Chapter 3
“Don’t.” I don’t say that loud. It’s more of a breath.
Ty doesn’t back down, so I push away from him, entirely too aware that he lets me go. He watches me, his dark eyes assessing. Always appraising everything and everyone, and me most of all.
I learned a long time ago that he sees everything, and sometimes I’ve wished with every part of me that he didn’t. Especially when the fact that he sees everything doesn’t always mean he sees it my way.
He doesn’t say anything as I shove the heavy weight of my hair away from my face.
I sit back on my heels and look at him, still lying there, stretched out like some kind of god on a rest day in between playing games with worlds.
His jeans are still shoved down, and he looks perfectly able to carry on a conversation with his cock hanging out. He is.
One thing about Ty is that he embodies the best parts of being a wolf. Part of that is having absolutely no shame. About anything, but especially his body.
Not that he has anything to be ashamed about, particularly not that cock of his that I can still feel—
But I can’t let myself get distracted any more than I already have tonight. And when all I do is sit there and gaze back at him, he sighs. He buttons himself up and then props himself up on one elbow, still stretched out there beside me.
“Time is running out, babe.” His voice is low.
Serious. I can feel how serious like concrete inside me.
“You know it as well as I do. You can feel it, same as I can.” He doesn’t look away from me as he takes his free hand and holds it over his chest, where I can feel the same longing and need in him that I have in me.
“We’re reaching the end of this grace period, whether you like it or not. ”
There’s a moment here. A possibility for the radical honesty that I know he wants from me. I want it too. Or we both say we want it when the other one is in a different place, like that intimacy might shatter us both.
Anyway, that’s what I tell myself. That’s what I shy away from.
“You know it doesn’t have anything to do with whether or not I like it,” I say instead.
I don’t like the way he phrased that. Since it’s part and parcel of the same story the pack likes to tell about me as it is.
Flighty Maddox. Selfish Maddox. Little Princess Maddox who takes and takes and never gives anything in return.
Sometimes when I say things like that, it makes him mad. Tonight he sits up, reaches out, and puts a hand on my arm. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
I like Ty rough and overbearing. I like him wild, showing off all that power he wears so easily. I love him with his hands on me, twisting this passion between us whichever way he sees fit—and me with it.
But this Ty makes everything inside me . . . shimmer.
“Things have been a little intense lately,” he acknowledges, still in that low, solemn way that makes that shimmering within me .
. . brighten. “Death goddesses and oracles and vampires and shit. But at the end of the day, you know the only thing that matters is this. Us. I told you that a long time ago. It hasn’t changed. ”
That hurts. He meant for it to hurt. “I know.”
“This has always been a finite situation. And the shit’s hitting the fan, baby. I know you know that too.” His dark gaze is direct. Unflinching. “So what’s it going to take? Because after all of these years, it’s starting to seem like it’s me you don’t trust.”
“That’s not true.”
Ty doesn’t respond to that. He doesn’t drop his hand, and he doesn’t move closer. He just watches me, this massive, beautiful male who is already too many things to me. I can’t count them all.
I blow out a breath. “It’s not true,” I say again. “Sometimes I think you’re the only person I do trust.”
His hard hand squeezes my arm, then drops. “But not enough, Maddox. Never enough.”
Without him touching me, I can think a little bit better. But my heart hurts a whole lot more. I cross my arms over my chest like that will help. It doesn’t.
“I’m not blind,” I manage to say, though my throat feels tight. “I wouldn’t be a worthy mate for the Rix if I couldn’t comprehend the politics.”
“Funny you say that.” Ty’s words are like bullets, and he doesn’t miss when he shoots.
“You had the opportunity tonight to solidify our standing ahead of the gathering of the packs, and you didn’t do it.
Explain that to me in a way that makes sense.
” His dark eyes blaze. “Because you know and I know that there are any number of motherfuckers out there who want nothing more than to crash into this valley and take me down. At what point do I stop protecting you and protect myself instead? Maybe even let you step up and offer to protect me for a change? When is that part going to happen?”
He lets that sit there for a long, long time. So long I think I almost feel the cold.
When it’s clear I’m not going to say anything, he keeps going. “I’ve heard a lot, for years now, about what a partnership should look like. But all I see, all I ever see, is me taking heat.”
My temper spikes at that, but I’m pretty sure it’s just rushing out ahead of what I’m really feeling, which is shame. Because he’s not wrong.
I wish he was.
“It has nothing to do with you.” I grit that out.
“What I know is that you tell me that,” he replies in that same implacable way that’s making everything in me quiver, and not in the usual, fun way.
“You keep telling me, Maddox.” This time I think that dark flash in his eyes leaves burn marks all over my body and, worse, inside.
He leans closer. “But I’m still the hundred-year king with no goddamned queen.
I’d have to be a little bitch if I wasn’t starting to wonder if maybe you don’t have any intention of keeping the promises you made to me. ”
“I just need more time.” I shrug as I say that, because it makes me feel something like helpless. I need more time because I know that it isn’t the right time. Not yet.
I’m aware that I’ve been saying that for so long now. Too long now. It feels like ash on my own tongue.
“Time is running out,” Ty says quietly. It hits me a lot harder than it would have if he’d shouted. If he’d come at me, wrapped his hand around my throat the way he likes to do—and the way I like him to do, to be clear—to growl straight up in my face.
Ty all quiet like this seems to settle in my bones like the kind of cold a werewolf isn’t supposed to feel. Like it’s already the darkest part of December inside me.
I push back and stand up, arms still crossed, but I feel restless.
Undone, something whispers inside me, but I don’t want to accept that.
I look around the abandoned hilltop, empty of everyone now except the two of us.
The fire still dances in the stone circle.
The jagged rocks that so many of the pack use as stadium seating are empty.
There’s only the moon up above us, keeping her watch, and the inky dark of the night sitting heavy on the trees that stretch out all the way to the coast.
I remind myself that it really is December now, on this side of midnight. The Wolf Moon is coming. The all-pack gathering is happening. I don’t need Ty to tell me that time is running out, because I can feel it myself.
Like it’s been an hourglass all along and the very last bit of sand is on its way out.
“When your mother brought you to me because you bled that first time, what happened?” Ty asks, still where I left him, seemingly lounging on the ground.
He’s not asking because he doesn’t know the answer.
“We don’t have to dredge up history,” I mutter.
“Sure about that? I think we should, Maddox.” There’s a little more temper in his voice now, and I’m ashamed that I find it comforting.
I know what to do with his heat. It’s his disappointment that breaks me, every time.
I’m now hugging myself more than crossing my arms for the sake of it. And I can’t help my reflexive look toward the door that leads back down to the grand cavern, like all he has to do is bark out an order and even my memory obeys him.
Johanna wanted the spectacle. She wanted everyone to know—or to remember, maybe—that she alone had given birth to the girl who would be the next queen of the pack. She has always been exacting when it comes to upholding the old ways, especially if those old ways advance her position.
I suspect that’s because she likes to think she survived the old ways more or less intact, so why shouldn’t everyone else? Not that I’d dare psychoanalyze my mother to her face.
I was thirteen that night. A wolfling girl becomes a woman when she bleeds, and that’s not inappropriate. Regular wolves reach sexual and social maturity a lot sooner. Humans later. Like most werewolf things, it all comes down to the blood.
Blood was the beginning and the end of it as far as my mother was concerned, and that night she herded me over from our part of the cavern to Ty’s up in the front, nipping at my furry haunches when I tried to evade her.
It wasn’t as if my bleeding was a secret. Everyone could scent it. Johanna wanted to make sure that the whole pack saw her delivering unto the king the queen that he was promised.
May this girl prove bountiful in all ways, my king, Johanna said with great formality, bowing down before him.
Everyone else in the cavern followed suit.
I stood there before him, not sure what the hell I was supposed to do.
Ty only looked at me, the biggest wolf I’d ever seen, and accepted me with a regal nod, letting me curl up there beside him for the rest of the night. It was an act of kindness I didn’t have to entirely understand to appreciate.
Later that night, when the fires were low and there were the usual intimate noises in the shadows and snores from the couches, he woke me up from where I was dozing in his sleeping furs.
Then he led me out of the grand cavern and back into the cave system, taking me down twisting, cold corridors until we reached his personal den.