Chapter 42
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
MAGNUS
Sorsha's boat was well-appointed. It communicated that its owner had money and wanted passengers to know it without her saying so.
Dark wood and brass fittings. Built-in shelving with creased spines facing outward to indicate they had actually been read.
A bar cart secured against the wall with unopened, expensive bottles.
I came out of the interior to sit in the stern with my forearms on my knees.
I watched the city's lights move past on the water as I held the wolf and the man together.
It felt like gripping two ends of a rope that were pulling in opposite directions.
The wolf wanted its mate. But the animal was smart. It knew that reaching for its mate back on the Volki boat would have brought harm to Nell. Right now it was regrouping, biding its time until it could get her back. Meanwhile, Nell's words played over and again in my head.
I understood why she'd said those things. She was the smartest person I knew. She'd thrown my words back at me, and they'd done what I had originally intended them to. I'd wanted a fling before my marriage. Only now I wanted my fling to be my bride.
The water moved past. The city lights grew brighter. The darkness of the river taunted me. This was the place I had gone under, the place where I had lost her. She was safest with Darius. For now.
He was a cousin. Not a rival. He was a leopard shifter. And Nell was...? I didn't know what she was, except that she was meant to be mine.
She hadn't smelled like a leopard. She hadn't smelled like a shifter. She'd smelled like herself, and me.
Everyone had smelled the scent of me on her. If she returned to the leopards of the Omondi clan, would she stop smelling like me? Would she smell more cat than wolf?
Everyone had seen the mark on her neck; her father's mark.
It should be mine; my claiming mark. But if Sorsha had seen that, she would've gutted Nell on the spot.
The only reason Nell was still breathing air and not gasping blood was because she was with the Omondi.
The only reason Katya hadn't gouged her eyes out was that she was with the Omondi.
If it became clear that she was mine, if I openly claimed her as my mate, Nell would be in the middle of a pack war that wasn't in the Blackwood's favor.
As things stood, the battle between the Blackwoods and the Volki had been settled by the old ways. The alliance between the Lobo and the Blackwoods was intact. We had potential new allies in the Omondi for returning their lost heir. Everyone would get what they wanted; except me.
I was going to be Alpha. The Alpha did not get the luxury of putting himself first. That was the whole of it, the entire architecture of the life I had been building since I was sixteen in a snowy clearing, giving up a girl I had a crush on.
Giving up the woman who had my heart was not going to be that easy.
I was going to marry Rosalind Lobo.
I was going to marry Rosalind Lobo, and I was going to be a good Alpha and a faithful husband. I was never going to touch Nell Odhiambo again.
"This weekend."
I looked up to find Sorsha walking towards me. Her dark hair blended into the blackness of the night.
"The wedding," she said pleasantly. "I think we've waited long enough. The council is destabilized; the Volki are in disarray. The Blackwood-Lobo alliance needs to be visible and public. So, this weekend. A small ceremony. We can have the larger celebration in the spring."
"Agreed." My agreement was toneless, emotionless.
I looked at the dock ahead, willing it to come faster. It was all I could do to not jump into the water and swim for my life. Once on land, Sorsha walked beside me for a moment in the comfortable silence of a woman who had gotten what she wanted and was not going to make a production of it.
"The Omondi woman, you knew she was a panther?"
"No."
"No wonder you were drawn to her. A panther princess. It's almost romantic. If one were inclined toward that kind of thing."
"Nell is brilliant. I have a weakness for intelligent women."
Sorsha made a sound that was not quite a laugh. "Too bad, then. Rosalind is not brilliant. She is beautiful and she is biddable. She will give you strong pups, and she will not give you a moment's political trouble. That is all that matters for what you need her to be."
She held my gaze. I held hers. There was nothing behind my eyes right now.
The river was dark around us. The city lights broke on the water. The night pressed in from all sides.
"This weekend," I said.
"This weekend," she agreed.
I walked down the gangway. A car waited at the dock; dark, engine running, one of my enforcers at the wheel. He saw me coming and got out to open the door. I walked past him.
I kept walking.
Past the car. Past the dock's perimeter.
Past the pool of light from the dock's single overhead lamp.
Into the dark beyond it, where the scrubby grass at the water's edge met a chain-link fence.
Beyond the fence was a stretch of industrial nothingness that connected to a service road that connected eventually to the kind of terrain a wolf could run in.
I stopped at the fence. I took off my shirt.
I stood in the dark at the edge of the city and I thought about Nell saying we are business partners in the voice she used for quarterly reports.
Like a brilliant, defiant woman who could bankrupt a pack's financial empire in an afternoon.
Like the woman who could scream yes at the ceiling while giving herself to me completely.
Like the woman who could deny I meant anything to her the next day and walk away to save my life.
The shift came fast. Bones moved before I gave consent to the wolf. Fur came in hot. The cold night air hit the wolf's skin. The world expanded into the full, overwhelming register of a predator whose senses had been running at human capacity for too long.
The wolf hit the ground and ran.