whole life but was so damned lucky to have found her at the same time.
Like she was a part of me, and if she ever left, I’d be changed forever. ”
When he looked up, he saw tears in Agatha’s eyes. “That’s what I thought.”
“Did you—” he started but froze, remembering JJ’s warning to never ask Agatha about her past. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t ask.”
“No,” she said and then blew out through pursed lips. “It’s okay. I can talk about it now. No, I didn’t have that. I thought maybe I did at first, but… I was wrong.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, because what else could he say?
“He was mean. He hurt me in a thousand different ways, but every time I thought I’d had enough, he’d be like he was at the beginning.
Gentle and sweet or, I dunno, not sweet, but nice at least. And I hate that I stayed for ‘nice’ for as long as I did.
I do. I hate it. But he told me we were fated.
He told me he knew it, and that was that.
I was stupid and in love and I believed that if he knew it, then it must be true.
I don’t know if he was lying or if he was just wrong, or both, but I wasn’t his fated mate.
You wouldn’t treat your fated mate like that.
You wouldn’t treat anyone you really loved like that. ”
She seemed to deflate into the cushions next to Robbie.
He looked down at the floor and slowly, so slowly, he slid his hand across the cushion until it rested in the middle of the space between them. She looked at his hand, and just as slowly, she reached out with her own, until her pinky finger curled over top of his.
“I’m glad you left, Agatha,” Robbie said. “You’re really brave.” She shook her head, but he protested, “No, you are. You took charge of your life and went some place he can’t ever hurt you again.”
She looked him in the eye then. “You’re brave, too.”
Now it was his turn to snort a bitter laugh.
She shook his hand gently with hers. “Your fated mate was taken away from you yesterday, and yet you got out of bed this morning.”
“JJ barked me out of bed,” he clarified.
“But you’re here. Broken heart and all. That’s brave.”
He nodded, staring at nothing in the middle distance.
“And you’re pack now. So you don’t have to go through this alone. Some days, the pack was the thing that saved me. The pack and my girls. They helped me keep going when I didn’t know that I could.”
Pack.
He looked to the front of the room where JJ had two braids with neon green ribbons tied to the ends.
He looked at the table of elders, who saluted him with their coffee mugs.
He saw Rose loading the percolator onto the wheeled cart to take it back to the kitchen.
He smelled them, all of them, a chaotic jumble of scents that were all different and yet somehow belonged together.
He heard the pups running and playing outside. He heard music and off-key singing.
Just then, Agatha’s daughter, a ten-year-old he now knew was called June, approached her.
“I’m hungry, Mom. Can we go home and eat?”
Agatha smiled at her. “Of course we can, baby. Let’s go.”
Robbie watched as Agatha pretended to need June’s help to stand, groaning like a bear as June pulled her up, and then pretending to fall forward. June laughed as she steadied her mom, and Agatha’s smile was brilliant.
He’d be in agony forever. He’d miss her forever. But there would be belly rubs from Rose and hugs from JJ that threatened to crack his ribs. There would be wrestling with pups and running under the full moon. There would be cooking. There would be pack.
It would take time and it would be hell, but someday, eventually, maybe, there might even be a laugh that took him by surprise
Rose was coming out of the kitchen, drying her hands on a paper towel.
“How about lasagna for dinner, Rose?” Robbie asked, his voice grating like sandpaper but stronger nonetheless.
“Sounds delicious, Robbie,” she said.
“I second!” shouted one of the elders, making the rest of the table laugh.
It wasn’t a smile, but Robbie felt the slightest twitch at the corner of his mouth. His legs shook and ached and his heart was still broken, but he stood up and walked to the kitchen on slow feet.
He had work to do, after all. His pack needed to eat.