Chapter 8
Nicky
“You need to get laid,” Laura tells me a day or so later. She’s approached me with an abundance of caution, which I notice, because it’s how everyone approaches me at the moment. I have been a little, well, how to best say it… I have been grumpy. Tetchy. Irritable, perhaps.
“I do not need to get laid. Sex is not a need. Food, water, shelter, those are needs.”
“Maybe not for humans, but for you, I think you need to get laid.”
“Why?”
She extends a hand at the chaos around me. “This, mostly.”
Okay. So I have thrown a rack of clothing on the floor. I didn’t notice that.
“Sorry, I knocked the rack over,” I mumble.
“And the rest of it?”
I turn around and look at my office. It is a little messy.
“It looks like someone ransacked it. You’re not shifting, but you’re starting to act wild anyway. You have to go to him, Nicky. You have to get him to take you through the shift.”
“I don’t need him. None of us do. He’s still the same person he was before I fucked him. Sex doesn’t change anything.”
“Maybe for some humans that’s true, but it’s not true for us,” she argues. “Sex changes everything, boss. It’s changing you.”
“Because I got a little messy?”
I’m tired of being questioned. There is something restless in me, but it’s just my need to go and do something. I’ve been in this office for too long. The walls are starting to close in.
“I’m going out for ice cream.”
“Okay,” she says. “I’ll send the…”
“Alone,” I say.
I go out by myself, half-striding, half-stomping through the streets with a scowl on my face that feels like it’s never going to leave. What the hell is wrong with everyone right now? They will not shut up about Rex and sex and shifting. Don’t they understand all the work we have to do?
I know it’s really my mood they’re complaining about, but they’re wrong about that too. I’m not monstrous. I’m whimsical. I’m nice. I’m fun.
I’m waiting at an intersection. The little red walking man turns to a green walking man. I step out into the intersection, just as a vehicle that apparently considers itself above the light system entirely comes screeching to a halt.
“I’m driving here!” a big man shouts at me out his driver’s window.
My temper spikes. I remind myself to be calm. I’m not monstrous. I’m whimsical. I’m calm.
I turn around and smile at him.
“Get the fuck outta my way!”
Still smiling, I very calmly punch his hood hard enough to leave a dent. Pain bursts through my hand. I feel my knuckles crack. I feel some small, tender bones break.
“Fuck!” I curse as I grab at my hand.
The guy comes half out of his car. He’s red in the face, so pissed off he’s forgotten to remove his seatbelt. Lucky for him, because the way I feel right now I could fight him and this whole street.
“What the hell are you doing, lady?”
Before I can reply, I hear my name shouted behind me.
“Nicky!”
I turn around and the boys rush past me, picking me up between them like the female lead in a musical being swept up and out of the way. Cal and Simon hook their big arms underneath my armpits and hoist me up so my feet can no longer touch the ground.
“Put me down!” I kick and squirm as they clear the street with me. They do put me down, but two of them keep hands on me while the third inspects my already swollen hand.
“You broke your hand,” Cal says. “Like, you fucking broke it.”
“Doesn’t matter. I have two.”
It doesn’t really hurt. Not compared to the charging energies inside me. Not compared to what I want to do. I want to fuck someone. Not someone. Rex. I want to fuck him so hard I come apart entirely. But he’s not here, and I am being tussled with on the streets.
The creature I have been fighting is rising within me. My body wants to undergo transformation. Wants to become fully female, entirely wolf. But I can’t do that. If I do that, I’ll lose everything. I know it. I have to stay as I was. I can’t let having met my fated mate change me.
* * *
Rex
My phone rings. I ordinarily would not answer during a meeting, but since mating Nicky, I have taken it off do not disturb. Nobody will ever understand what a significant change that is for me, and I will never tell them.
I don’t recognize the number, but I answer because the call could be about Nicky, and nothing on this planet is more important than her.
“Hello?”
“Uh, yeah, hi. It’s Laura.” I hear her draw on her vape, and immediately have the visual image of the largely disinterested secretary posted outside Nicky’s office.
“To what do I owe the honor of this call?”
“You gotta come get your girl, big man. She’s fighting the shift. It’s not good for her. We’re worried she’s gonna go feral in the middle of the street.”
I hear a commotion in the background. I can hear my mate making very un-ladylike sounds and then male voices calling out excitedly.
“She punched a car!”
“She what? She went feral in the street?” I hear Laura say. She puts the phone back up to her face. “Sorry. I gotta go. Come to the warehouse if you want. Or don’t. Whatever. Bye.”
She hangs up on me.
I look at the phone for a brief moment, then make a decision.
“Gentlemen, I have to go. We can continue these negotiations later.”
The negotiator across the table from me blanches. There’s a notable shuffle of consternation from several parties. “We’re on the verge of deciding the fate of billions of dollars and thousands of workers, Mr. Regent.”
“Yes, we are. All the more reason not to rush anything,” I say, already walking. “Reschedule with Fescue, please.”
* * *
Nicky
My boys have me pinned down. Tom is sitting on me, blocking blows as I swing at him and tell him to get the hell off me.
“No, boss. I’m sorry,” he says. “If I let you go, you’re gonna go feral.”
“I’m not gonna go feral,” I say. “Let me up. I’ll be normal.”
“You punched a car. And now you’re punching me with a broken hand. You’re doing everything but foaming at the mouth, boss.”
He has a point. My hand does hurt, now that he mentions it. But there’s too much else going on in my body to notice. I do not feel like my usual self. I feel like a much more heightened, angry, horny version of myself.
This is what coming into my feminine self is like, apparently. I can only imagine how terrible I will be if I stop fighting it. If I let myself fall into my wolf form, I will never be the same.
They got me back to the warehouse by carrying me, and they’re trying to convince me to go and see a doctor, but I don’t want to see a doctor, and also how can I do that when they’re sitting on me?
Then something happens that makes me go absolutely still.
I scent something that shouldn’t be possible.
“Rex Regent is in this fucking building, isn’t he?”
I stop trying to cuff Tom off me and look around for whoever told on me. There’s no immediate reply. Maybe they don’t know. Maybe I haven’t been betrayed as thoroughly as I suspect I have been betrayed.
“Fuck! What’s he doing here?”
“Well,” Laura says. “Technically I called him.”
“Why would you do that?”
She gives me the kind of look only someone who is your very best friend in the whole world can give you. It’s a look that says, you’re crazy, and I love you, but you cannot keep being crazy.
This is not fair. The hormone storm Rex unleashed in me is taking over my body and my mind. I’m still fighting it, because goddamn, I will not be controlled by a man, or a relationship.
I’m still being sat on as he stalks into the room.
“Up,” he says to Tom, giving him a short, curt order that is immediately obeyed.
I scramble up, breathing heavily. It feels like I’ve been fighting for hours. I’m tired. I’m wired. I’m angry. I’m so many things, and none of them cast me in a particularly flattering light.
“What are you doing here?” I snap the question at him.
“I heard you’ve been naughty,” he says, looking down at me with those piercing eyes. “I heard you’ve been acting out.”
“I’ve heard nothing about you,” I rejoin.
He snorts under his breath with amusement.
“You’re cute when you’re being driven mad by the need to shift and your own need to resist nature,” he says.
“Why are you fighting this? Why are you fighting me? You know we mated. You know that events are destined to unfurl because of that. You are making your life hard for no good reason.”
“I don’t have to tell you my reasons for anything.”
“You don’t have to, but I do have ways of making you talk,” he says. “But first, you are going to see my pack doctor.”
“No, I’m not. I’m not sick.”
“Your hand looks like it’s been hit with a meat tenderizer,” he says.
“Actually, it was a Honda Accord.”
He does not laugh. Doesn’t even smile. “I let you have your way,” he says.
“I let you run off and set yourself apart from me, because I believed in letting you choose. All you’ve done is run off and resist your very nature.
If you won’t talk to me, fine. But you are coming with me. That is an order.”
I knew that one day I’d have to deal with this.
I knew that one day, the impulse to be animal would overcome me and I’d turn into a monstrous creature and do things I have no control over.
I knew when I fucked him that I’d have to fight this.
But I also know that you can fight the shift.
Every time it tries to come over me, I push it away. It’s working.
But I don’t know if I want to fight him.
My hand does hurt, and my desire for him is stronger than ever. The animal trying to escape from me whines and whimpers with need. I’d let him fuck me right here, right now if he wanted to. I’m keeping my human form, but I am being overrun with animal impulses.
Maybe things will be better if he and I have sex again. Maybe that’s what I need. If he breeds me, I don’t have to shift. The logic is twisted, weird, and probably wrong, but I don’t really care. It’s my logic, and I want to get laid.
“We’re coming with her,” Simon says. I guess he feels guilty about how this is going down. They just organized my abduction, after all.
“Yes,” Laura agrees. “The boss doesn’t travel alone.”