Chapter 6
Olivia
I sleep badly, tossing and turning all night, and wake up hangry.
On the bright side, I still have one of the chocolate mousses left, so I scarf it down as I lean on the kitchen counter, savoring the bittersweet taste.
After I dress and pull a comb through my hair, I head down to the pack canteen where my brother had agreed to meet me for breakfast.
After breakfast, I’m going to go find the pack library. I hear they have some incredibly cool old lorebooks, and my bookbinder heart is yearning to see them. I miss my bookbinding tools desperately.
The air in the canteen is rich with the scent of sizzling bacon, frying eggs, and strong coffee. Dozens of pack members line up with plates or sit at tables chatting. Shifters are pack animals; we’re a social bunch.
My brother is nowhere to be seen, though, and Stephen is never late. My stomach clenches in worry.
I hurry from one end of the room to the other, searching for him. I finally collar a guy and send him into the men’s room to look for him. When that fails, I go outside and call him, and the call goes straight to voicemail.
Now I’m straight-up scared.
Is he injured? They’d tell me if he was, wouldn’t they?
What if they did some kind of horrible experiment on him to bring his wolf out, and it failed? And they were afraid to tell me?
I try to take deep breaths to calm myself, but it fails. Every breath I take is another couple of seconds where I can’t find my brother. I am practically in tears when I grab one of the servers by the arm and ask if anyone knows where my brother is.
"Stephen?" The woman flashes me a puzzled glance. I let go of her arm, and she resumes wiping down a table. "He's over in the gym with Bram."
“Why?” I demand. “Why isn’t he here?”
She shrugs. “Pretty sure Alpha Kieran told him to.” She turns away and moves on to another table.
What the h-e-double hockey sticks?
Bram is a hardass. He’s mean. He hits hard. And now he is teaching my baby brother how to take a punch because His Royal Hiney ordered it.
Stephen has been punched enough in his life, thank you very much. He’s been the target of bullies since the other kids figured out that he couldn’t shift.
He’s been sad and quiet since he was fourteen years old, and I have spent every one of those years standing between him and anyone who wanted to make him feel worse about himself, and nobody gets to decide what happens to him without going through me first.
My wolf is up and pacing. For once, we agree on something – we want to bite the Alpha’s damned face off, chew it up, and spit it out.
I stalk out of the canteen and across the white gravel to the pack meeting building.
Teresa is at the front desk. She takes one look at my face and stands up.
"Miss Crowley. The Alpha is in a meeting."
"Great. I'll wait."
The meeting, it turns out, is not a quiet one.
A man is booming away in there. A woman’s voice keeps sailing over the top of him, higher and sharper. Teresa types on, serene.
"—the strongest healer in the country, and you're telling me she won't lift a finger for my son? She’s so precious she can only work on your own pack members? We said we’d pay!”
I lean forward, craning to hear.
Kieran answers, too low to make out. Whatever he says, it doesn't help.
"Don't you quote policy at me." The woman now. "He's nineteen. He limps in his wolf form and his human form, from that silver injury! Everyone else says silver injuries can’t be healed, but I know your sister could undo it!”
"We came to you in good faith," the man bellows. "The Briarwood pack will remember this."
I have no idea who the Briarwood pack is, but based on this sample, I'm guessing they're a real treat at parties.
The door bangs open. A big gray-haired man barrels out with his face brick red, an expensively dressed woman clicking along behind him with angry stomps of her heels.
Between them limps a boy — teenaged, tall, shoulders up around his ears, his right leg swinging stiff from the hip.
He fixes his eyes on the floor and keeps them there.
Him, I feel bad for. His parents came in swinging the pack name around, but he's the one who has to live with that leg.
The woman stops in front of me. "The nerve," she announces loudly. "The absolute gall. This is the pack everyone raves about."
Then they're gone with a slam of the door, and the lobby is very quiet.
Teresa keeps typing.
"Does that happen often?" I ask. “Him refusing to let his sister work on people?” I wasn’t aware until now that he had a specific rule on not working on people outside of the pack.
When they turned my brother away, I honestly felt like they were being snobs.
We were poor white trash, not worth helping.
It’s possible that years of living in a tiny falling apart shack and wearing second-hand clothes and frequently having to hunt food for myself and my brother because we can’t afford groceries have left me with a bit of a chip on my shoulder.
"The Alpha will be unavailable for the rest of the morning," she says, which is not a no.
Fine. My face-biting agenda will keep.
I go out the front and around the side of the building, hunting for somewhere to stomp in peace.
That's where I see him.
Kieran comes out the back door alone. He doesn't notice me. He stops on the gravel, tips his head back, and stares at the sky. He isn’t smirking, for once. He looks frustrated and grim. And maybe…glum?
Huh. So he doesn't actually enjoy rejecting people.
I've spent two days assuming that being an a-hole is his hobby, that he enjoys exerting dominance for the sake of it.
It's much more dangerous to let myself think that he might have a reason for doing it, because then I'd have to wonder what the reason is, and wondering about him is a slippery slope that ends with licking his abs.
Holy fates. Why does my mind keep going there? Why, even when I’m furious at him, do I also find myself worrying about him and the terrible burden of being an Alpha?
I'm still mad at him. The man ordered my brother into brutal physical training without asking me, and there's a nineteen-year-old limping to his car right now over a rule Kieran won't even explain. Furious. That's me.
He strips his shirt off over his head, and I have only seconds to let my eyes roam over his broad shoulders and back, narrowing to his trim waistline, the curve of his biceps, before he shifts. Alphas shift much faster than average shifters.
It's fast and violent — fur and muscle exploding out of the man, his jeans not surviving the transition. His wolf is gray and enormous, and it hits the ground already running, straight for the tree line, gone.
My wolf surges so hard my claws come out.
I should go back to my cabin. I should check on Stephen. I should do absolutely anything other than what I'm about to do.
I leave my clothes folded on a stump, because unlike certain Alphas I could name, I can't afford to explode out of my wardrobe. Then I shift, and I run after him.
He hears me coming. He slows just enough for me to fall in beside him, and I brace for — I don't know what. A growl. A snarl. Rejection.
He does none of that. He just runs.
So I run too.
We pour down a deer trail through the pines, over a creek, up a long ridge studded with granite. We’re pure instinct, pure animal.
Every conversation we've had has been a fencing match, and out here there's nothing to win. There's pine sap and cold air and the drum of eight paws.
Then we crest the ridge, the trail opens into a long meadow, and he pulls ahead.
Oh, no you don't.
I flatten out and dig in. He glances back, tongue lolling, and pours on more speed, and I hit what Stephen calls "the turbo button and no steering" and close the gap a little.
We tear across that meadow flat out, and a hundred feet before the far trees, his stride shortens.
I sail past him and pull up at the treeline first, spinning, tail high, victorious.
He let me win. He absolutely let me win, the enormous smug cheater.
The insufferable part is that it worked. I feel better than I have in two weeks.
I'm still mad at him, but there’s apparently room for other emotions in there as well. I just don’t dare let myself give those emotions a name.