Chapter 3 #3
“I know all the packs are coming,” I say, looking back at him after that unwelcome trip down memory lane. “And I know that no one understands this thing between us—”
“Including me,” he growls.
I shoot a glare back at him. “You understand it, you just don’t like it.”
“Again, end of the line, babe.” He gets to his feet then, moving much too fast and much too gracefully for someone his size.
He’s breathtaking, is the trouble. If I’d been fated to a goblin, my whole life would be different.
I’d be on an island in the South Pacific even now.
“You say you know all the packs are coming, but are you really prepared for what that means? You didn’t like it that much five years ago when we were back east and no one could understand why I was letting you make a mockery of me down in New York City. ”
He was right. I’d hated it. “You told me you didn’t care what they said.”
“I don’t,” he shoots back at me. “But I do care about what they might do, Maddox. Sooner or later a hundred-year king with no queen looks like a weak-ass bitch. A liability. The fact that we managed to take down a death goddess from hell won’t matter much if enough of the wrong people decide that a move against me makes sense. ”
“I can’t believe anybody would dare.”
“Maddox.”
I can hear the impatience in his voice. It’s all over him, and it’s different this time. The all-pack gathering changes things. I should have been more prepared. I can see that he is.
He glares at me. “Stop stalling.”
“I just think that there should be more than this,” I say, flatly. Boldly.
I’ve never said it before. Not quite like that. I’ve hinted at it. I’ve come toward it but never quite got there.
Mostly because I suspected that he would look exactly the way he does now. Like I’ve slapped him. “What the fuck do you mean by that?”
“I mean that the world ended three years ago and everything changed, except us.” I throw out my hands to encompass this hill, the den beneath it, the entire pack.
“We live exactly the same way that our ancestors were living one hundred years ago. But you can remember that yourself. It was the same two hundred years before you. A thousand years before then.”
“That’s called history,” Ty growls. “Our history.”
“Is it?” I shake my head, not sure why I feel like there’s an earthquake inside of me. “Why are we still hiding below ground when everyone else is walking around free? Why are we adhering to archaic rules that have nothing to do with how this pack—how you—can change things going forward?”
“Talking shit isn’t going to change the situation.”
“I’m not talking shit. You hear everything I say but you never listen, Ty.”
That isn’t fair—or true—but I don’t take it back. He looks at me in that arrogant amazement that makes most people cower. I don’t let myself.
I push on. “You are the smartest wolf I’ve ever met, and I’ve met a lot of wolves. Yet for some reason you think that you should be bowing your head to the old ways just because people have always done it that way. So what if they have?”
He’s looking at me like I’m nuts, so I blow out a breath and give him an example.
“Why should you have to negotiate with all the other North American kings? It causes chaos. It’s always annoying.
It would be better for everyone involved if there was only one king.
” I glare at him. “And it should be you, obviously, because you’re the one who figured out how to take over human shit and make it ours in the first place.
All the rest of them are just copying you. ”
“Don’t talk crazy,” he tells me in a low voice. “And definitely don’t talk like that when the other packs are around.”
“Every other king in every other pack already has a queen,” I remind him.
I watch him go nuclear. “That’s part of the fucking problem, Maddox.”
“And what have those queens contributed to their packs?” I demand, not backing down at all.
“They provide young. They create what I imagine are deeply bitchy and petty social structures in their dens, if my own mother is anything to go by. It might surprise you to learn that I think females have better things to do than play stupid little reindeer games.”
“What do you think being my mate means?” He is shaking his head, looking a lot like he’d like to shake me. “Bearing the young is part of the deal, babe.”
“I can’t wait to have your babies,” I grit out at him.
“But don’t you think that we have shit to do first?
” When he only glares back at me, I wave my hands around, trying to take in the whole valley this time.
“The vampires don’t live underground anymore.
Oh sure, they have their lairs, but how many vampires have you seen moving into the abandoned houses around here?
Whoever heard of vampires just . . . living aboveground?
There are even goblins in the half-falling-down houses off Pioneer Road, and they’re not wrecking things.
They’re gentrifying. That’s what I mean. Everything’s changed, except us.”
He doesn’t like that, but he doesn’t argue. It’s why I can’t hate him.
“I’m the one who lived with humans all of those years,” I remind him. “I’m the one who took the time to figure them out.”
“Wasted effort, it turns out, since they’re nothing but snack food these days.”
“Here’s the thing about humans,” I tell him. “I’ve been trying to tell you this, but you won’t take it on board. They’re weak. They have to build weapons to defend themselves because they don’t possess the power to do it naturally.”
“Like I said. Waste of time all around.”
“They know how to dream,” I throw at him. “Imagine what we could make of this pack if we stop living like wolves, live like the werewolves we actually fucking are, and dream like humans?”
That blazes between us, another fire all its own.
Ty doesn’t shift his gaze from mine, but he doesn’t come any closer either. “What I think is that you have to trust me, Maddox. It’s now or never. And I don’t like how never sounds. I don’t think you’re going to like how it feels.”
He’s blowing me off and I want to bite him, but I know where that will lead. “I don’t understand why you can’t trust that I have the pack’s best interest at heart. Or that I might actually have learned something in the time I was away.”
“Because it’s bullshit, Maddox,” he says, and it would make me flinch less if he shouted it.
Instead, he’s quiet again. It’s devastating.
“All this is bullshit, and it has been for years. The entire life that you’ve lived up until now has been an exercise of my trust in you, and what do I get back from that?
Not a fucking thing. Up to and including you choosing to move out of this den like a big fucking middle finger in my face.
We are literally made for each other, asshole.
That’s not flowery language. That’s not some stupid book. It’s fucking fate, like it or not.”
“We can be made for each other and not ready for each other,” I throw back at him, trying to disguise how shook I feel.
He looks like he’s considering biting me himself. “You’ve had more than enough time to get ready.”
“We can be made for each other and no fucking good for each other, too, Ty,” I hurl at him. “Have you ever thought about that?”
It’s one of those moments, so seldom, when I manage to hit him where it hurts. He makes a small sound, like a laugh, though not like it’s funny.
I want to go to him. I want to apologize. I want to explain—except I can’t explain. I’ve been trying to explain for years, and it always ends up back here.
The same sad circle, again and again and again.
“You don’t think that we’re good for each other, but I should trust you to do what, exactly?” He asks that in a stiff, gruff way that lets me know that I really did land a blow. And that it hurt him.
I hate myself.
But I don’t stop. “You told me you’d wait until I was ready. I’m going to need you to keep that promise, Ty.”
“Go fuck yourself, Maddox,” he suggests, low and deliberate.
A blow in return. I deserve it.
I understand that if I don’t do something about this, right now, we will stand here in this exact spot and repeat this. Over and over. Fuck and fight. Fuck and almost reach some kind of understanding—but no. Fuck again. Fight again.
But if I could do that, we wouldn’t be here right now, would we?
I give him the actual finger this time, on top of the figurative middle finger he thinks my living situation is. “You first,” I suggest.
This time, when he laughs, it’s a warning.
I heed it. I turn and run. All the way to the steep side of the hill, and I can hear him behind me, moving fast.
I jump, and I shift midair, and when I land on the slick, steep hillside, I haul ass on four legs all the way home.
When I make it through the woods to that pretty little hill in Jacksonville, my cottage waits for me. It’s nestled into the trees on the edge of the big front yard outside the oracle’s house. I left the lights on to welcome me home, and once I’m in the yard—once I see them—I pause.
I take a breath, but when I scan all around me, Ty’s nowhere. I can’t even scent him on the wind.
I know that he let me run all this way. Let me beat him.
I know, too, that this is another example of his trust in me.
Yet I also know that no matter how much I wish it could be, it’s not enough.