Chapter 12 #2
Liam has to fight two opponents, and he does so with the same ease, dispatching one and then the next as if it’s all swatting flies to him. It doesn’t even look as if he’s winded. When he bows to Connor, then the stage full of females, he’s grinning.
“Not a bad showing,” I murmur to Ty, completely failing at my attempt to not sound like I’m gloating at my family’s prowess. When I am.
“Not bad at all,” he agrees.
I can’t help noticing that each of my brothers chose a mate from the three packs with old kings who are no fans of Ty’s. It looks like three new sisters for me, which is lovely, but it feels like strategy.
The new mated pairs run off together into the remains of Saturday night.
The males who failed to secure a mate start drinking away their wounds and grievances.
The rest of the men settle in for a night of bitten women and other adventures, and I decide it’s time to go down into the den when all I can see is creative, athletic fucking in all directions.
I spend the rest of my evening down in the cavern, letting the older women tell me how best to welcome newly mated females into my pack.
“Don’t you worry about testing their loyalty,” the oldest grandmother there tells me as if that was my first order of business. “You leave that to their men. Because we all know that unless a woman can depend on her man, she’s never going to trust his pack.”
All the other women around me hum their approval. “I wasn’t planning to start any hazing rituals,” I assure them with a laugh.
Another one of the old women looks at me, and though her eyes are clouded over with age, I think she sees me just fine. “That’s because you’re more secure than most,” she says, with a nod. “Not worried about your position. That’s not true for many. You just remember that.”
When my old ladies get tired, they curl up on the couches set all over the grand cavern, because the dens in this cave system are for families or fucking or both, and I head back to Ty’s bed.
Yet I’m still awake when he finally comes down to me, smelling of firewood without a single trace of any bitten women on him, not that I thought there would be. Still, a man’s future queen likes to be sure.
I tell him my theory about my brothers’ mates.
“That’s not the theory, babe,” Ty says gruffly. “That’s the whole point.”
“I had no idea my brothers were so biddable.” I smirk. “I’ve always considered them to be giant assholes who never do anything anyone asks them to do.”
“Maybe not,” Ty agrees. “But they do what I tell them to do.”
“Like everyone else, my liege.”
He laughs at that. “Damn right.”
He crawls onto the bed with me, still clothed, and stretches out there beside me.
I reach over and play with that hair of his that some might call a little too long, but I love it.
I thread it through my fingers for a while.
Then I let my fingers move over his whole head.
Pressing into his skull to release any tension he’s carrying.
And he’s always carrying tension, along with . . . literally everything else.
“I thought we’d spend the day talking about how to modernize the packs,” he tells me, tilting his head back to press into my touch.
“Instead I spent all my time appeasing old men and putting out fires because everyone seems to think the packs are stealing from each other, except no one can prove it. Complete bullshit. And a waste of time. Wolves are going to die because of this shit.”
“I think that’s the point,” I say. His eyes snap open and fix on mine, but I don’t take it back. “Ty. Maybe I’m crazy. But I think there’s a traitor in the pack.”
I expect him to immediately shout at me and tell me that can’t be true, but he doesn’t. His gaze sharpens. “Explain.”
So I do. I lay out the sacrifice issue as I see it. And the protection issue—or lack of it. I tell him exactly how long it took for my supposed protection detail to show up after McCaffrey’s pack started their howling outside my cottage.
“Too long,” he mutters, a look on his face that does not bode well for my cousin Beaudry.
I keep going. “I thought it was aimed at me specifically, but maybe it’s not.
Maybe this is about the pack. Because if there really is a traitor causing trouble, it makes sense to me that the very day after we literally showed them all a different path forward that instead of working toward it, they’d suddenly be at each other’s throats.
Over stealing.” I roll my eyes. “It’s textbook.
Every single wolf here could get their own personal arsenal in a heartbeat if they wanted to.
There are goblin gun markets all over the place.
But they’re all territorial assholes, so the very idea that someone might have taken something that’s theirs? Instant battle.”
“You’re not wrong,” Ty agrees. He runs a hand over his beard. “I wouldn’t be surprised to find out someone was manipulating everything to make sure it goes bad. It just feels wrong.” He shakes his head. “My gut is always right about that shit.”
“Let me tell you what my gut wants.” I shift on the bed so I can look down at him, full in the face. “But you have to promise to hear me out. Don’t rip out my throat until you hear my logic.”
“There’s only one reason I’ll be ripping out your throat, babe,” he drawls lazily, though his eyes flash. “But you have just about ten days to get yourself right on that one.”
He thinks we’re talking about mating. I am definitely not talking about mating.
I must have a serious look on my face, because he shifts his position then too, propping himself up on one elbow.
I sit up all the way so I can look directly at him.
So he can see how completely serious I am.
“It’s been obvious for a long time that the packs need unity.
And you keep trying to build consensus. You keep trying to get them all to work together, and I just don’t think that’s ever going to work. ”
“It will,” he says, his voice as serious as mine. “But if I’m honest, I think some of the old guard is going to have to die off first.”
That’s the way it usually goes. The young wait out the old, but by the time they can do what they want they decide that nothing really needs changing. If it did, we wouldn’t be living like it’s still the Revolutionary War out there.
“Sure,” I say. “But in the meantime, you’ll get bigger and stronger, they’ll all try to challenge you, and we’ll all continue living exactly the same way we always have.”
He frowns at that, but I don’t give him a chance to respond.
“And I don’t just mean that in terms of me,” I assure him.
“I mean all of this. These petty little fiefdoms. Little kings marching around all puffed up because they can dominate a few submissive females and a handful of weak beta males. We were always taught that the original packs were formed the way they were because they all had powerful wolves to run them—but things are different now. There’s no one in any pack who could even dream of being as powerful as you are. You know this. They know this.”
“I can handle a target on my back,” Ty tells me with a laugh.
“You have to,” I say. I’m not laughing. “Because tomorrow is the solstice, Ty.”
We both know what that means, especially now. Wolf week always ends at the solstice. The darkest night of the year. The one night that any wolf from any pack can challenge any other wolf for any reason. The night hierarchy and common sense don’t matter.
On one such solstice night, a hundred years ago, Ty himself challenged the leader of this very pack and won.
“What if,” I say, actually whispering because what I’m saying is heresy and I’m suddenly afraid the walls themselves can hear me, “instead of waiting for all of these little kings to challenge you, as they probably will, you issue a challenge yourself?”
He blinks, then looks amused. “Baby. Who am I going to challenge? I can kill all of them. It’s not even a question.”
“I know that.” I lean in and put my hands on his face.
His beautiful, impossible face. “What if you crown yourself king of all kings. The king. If they won’t pledge their fealty to you, they can fight you.
Just like back in the old days. Honoring the old ways, as so many of these kings claim they’re doing all the time. ”
I expect him to flip out at this. I expect him to at least shut me down, and hard, whether he thinks I have a point or not. But . . . he doesn’t.
We stare at each other. We stare into each other.
And I know, suddenly, that whatever comes next—our lives will always be divided between before this moment and after it.
Ty knows it too. He puts his hands over mine, holding them fast against the planes of his jaw and the rough caress of his beard.
“If we do this,” he says, his voice hoarse, “are we doing this together?”
I don’t look away from him. I’m not even sure I blink. “We’ve been doing everything together for a long time, Ty. That’s who we are. It doesn’t matter what we call ourselves or what they call us. We’re still us. We’re always us.”
I know full well that it’s a vow I’m making. I know that I’m telling him that I’m not fighting anymore. That I’m leaning into him, to this, to the fate we make.
I know that I’m promising him that when the Wolf Moon shines full above us, I’m going to run, he’s going to catch me, and he’s going to stake that claim at last.
I’m promising him that I trust him more than I fear what lies ahead for us.
“Us,” he says, his dark eyes bright and hot. His own kind of vow.
Then he pulls me closer.
He kisses me in that same bruising sort of way he did after that impromptu rave. He pulls me down with him, he gets his hands in my hair, and he keeps kissing me.
He kisses me like there’s no beginning, no end, just this.
And I can feel that fire dance inside of us, but he doesn’t crank up the heat. This is different. This is sacred.
This time, maybe for the first time, we don’t fuck. That’s not the right word.
Because this is true love. This is the real fate that’s held us in its grip all this time. This is the two of us, coming together. Becoming one.
This is the only way we can get our souls entwined.
Ty explores every part of my body. He pulls me over him so I can straddle him, and so I can see him worship me. With his hands. With that look on his face.
Over again we turn and I hold him inside me, doing my best to lock my legs around him, though he’s so broad and his muscles are so hard—
It’s as if I can’t take him deep enough.
Still, we fit. Whatever we do, we fit.
I stop pretending that there’s any possibility of me feeling whole without this man. My mate. My king.
My destiny.
When we come, we do it together, and it feels like pure joy.
We hold each other for a very long time. So long it begins to feel like a different kind of communion. But eventually, I turn over and I look at him.
“I miss the stars,” I confess. “That’s one of the reasons I like the cottage so much. I can see them from my window.”
“Baby,” Ty rumbles. “I can give you the goddamn stars.”
He pulls me with him out into the tunnel and then outside.
We sneak back up to that hilltop, but we don’t join the party that’s still going on around the fires.
We skirt around it and head for the next hill, where Ty and I avoid the sleeping packs from the Southwest and climb halfway up a very tall pine tree.
We keep going until we make it to an old lookout spot with a still-sturdy platform.
He sits with his back against the tree trunk and wraps me up in his arms. I lean back into him, my back to his chest, and we don’t say a word.
Maybe we’re beyond words.
I tilt my head up to look at all the stars high above me on the second-to-darkest night, bright and beautiful as if to whisper the truth—dawn is coming.
Dawn is always coming.
I feel no death goddess darkness encroaching tonight. There are nothing but constellations up above us and the whole, complicated, magical galaxies that Ty and I have made between us.
For a moment I can pretend that the solstice isn’t coming. That we can always feel exactly like this with no test, no fight.
That it can be only the two of us, with the world like the far-off Milky Way, something to look at and marvel at that doesn’t affect us in the least.
Just for a moment, I lean into him and let myself believe it could.