Chapter 2 #2
My mother lives on spite, but sometimes I think I’m made of rage. At least we have that much in common.
Johanna Hemming rises from where she sits, the widowed mate of a celebrated high-ranking lieutenant who died in a skirmish before I was born, everything about her elegant and chilly though most wolves run hot.
Even the hair that cascades down her back, inky black and straight, seems like a rebuke of my many excesses and betrayals. Not to mention my waves and curls.
She kisses each of my cheeks in turn, but I’m close enough to her that I can see how cold her gaze is. The kisses are for show. They’re for the rest of the pack, not me.
“I hope you plan to stop embarrassing us tonight,” she says as she pulls away. She sits down on the smooth, flat stone behind her and nods to the stone beside it, but it’s not an invitation. It’s an order.
And she’s doing it to humiliate me. Because she and I and every other wolf in the Rogue Valley know that she doesn’t hold rank over me, whether she’s my mother or not.
This is the bloody, beating heart of all our problems.
If she could control me, she would have, and long ago. But I was Ty’s, not hers, and that’s always meant that only he can tell me what to do. Johanna has never liked the fact that, as far as she can tell from my lack of a crown, he indulges me endlessly.
Little does she know what prices he exacts for his patience.
There are some things even notoriously free and open and casually sexual wolves don’t share.
I remind myself that in college, I didn’t just learn how to beat humans at their own game. I also learned that the way to do that best was to remain calm above all things, and not to sweat the small stuff.
So I sit. I let her head be higher than mine, because I know it makes her feel important.
What I also know is that it makes me look like the bigger person for allowing this to happen. It makes me look like I can’t be bothered to engage in power struggles, suggesting I have better things to worry about—and also that I’m not the least bit concerned about my status.
This makes me seem even more powerful, and I know it.
My degree was in political science and business, but it might as well have been in strategy.
“I’m sorry that you feel embarrassed,” I murmur once Johanna has finished pretending not to look around to see who might be witnessing her little power play.
When my aunt offers me a beer, I take it.
The night all around us is cold and littered with stars, but here on the hill, it’s hot.
I can feel the sweat on my skin, and when I prop the beer bottle on my thigh, I can see the ring of condensation it makes against the faded denim of my jeans.
“The moon is nearly high,” my mother says, as if that isn’t something we can all feel like moon-shaped timepieces inside of us, ticking away.
Johanna is an imperious woman. In her skin, she terrifies the humans.
In her fur, they mostly die of heart attacks before she gets around to biting them.
Male wolves still sniff around her, looking for a way in—but though she’ll run, she rarely lets them catch her.
She hasn’t changed her form yet so I let my gaze move over her tattoos, full sleeves on her bared arms and that raven on her throat.
I can’t see them tonight, but I know that they’re all over her back and legs, too.
I have my own tattoos, incantations and wild magic pressed into the skin we only wear some of the time. Before the Reveal, humans interpreted this as threatening, no matter how many tattoos they sported themselves.
These days, they can tell who we are by the way our eyes look in the light sometimes, like gold. And all of our usually wild hair. And . . . the way we are.
Reckless by their standards. Outlaws then, monsters now. I guess it shows.
I sneak a look across the fire toward Ty. He’s big and brawny, all of that dirty-blond hair that’s always a little bit messy, and that beard, and when he moves he has a swagger that tells everyone and everything in a ten-mile radius that he’s the alpha. He doesn’t have to say a word. He just is.
Smart people have always given him a very wide berth, but me? I’m either running to him or away from him, but there’s never that much space.
He catches me looking and, for a moment, there’s a pulse of that blistering heat between us. I feel it curl all around me like he’s pinning me to a bed again from across the top of this hill.
It’s not as if it’s easy to refuse the call of the moon. I don’t actually enjoy pissing off my family, letting down my pack, and making Ty feel betrayed again and again.
Not that anyone ever asks me why. They just tell me what an asshole I am.
“I can feel how high the moon is, Mother,” I say lightly, that ticking inside me so loud now it’s all I can think about. “Can you imagine being moon numb? I think I’d rather be dead.”
“It might come to that,” Johanna replies, hard as fucking nails.
“I love you too,” I murmur.
She turns her head to look at me, her eyes dark. I brace myself for whatever she’s going to hit me with, but she doesn’t get the chance.
The drums get louder. We can all feel it, that surge deep inside.
In the distance, we can hear the young cubs and the old ones howl from inside the cavern. Farther still, the thin howls from the bitten. Even the regular wolves join in, some of them already here on the hill with us—not exactly pets. More like companions.
This is the moment we wait for every moon. The pack begins to howl too.
I can feel it inside me, like a song I can’t help but sing, flowing through me, opening me up, desperate to make me exactly who I’m meant to be—
But I wrench myself back. I tamp it down, and it hurts.
It always hurts. It’s always hard.
I fight until I think I have it under control and when I do, I find Ty’s gaze on me again from the other side of the hilltop.
Suddenly, he’s all I can focus on. That forbiddingly gorgeous face of his. His mouth in a grim line. His dark eyes flashing.
All around us, the sound of the drums is replaced by the thunderclap bursts of energy as blood wolves shed their skin, bristling and stretching and becoming into their fur. When they do, they howl louder.
I can feel my body shake because it wants so badly to change. I can feel the heat between my legs, the power in my blood, and the song in me that connects me to the moon, and my pack, and most of all, Ty himself.
His eyes are dark and gleam like gold, but they have that ring of indigo at the edge, and I can feel him all over me, commanding me to do this thing at last. At last.
But I still don’t change.
I am vaguely aware of wolves all around me. All fur and claw now, they run.
They pour down the steep sides of the hill and take off in all directions. They run for the pleasure of it. They run for the moon. I can see what they’re doing in a different part of my brain, bursting out into the night, covered in moonlight and catapulting themselves into the pure joy of it all.
They will run and run until they drop. Some of them will drop together, the males mounting their females, biting down hard on their necks and then thrusting in deep.
Sometimes this is simply sex, though it comes with the possibility of young, thanks to a full moon night.
Sometimes this is mating between a bonded couple.
When I finally take this run with Ty, it will be a claiming. A howl to the moon, answered in the shine around us and the way he will mark me with his teeth, his claws, and when we are done, the crown tattoo he will place on my throat.
A sign to anyone who can’t scent the truth that I am his.
I can feel it as if it’s already happening.
As if the claiming that I refuse to accept is already a part of me, a memory that hasn’t occurred yet.
I can feel Ty on my back, hot and heavy, and his snout in my ear, that enormous cock of his driving deep and then swelling inside me until we’re stuck, tied up tight—
Once again, I have to fight, hard, to bring myself back to skin.
These bones that are not a wolf’s shape and that I won’t let stretch, though they ache.
The stone beneath me and the breath inside me and whatever the hell else I need to do to keep myself in this human form while the moon and my own desires fight against me.
It goes on and on.
It feels like an eternity. One by one, in bursts and dribbles and mad, wild rushes, all the wolves in our pack disappear into the night. The regular wolves follow.
Only Ty remains. Ty and me, his recalcitrant queen.
Neither one of us moves. He is still waiting, lounging there on that high rock that might as well be a throne. I wouldn’t call it pleading, much as I’d like to. The way he’s looking at me is too demanding.
Too furious.
I can feel my pulse like the drums that aren’t beating any longer. It pounds inside my veins, and I know he can hear it too.
I still don’t move. I can feel my eyes watering. I can feel my muscles aching from the force of will it takes to keep them in one place. In one body. Here.
We can both feel it when the moon shifts, just that little bit. Just enough.
The moment is lost.
Because the full moon run has to start at the moment the moon is at its height. If it doesn’t, it won’t count.
This is how we both know the very instant I’ve betrayed him once again.
I let out a deep breath.
Ty lets out a howl that sounds more like a roar.
Then he’s on me. I don’t even see him move. One moment he’s across the hilltop, high on that rock, and the next he’s here.
“You little shit,” he growls, his face and that beard in my neck, his impossibly strong arms hauling me up from the stone until I’m hanging there, my toes off the ground. “Fuck you, Maddox. You know the gathering is coming up. I wanted my fucking queen before the solstice.”
I want to melt. I fight instead. “Then earn her, Ty.”
He doesn’t like that much.
He bites me, there on my neck. And as I throw my head back—heat and desire and that slick, impossible heat rushing through me—he sets me down and turns me so I’m facing away from him. He hooks an arm around my middle and holds me back toward him, against that massive, ripped chest of his.
Then he takes us both down to our knees.
I can feel his hard, dangerous hands on my jeans. He pulls them down, out of his way, and his rough fingers find me so wet and so ready that he grunts his approval even though he’s furious with me.
By the time he makes room for his cock and presses the thick tip against me, I’m sobbing out his name.
He’s over my back, pressing down on me so that I’m on all fours now. He’s mimicking the thing I won’t give him while the moon is full, and he’s doing it deliberately, and the trouble with Ty is that his punishments feel too good.
“You don’t deserve it,” he growls at me, his mouth at my ear. “You don’t want my cock when it matters, why should you have it any other time?”
“Because it’s mine,” I throw back at him.
I can feel as well as hear the way he groans at that. Because the only saving grace in this shared fate of ours is that he’s as powerless as I am when it comes to this. To us.
Fated means we’re both fucked.
He slams himself into me, hard.
And he’s not a small man. He’s always big and thick and wide enough to make me feel stretched. To give me that moment of near-pain before the wild delight floods in, and it turns out, you can become addicted to that, too.
This is all the rage and longing, mad fury and desire, fate and betrayal and go fuck yourself that we take out on each other. This is raw and overwhelming and beautiful the way a storm is as it wrecks everything in its path.
It’s not cute. It’s not even the typical way he teases me, plays with me. He makes me his fuck toy tonight, and I know he thinks he’s dominating me, but I like that too.
Then he groans, because I make him mine. I move my hips, I push back to take him deeper, and this is who we are. This struggle, this rush, all barbs and teeth, claws and bites and yes.
It’s a full moon fuck, filled with a bold and battered longing for who we aren’t, not yet. Who we can’t be.
Who I won’t let us be.
I come in a rush and he follows, scalding me from the inside out. He bites down hard on my neck, and I can smell my own blood, a coppery sheen in the air.
It makes me come all over again, and harder this time.
My throat is raw. That’s how I know I was screaming his name.
In the aftermath, we’re a tangle of skin and flesh and shoved-aside clothes, breathing too hard in the dirt.
I want to curl into him. I want to hold him and reassure him—and me—that we’re going to be okay. That what I’m doing is the right thing, except I know that he doesn’t think so.
That’s why we keep coming back to this place again and again, and will keep coming back to it.
For a moment, that feels so heavy that I worry I might cry.
I sit up, wiggling to get my jeans back up and zipped. He grunts at me and runs his fingers through my hair, making a fist to hold me where I am.
“Where do you think you’re going?” His voice is low, but he’s not redline furious anymore.
This is the Ty I know best. The Ty I get in private. Resigned and not happy with me, sure. But still mine.
Always mine.
Nonetheless, I choose violence. It’s that or sob.
“I don’t like it here,” I tell him, and watch his eyes blaze. “You know I don’t. I came for the moon. I honored the full moon, and now I’m going home.”
“Home?” His growl is edgy. Dangerous. “You don’t have a home that’s not with me, Maddox. You never will. Don’t make me prove that to you in a way you really won’t like.”