21. Leora
Leora
“Alban,” I called after the giant wolf I hadn’t expected to storm out. “Alban, could you please come back so that we can discuss this?”
The door slamming behind him provided the only answer to my question.
And I stood there, left behind in the library, with a strange guilt twisting in my gut. Even though I’d done nothing wrong.
I mean, I didn’t think I did anything wrong.
He’d made it more than clear that he didn’t want Dorie and me around when he told his father to kick us out. Taking Dorie up to the cabin by myself for the holidays would have given him the solitude he seemed to crave more than anything else.
I thought it was a compromise that would please everyone. But Alban—Alban of all people—had acted as if I was some kind of rude, ungrateful monster for simply making a request. A request he could’ve easily just said no to without all the ugly accusations about my character.
Then he’d just left.
I didn’t know whether to run after him and beg for the cabin or just give in and drag my daughter with me to live at the castle. He had a point about it not being much of a hardship. I’m sure Dorie would get used to living in this huge, drafty castle if she just gave it a try …
“Well, that was some argument, wasn’t it?”
I jumped when the voice sounded behind me, then turned to see a male wolf standing behind a long wood table covered in computers at the farthest reaches of the library.
Apparently, I’d been so focused on my confusing conversation with Alban. I somehow hadn’t registered his presence in the room. And he’d been standing too far away for me to pick up his scent with my wolf-heightened sense of smell.
“Oh, hello, there,” I said, recovering my politeness. I started forward with my hand outstretched so that I could get within both smelling and shaking distance. “I’m Leora.”
“Evan,” he replied, coming around the computer table to give my hand a weak up-and-down shake.
Even before getting close enough to smell him, I sensed he wasn’t another Faoiltiarn male.
He was tall and thin, as opposed to towering and broad.
Also, he didn’t have a thick Scottish brogue like Magnus, Alban, and Hamish.
And he smelled different—not like nature, but something else I could only describe as a plastic and metal undertone.
“I’m so sorry you had to see that … um conversation,” I said awkwardly.
“Oh, don’t apologize.” He threw me a knowing smile. “Watching the heroic Alban Scotswolf get shot down was way more fun than trying to get these ancient computers online with their even more ancient server.”
The heroic Alban Scotswolf? I didn’t understand Evan’s mocking tone.
“Last name’s Glaswolf. I’m Gail’s husband. I should’ve tacked that on to my introduction,” he said, mistaking the reason for my confused look.
He rolled his eyes. “I think I’ve become a bit too used to everyone in town somehow automatically knowing I’m the husband who got dragged here by the new schoolteacher. And you must be the queen’s sister, right?”
“Right,” I confirmed as I put two and two together.
Gail Glaswolf was the town’s new teacher.
“I bet us two girls are going to be best friends,” she’d told Dorie on the first day my daughter had attended school behind the castle.
And Dorie had answered, “No, we’re not. Senair told me about how mean you were to my best friend.”
That was how I’d found out that:
one) Dorie considered Alban her best friend, and
two) Hamish was definitely becoming a bad influence on her.
I’d apologized to Gail profusely on Dorie’s behalf. But the pretty teacher had treated me coolly after that. And Dorie’s only complaints about school were that the teacher insisted on being addressed as Mrs. Glaswolf—and never called on her when she raised her hand.
Evan Glaswolf must be the male she’d met while her fiancé had been deployed—the husband Hamish only ever referred to as “that city wolf.”
Suddenly, I went from feeling angry at Alban to feeling defensive on his behalf. Hamish had told me Alban hadn’t dated anyone since Gail left him. So why would Evan be the one holding on to any animosity toward Alban?
Without warning, my body flushed with a heat unlike anything I’d ever known. Even when I woke up in Alban’s cabin sweating with fever. Even when I embarrassed myself so thoroughly in the chicken house, I silently begged for a hole to open up beneath my feet.
“Are you …?” Evan frowned at me. “Are you all right, love?”
I couldn’t answer. A hot wave crawled over my skin, making it boil underneath my too-heavy clothes. Was I sick again?
A strange smell began to emanate from me, and in an instant, it filled up the room in a way I could only describe as … well, noisy. Like church bells ringing so loudly overhead, you couldn’t possibly hear or think about anything else.
And my skin, it was hot—so very, very hot. I felt like a balloon, swollen to the point of bursting.
A ferocious urge to rip off all my clothes came over me. But I couldn’t do that. Not with someone else—a male in the room with me.
In the distance, there came great crashing, cracking, and clattering sounds from the other side of the library door. Like breaking furniture and metal being knocked to the floor.
Whatever could it be? The suit of armor that sat outside the throne room, perhaps?
I quickly decided it didn’t matter. The fever had somehow grown even hotter. It felt like it would kill me if I didn’t do something about it quick.
I started toward the door with a vague plan to find my sister and ask about the dungeon she mentioned below the castle—the ones they’d put Dorie in at the last full moon.
Dorie had hated it down there. She’d said it smell the opposite of Queen Elizabeth—like despair and evil-doing.
But I pre-decided they were more than good enough for me as I headed for the door. I was sick, and my wolf needed someplace safe to change.
“Hold on, there, Leora. Don’t go running away just yet.”
Evan reappeared in front of me. The glow in his eyes let me know his wolf was close to the surface.
“I don’t feel well?” I told him urgently. “I need to get by. I need to find help—aaahhhh!”
A large cramp doubled me over … but not with pain.
No … the squeezing sensation I associated with the painful cramping of something bad I’d eaten wasn’t coming from my stomach. This was something else, I noted dimly. Something I’d never felt before. Actually, that wasn’t true …
Horror washed over me in waves of realization.
The continuous cramping was coming from a spot lower than my stomach.
From the private area between my legs that I only ever touched when I washed up.
The part of me that had tingled when Alban kissed me on the floor of the coop while pressing the hard ridge of his penis into my most secret spot.
Why is my body going crazy? What is happening to me?
“You’re in heat,” Evan answered my unspoken questions, his voice deeper than I remembered it.
Then he shoved me, sending me tumbling backward to the floor.
Heat?
As I fell, a vague memory of my mother dropping an entire pan of baked spaghetti halfway to the dinner table suddenly came back to me. I remembered my father looking at her intently as he ordered six-year-old me to take my four-year-old sister and run to our closest neighbor’s house.
“Tell them your mother’s in heat,” he’d commanded, switching to his native English, even though he’d made a dutiful habit of only speaking Wolfennite German in Maem’s presence.
Then he’d picked our mother up, slinging her over his shoulder, and he ran off with her up the stairs without so much as a backward look at his two daughters.
Three days we stayed with those neighbors who’d only had one wolf-mated daughter. The father kept joking that he didn’t know whether to be impressed or jealous that our mother had gone into heat twice.
Yes, I was in heat. I realized Evan was right about that as I hit the floor with a hard oomph.
But just as I began to comprehend the biological action my body was undergoing, Evan flipped me onto my stomach and tore apart the skirt Alban had given me. Evan, the male who was married to Gail but held animosity toward Alban for some reason.
A much sicker understanding came over me then.
“Guess you’re finally going to give me the baby that Alban’s other ex couldn’t,” Evan said above me, confirming my worst fear. His voice was low with intent. Evil intent.
“No!” I screamed, kicking out at him. “Not you!”
“Yes, me,” Evan growled above me. He pushed me flat on the floor and pinned me there with a knee to my back.
I was in heat, but my entire body went cold. He was going to force me—whether I wanted it or not. Memories of being locked in a cage with Joshua for wolf-mating on a full moon night flooded into my mind.
I was going to be mated. And once again, I wouldn’t be given any choice!
Please, God. It had been so long since I connected with God outside of the mandated church services my former Benefactor used to run. But tears filled my eyes as I silently begged. Please don’t let this happen to me. I don’t want to be mated this way. Please.
Evan screamed out, and in an instant, the weight of his knee disappeared from my back. Amen.
It worked! My prayer actually worked.
I flipped over and sat up, half-expecting to find Evan fully smote in the biblical way Joshua was always warning us helpmates about.
And, in a way, he was. But it wasn’t God doing the smiting.
It was Alban.
He’d thrown Evan to a part of the library’s stone floor not covered in rug. One large hand was wrapped around the male’s throat, the other was balled into a fist, raining precise, continuous blows into my attacker’s face.
Protecting me, I realized with a start. Unlike my father and every other man I’d ever encountered, Alban was actually protecting me from a fate I did not want.
At first, my heart swelled with gratitude. But then, I realized … “Oh no, you’re going to kill him. Alban, stop. You have to stop.”
If Alban heard me, it didn’t show. There was a terrible look in his eyes as his large fist continued to steadily pound into Evan’s face. Somehow unhinged and cold at the same time. And in the next moment, I heard a sickening crack sound.
“Alban, stop!” Scrambling to my feet, I grabbed a hold of his shoulder and screamed. “Alban, please, stop!”
Alban stopped. But not because of my pleas.
Hamish and three other grey-haired soldiers appeared out of nowhere, and they grabbed onto Alban, two to an arm, to pull him off of Evan.
And then my sister came to stand beside me over Evan’s body.
“Oh my God,” she said when she saw the mess Alban had made of the other wolf’s face.
Meanwhile, behind us, I heard Hamish say, “Son of mine, you must calm down. Your she-wolf’s out of danger.”
Tara whipped around to inform them, “My sister does not belong to that psycho!”
Then she lowered her voice to say to me, “I know they hurt you. Unfortunately, the fact remains that you are most certainly in heat. You’ll, need someone to, ah … complete the cycle.”
But it had been Evan who hurt me.
“Not Alban,” I tried to explain to my sister. But then, I had to stop to catch my breath and my balance. My head was spinning from everything that had happened—everything that was still happening.
“Oh, I know not Alban,” she assured me, glancing over her shoulder where Alban had been pinned down to the floor by no less than eight grey-haired guards, two to each limb, including his father.
Then she turned back to me with an apologetic look.
“But you are in heat, sis, and you do have to choose someone to …” She swallowed uncomfortably. “… complete the cycle. I can help you decide. Just tell me what you’re looking for in an ideal mate.”
As if in agreement, another wave of heat flooded my body. Despite what had happened, the squeezing sensation between my legs came back, even more urgent than before.
Oh goodness, Tara was right.
Evan had been incapacitated. He would no longer be able to take me by force. But I remained in a heat cycle that wouldn’t cease until another wolf had enough sex with me to produce a baby.
And it was now up to me to choose who that wolf would be.