Chapter 14 #4
“I think you were scared, and hurt, and defending yourself, and that a few bites won’t do you any harm. It’s not something we should get a regular taste of, but most wolves who have fought humans have some exposure.”
“I’m going to be sick,” she says.
And then she is.
She rushes to the bathroom, retching and trying to stop herself from making a mess. She is so wound up over these thoughts her body is rebelling. I follow her and hold her hair back while she is ill.
“Poor thing,” I murmur. “You need more rest. You’ve had too much excitement.”
“Excitement is the wrong word,” she says, washing her face afterward. “I fucking hate this. All of it. I wish I’d never come to the city. I wish I’d never met anyone. I wish I hadn’t been born.”
“You need a nap,” I tell her. “You need to sleep and you’ll feel better.”
“I’m not sleepy,” she says as I start the shower. She needs to relax and clean up and then once she settles, I know she will be tired. She is hopelessly exhausted still, coming to terms with herself and all that has happened to her.
I usher her into the shower, where she stands and stares at me under the flow of the water.
She looks at me with eyes that contain a lot of pain and doubt.
I wish I could take this part away from her.
I wish she didn’t have to come to her own terms on how it feels to be a wolf who has done the unspeakable.
But I can’t do that for her.
I might never know what really happened in that truck. She says she didn’t consume his flesh. I don’t know if that’s true, and I don’t care if it is. But she does. She’s so afraid of becoming her father she can’t focus on anything besides that one act.
I wrap my hand around the back of her head and pull her close. “I don’t care what you did,” I say. “There is nothing you could do that would make me stop loving you.”
“What if one day I leave our kids in the middle of a bloodbath and drive away, leaving them to face the authorities and they end up in the care system until they turn eighteen?”
“I can think of a few reasons that wouldn’t ever happen. One of them being you have me, the other being that you are not your father, and even if you were to spend the rest of your life actively trying to become him, you would not succeed. Come. It’s bedtime for you.”
I wrap a towel around her, because she seems sullenly disinclined to dry herself off, and I pat her down all over, before putting a robe on her and wrapping her hair in another towel, which I scrunch lightly until it feels less than sopping.
“When did you learn to do this?” She asks the question with curiosity mixed with a hint of jealousy.
“Do what?”
“Dry hair.”
I smile at her in the mirror, where she is pouting at me.
“It’s not rocket science, sweetheart,” I tell her. “I want to look after you. This is less than the bare minimum.”
“Have you dried another woman’s hair before?”
She is in an absolute mood.
“Baby,” I murmur in her ear. “If you don’t settle down, I’m going to spank you.”
“Why?” she gasps. “That’s so unfair!”
“Because I can tell you’re in a mood that isn’t responding to being taken care of kindly, so you’re not leaving me with much of a choice. Settle down, and behave yourself.”
It is at this point that she bites me.
And that is how I end up sitting on the edge of the bath, with my mate thrown over my knee, her gown pushed up and out of the way, my palm slapping her curvy ass over and over until it glows a pretty red.
“That is enough of that,” I growl down at her, sounding sterner than I really feel. She needs to be anchored. I know she feels bad for snapping at her friend, and likely for her attitude with me. She needs to know I can keep her under control even when she’s being an unpleasant little brat.
She starts to cry when she is barely more than warm, and I know it is not because she is in pain. It’s because she is trying to metabolize deep shame that she’s been living with for far longer than I have known her.
“You must hate me,” she whimpers as I pick her up and cuddle her on my lap, rubbing her hot cheeks with slow, circular motions to calm her while she accuses me of the most ridiculous thing in the world. How could I hate her? There is not a thing she could do that would make me dislike her.
“I love you very much,” I tell her, murmuring the words against her forehead even as she tries to remain stiff against me—and fails. I feel her melting against my body as the fight goes out of her.
“I love you too,” she says so softly it is almost entirely under her breath. “I love you and I’m so scared of disappointing you when you work out that I am just like him. I come from trash, and I’ll always be trash, and you’re so rich you don’t even understand what it’s like to be one of us.”
“I see you in ways you cannot see yourself,” I tell her.
“I see your strength. I see your power. I see your beauty. I see your potential. I see how you took experiences that could have destroyed you and turned them into something that gave so many other young wolves a place to be. You have done more than you allow yourself to take credit for. One day, I hope you see yourself for all I see you to be. And until you do, I’m going to love you anyway. ”
With those words, I pick her up and carry her to bed. She is exhausted, and asleep within minutes of putting her under the covers.
* * *
I turn my attention to the aftermath of that little fracas. The fear on the girl’s face when she was being bailed up concerns me. I want to ensure that she is not too shaken. This period of adjustment is proving difficult for many of us.
I step out of the bedroom, past the guard. I can hear voices not far away. One of them I recognize as Fescue. The other is the girl, Laura. It seems my man has taken it upon himself to tend to her needs.
“She’s really crashing out, huh?” Laura says.
“Indeed,” Fescue replies.
“You think it’s because she ate human flesh?”
“There’s no evidence she did that,” Fescue says. “And repeating it is incredibly ill-advised. I would suggest you not let that combination of words pass your lips again, lest punishment ensue.”
“Punishment?”
She sounds a little too intrigued for my liking.
Nicky did so much for these wolves, but she did not provide pack discipline.
Her means of keeping control was keeping them busy, giving them things to do that proved their worth over and over.
It worked, but it won’t let them function inside our pack, and that is what we are trying to fix now.
Apparently Fescue has already come to the same conclusion. I hear a sharp slap, followed by an outraged gasp.
“You hit me! You’re not allowed to hit me! I can’t believe you did that!” Laura’s voice is high and outraged.
“Little lady, most of the pack is entitled to do that to you, and more. So, again, mind your words and manners.”
“Can’t believe you did that,” she says. “That’s fucked up. I should hit you back.”
“You’re welcome to do so,” he says. “And if you do, the consequences will be painful and probably quite embarrassing for someone of your temperament.”
I hear a dull thud. My brows rise and I confess I step around the corner. The two of them are facing off against one another. I do believe Laura has just thumped Fescue in the arm, not unlike a spoiled thuggish little brat attempting to start a brawl.
Fescue has caught her wrist, his much bigger hand wrapped around it. She is giving him a steely stare and threatening him with bared teeth.
I lean against the wall, fold my arms over my chest, and watch with some amusement. It’s interesting to watch someone else handle a spoiled little uncivilized animal for once.
“Do you want your spanking over my knee, or would you prefer to bend over the side table?” he says quite calmly.
“What? Fuck off!” She panics and tries to pull away, but he clearly has no intention of allowing that. He keeps a firm hold of her wrist.
“Over my knee, or the table? If you do not choose, it will have to be over my knee.”
“You don’t have any right!” Laura is starting to sound quite panicked now.
She looks around for help, and her eyes land on me.
She blushes furiously, knowing that I am not going to be any particular help to her, and she is about to be spanked in front of me.
I wonder how many times little scenes like this will play out with the Runaways as we assimilate them. A great deal, I think.
Fescue gives a little sigh and leads her over to a chair. She fights him along the way, even going so far as to bite his hand in the effort to make him release her.
“I’ll fucking kill you if you do this,” she says. “I swear to god, you won’t live until the end of the day if you, argh!”
The last part is her being tipped unceremoniously over Fescue’s knee. Interesting how she calms right down the moment she finds herself with her head down and her ass up high over his thigh.
“The thing about threats,” Fescue says, “is that you need to calibrate them to the individual receiving them. I do not fear death. If you wish to concern me, you need to threaten something else.”
“I’m gonna cut up all the good clothes and replace them with fast fashion!”
“A much better threat,” Fescue says, his mouth flattening as that threat hits home.
“I mean it! I’m gonna cut everything up! I’m gonna go online and find cotton poly blends that will pill the second you look at them and cling to your skin!”
Fescue snugs her closer over his lap. He hasn’t started spanking her yet, and I find myself wondering if the threats are, on some level, working.
“I’m going to introduce harder water into the laundry so the soap creates a hard film over everything!”
She continues to make ever more fearsome threats. I see Fescue hesitate about the laundry water threat. This girl is good. She knows how to hit him where it hurts. The prospect of having to decalcify machines is clearly concerning.
“I’m going to have all your pants taken in by a seamstress who doesn’t leave the excess!”