Leora
“I got you something, mo ghràidh,” Alban told me before Hamish and Dorie came downstairs on Christmas morning.
He handed me a gift bag that turned out to have a small leather box inside.
“Magnus let Dorie and me take a wee trip into the royal vault as an ‘I’m sorry’ for his wife’s behavior,” Alban explained as I fished the little box out of the bag. “But the real gift to me will be you agreeing to wear it even if it’s not exactly fitting with your Wolfennite background.”
I shook my head at Alban without a clue as to what that meant. Then I opened the box to find a beautiful pearl ring with a cluster of small diamonds around it.
“What do you say, mo ghràidh?” he asked, his voice gruff with emotion. “Will you wear my ring and agree to marry me on New Year’s Day?”
“No!”
Dorie’s answer to my request came fast and sharp. And she scrunched up her face as if I’d asked her to drink poison, not simply retire to her room for the night.
“Just a few months of your over-permissive parenting and the girl’s forgotten how to mind.”
Joshua sat at the far end of the luxury suite’s dining table, eating from the several plates of room service he’d ordered since Magnus—not he—was paying for it. But he paused long enough to disparage my parenting and say, “Don’t worry, I’ll have to re-teach her when we get home.”
Dorie glared at him with such contempt. If a stranger walked into the suite, they wouldn’t guess even for a moment that the two were father and daughter. No wonder she’d asked Alban for that Second Christmas gift.
Can I call you Da?
Guilt was a strange and heavy thing. For most of Dorie’s life, I’d walked around with a single stone of it in my belly. And it had grown bigger and heavier with every year that passed after Dorie was diagnosed as toothless.
I’d gotten so used to it being there I’d never considered the weight of it inside of my body.
Not until the stone had dissolved for a few glorious weeks. Being with Alban had felt like floating on air.
But now the stone was back. Heavier than ever, and not just in my stomach.
There was also one in my chest where my heart had thrilled, swelled, and melted so often after I mated with Alban.
And another one inside the mind I’d had to harden as soon as I realized what I had to do to keep Dorie safe from her father.
“Dorie …” The guilt made the engagement ring on my finger so heavy, I could barely lift my hand to rub at my temple.
The headache that had started when Joshua informed me that both Canadian and Scottish law sided with the fathers when it came to child custody disputes had only grown with every hour that went by.
Agreeing to return to Canada with Joshua had been hard enough. I absolutely did not need Dorie’s refusal to cooperate on top of it.
“Dorie, bitte,” I switched to Wolfennite German—despite Joshua hating when we spoke to each other in a language he couldn’t understand.
I’d almost gotten used to talking to Dorie in whatever language I wanted at Alban’s house.
Neither of those worthy males had ever jumped to the conclusion that we were speaking behind their backs.
But here I was again, using my mother tongue to soothe my daughter.
“You must believe I am making the best actions for you and do as I say.”
“Nein, Maem,” Dorie shot back, also in Wolfennite German. “Staying in Faoiltiarn with Senair and Alban was the best action for me—the best action for us. We were finally happy! But you made us leave our real family!”
“Did she just say that other wolf’s name?” Joshua demanded.
He rose menacingly to his feet, reminding me that we were no longer in Faoiltiarn with Hamish, Magnus, and a host of random strangers who wouldn’t hesitate to act if they sensed a male was hurting one of their town’s she-wolves. But there was no more community.
No more Alban.
The stone in my chest cracked, remembering what Tara had said to me before I left.
“I just need a couple of minutes with my sister,” she told Joshua as I followed him and Dorie to a car idling outside Alban’s townhouse.
It was a taxi similar to the one I hadn’t been able to afford to take us all the way here. Had that only been a couple of months ago. It felt as if I’d been in Scotland for so long. It was like waking up from the nicest dream to find yourself in a real-life nightmare.
“I want to get to the hotel before you let that animal out of his cage,” Joshua insisted.
Tara glared him down with the authority of a queen. And probably remembering what she’d done to his brother, Joshua gave in with a “Just don’t be long” before scampering away. Like a roach.
“I’m not going to change my mind,” I told Tara before she could even speak.
But Tara being Tara, insisted on trying anyway. “Please, Leora. You know you’re making a mistake. Stay here. We’ll keep Alban in the dungeon as long as it takes to figure this out.”
Obviously, I was making a mistake. Several of them.
But Tara didn’t understand, and Joshua was impatiently waiting for us in the car. There just wasn’t enough time to explain everything to her.
No, Joshua hadn’t wanted the burden of a daughter, and we’d humiliated him in front of his village by leaving him for dead with a fire poker stuck in his eye. If not for his father, Jeremiah, finding him there shortly after we left, he might have very well died as we assumed he had.
But Jeremiah had been furious for reasons that went beyond our treatment of Joshua.
His youngest son had run off to only God knew where, and his oldest had been left by his helpmate.
Helpmates weren’t wives, but it was strictly against the Saint Albert Discipline for Joshua to wolf mate anyone else while his original helpmate still lived.
That was why Jeremiah went from pretending his sole granddaughter didn’t exist to barely letting his son recover before putting Joshua on a boat to Scotland to drag his toothless daughter back to Canada.
As it turned out, I’d been na?ve to think Jeremiah and the rest of the Saint Albert executive board would have deemed Dorie unworthy of mating. On the contrary, she was Jeremiah’s last hope of continuing his family name.
As Joshua had put it. “I’ll just have to put up with her for five years, and she’ll be wolf-mated as soon as she turns of age.”
My skin had iced over with horror when he told me that.
Of age meant a lot of different things to a lot of different Wolfennite communities.
In St. Ailbe, a girl couldn’t be wolf-mated until the age of seventeen.
But in Saint Albert, I’d seen that number reduced, especially for families with more than one daughter.
And as our community bishop, Jeremiah was often the person called upon to make that final decision.
No, I had to protect Dorie. No matter what it took.
“There is no figuring this out,” I told Tara, ripping my arm out of her grip. “I can’t leave her alone with them. Not ever.”
I started to walk away toward the life I’d chosen.
But Tara called after me in Wolfennite German, stopping me in my tracks.
“You were right, you know,” she told me. “You were right about Alban being the exact right choice for you. I finally admitted that when we were walking down the mountain and he said he had to speak to me about the teaching job. I thought he was going to yell at me. But he …”
Here it was. Here was the information I’d come downstairs looking for before that terrible toll of the bells. Only now, I didn’t want to know. But I stayed frozen in my tracks, too mournful to do anything but listen.
“He demanded a meeting with me,” Tara said.
“He told me I must put him on my ‘wee calendar app’ so that we could come up with a plan to make sure you had all the resources you needed to take the position. And he asked me for advice on the best way to approach you about learning to use the computer. Because he knew it would make your job easier, but he did not want to upset you or go against your religion.”
My religion.
Without formally deciding to, I’d given up on being a good Wolfennite. I’d kept God in my heart—but in my own way, not according to some set of unnecessary rules overseen by men determined to keep she-wolves under their paws.
“That was when I understood why you chose him,” Tara said behind me. “He is not some awful ape, unable to care about what you want. He cares for you. And if you leave him like this, you will destroy him.”
Her words crushed my heart like a boot stomping down on a tin can … then made me even more determined to see my plan through.
“Make sure he understands that this was my decision,” I told my sister. In English. “Everything I’m doing is my decision.”
Then I walked toward the idling car, waiting in front of Alban’s townhouse without looking back.
And now, here I was in the hotel suite Magnus had arranged for us—not out of kindness, but because “Faoiltiarn will not host the male you chose over our Kingdom Defender.”
To say he hadn’t been happy with my decision was an understatement. And I couldn’t blame him, even though I had my reasons.
Good reasons. I stared down at my mutinous daughter and asked both her and God for forgiveness for what I was about to do—right before I sneered at her and informed her in English, “I am the mother, and you are the daughter. You will go to your room as I told you, or you’ll really have something to cry about when I give you the back of my hand. ”
Dorie’s face dropped with total shock as if I’d been replaced by an alien. Or the sort of rigid and stern Wolfennite parent I’d promised never to become.
“I don’t understand. Maem, why are you—” she started to protest.
No, she didn’t understand. But I had to make her understand—had to make her mind me in order to keep her safe.
“All you need to understand is that I will swat your butt if you continue to talk back to me. Now, come on …”
Without giving her a chance to protest again, I grabbed her by the arm and dragged her to the smaller bedroom toward the back of the overlarge suite.