Chapter Thirty
Gwen
Arabella was like a small child with the Christmas preparations. Ajax was reserved, but I knew when something went straight to his heart. No matter what physical presents he received, he’d already been given the thing he’d most wanted in his life.
Family. Inclusion. Belonging.
He’d thought, for a while, he might want to join the bikers.
That wasn’t a possibility for him yet, but I had a feeling it would be before the next Christmas.
He and his wolf were in sync. It was just a matter of time before Abbott fully released him.
I no longer worried about Ajax joining the RTMC, though.
Perhaps if Arabella hadn’t come to us, he might have.
He’d needed a warm-blooded family member in the house, and he’d needed to be in control sometimes.
But not all the time.
The bikers would need him to always be in control. Kieran and I could give him some time off, when we made the decisions. Time when Kieran drove the bus, and Ajax only needed to follow orders and hold onto his orgasm until he had permission to find release.
I could see into both Ajax and Arabella’s memories of their day when I rose. I saw their intimate moments when they first awakened. The gentle, loving sex. I also saw the times Ajax took control and was rough with her, but it didn’t happen often. Three or four times a month.
Swans have to change on the solstices and equinoxes.
They’re in great pain for the following three months if they don’t.
I’ve tortured swans in the past by withholding the change when it was necessary for some security reason, but never would I allow our Arabella to be put through that.
The change requires the swan female have an orgasm with a cock inside of her.
A dildo won’t do. It has to be a warm-blooded penis.
This meant Ajax was the only one of us who could do it, and he felt honored to take on the task.
Arabella and Ajax were invited to Thanksgiving dinner with the Swan Queen and Dragon King. They arrived home stuffed to the gills, and then Kieran and I had our own feast. Different meals give the blood a different taste, and Thanksgiving dinner has a specific flavor.
The stores were open in the middle of the night for the big Black Friday sales, so the four of us went shopping together. It was a madhouse, and I nearly hissed at a few people, but remembered not to. Even if no one else saw, there were cameras everywhere in this century. Such a pain in the ass.
We bought more Christmas decorations, including a totally tacky huge blowup fake glass globe for the front yard. Arabella wanted it, and none of us could bring ourselves to tell her no.
I intended to take Arabella to Italy for a shopping spree.
She’d open a present to find the itinerary confirmation for Abbott’s long-range jet, and a promise to purchase as many outfits as she could put together in three days of shopping.
I figured between the two of us, we’d probably spend one hundred and fifty grand on clothes, hotel, and the cost to use Abbott’s plane.
We had reservations in a Milan resort that caters to vampires.
Ajax was getting private lessons for a helicopter license, along with a four-person helicopter. His house in Alaska came with a helipad. It seemed a shame not to use it.
And for my wonderful husband, I’d purchased a declining hotel in an up-and-coming portion of Fairbanks. It’d been a while since he’d done the hands-on real estate thing. He enjoyed turning a building into a successful money-maker, and this one was the perfect business for him to revamp.
Yeah. Okay. So I go a little overboard for Christmas. If you can’t splurge on the ones you love, why bother being filthy rich to start with?
When we returned from shopping, our Ajax decided it was time we saw what was in the blocked-off portion of his memories.
At first, I thought he did it in the hopes it might be one of the things Abbott and Sophia were looking for, but as soon as I had the thought, I saw the truth in his mind.
He didn’t want to keep secrets from us anymore. He wanted us to see all of him.
We didn’t have long until we needed to retire before the sun rose, and I believe this was by design, to keep from having to talk about it. Instead of telling us, he merely opened it, so we could see everything.
Our werewolf was fully broken in as a bodyguard, not as a sex slave.
Some of it was similar to a military boot camp — sleep denial, more exercise than should be physically possible, rough fight training.
But there was more. Extended time caged.
Treated as an animal. Broken down to nothing and then turned into a lethal killing machine.
And then, training in how to sit still and focus for days, and still be able to react within a millisecond.
And always, extreme punishment when a trainee failed at a task or assignment.
This was how he knew the Singapore method of caning, though that was far from the worst thing done to him.
When he’d later been put through slave training, it’d been a piece of cake.
Instead of giving him sympathy, I merely thanked him for trusting us enough to share this painful part of his personal history. Kieran told him he honored us with his truth.
And we didn’t speak of it again. He locked those memories back up.
He’d trusted us to see them and not make a big deal of it, and then he put them away again.
We didn’t force him to talk about it because we saw that Abbott had handled it for us.
However, we also endeavored to never give our werewolf any trigger that might remind him of that time in his life.