Chapter 2
Since contemplating my doom is such a thrill, I decide to amp the whole thing up with some overdue family time.
My three older brothers and a handful of my cousins are kicked back on one of the rocks near Ty, one of the perks of being in the group of Ty’s lieutenants.
His vice president, Connor, is not directly related to me, which I assume is why he’s not glaring at me like all the ones who are. At the moment, anyway.
They still operate like a motorcycle club, a shift in previously long-standing pack policy that came about when Ty won his position a hundred years ago and, shortly after, recognized exactly how he could use the growing biker subculture to promote the pack’s best interests.
He got a lot of pushback, because there’s always pushback from the other pack kings, and werewolves really don’t like change, but he prevailed.
He always prevails.
I feel that same prickle on the back of my neck as I think that, more confirmation that I’m doing nothing but delaying the inevitable. He’ll win. I know he will. That isn’t the point.
I tell myself that isn’t the fucking point, but I find it hard to remember when I’m here, neck-deep in pack and pack politics and all the parts of these things that I love against my will.
I love them—or what they could be—so much I want to make them better, for all of us, though no one sees it that way.
Not even my own family. Maybe especially not them.
Everything in the pack is based on hierarchy. And even though I’m Ty’s fated mate and everyone has always known this, I haven’t actually, officially mated with him yet.
Fucking him constantly in skin and fur but without the power and seal of the full moon doesn’t count.
What this means for me is that I retain my only bargaining chip with Ty.
What this means to my family is that they can’t claim the power and status they feel entitled to.
My brothers and cousins fought their way into Ty’s circle, because that’s the only way to become the trusted seconds of the king.
It’s always about blood spilled and blood avenged.
Creatures of tooth and claw require proof in red to trust anything.
My brothers and cousins view my refusal to seal the deal with Ty as disrespect.
My uncles, too old or otherwise compromised to serve Ty bodily, are waiting for my ascension so they can reclaim the bragging rights they lost when their glory days passed.
My mother and aunts, on the other hand, have to wait for me to do my moon-given duty before they can assume their rightful positions in the pack.
Females fight dirtier than males, and not always with their paws.
Johanna feels she has been slighted every day, by every female in the pack, because she cannot assume her rightful position as celebrated mother of the actual queen until I become that queen.
And therefore she cannot take revenge on all the females who she feels were unkind to her when she was brought into this pack in the first place.
My mother’s greatest weapons are her infallible and extremely detailed memory. And enough spite to flood this whole valley. Maybe the world.
Family time has been fraught with peril since I was young, since most of my relatives have been pissed at me since the day I bled the first time, catapulting me into womanhood according to all the old ways, and yet failed to immediately secure my place at Ty’s side.
I was only thirteen.
It’s really not such a big surprise that five years after that, I took the escape hatch marked college and bolted for the East Coast.
I thought I’d never come back.
But this place has its hooks in me. You can’t choose the things you love. You can’t make your heart obey when it refuses to hate the place that made you.
Believe me, I’ve tried.
I let the drums work their way inside me.
The drums and the fire and the occasional howls of celebration, and I’m too much of a wolf not to admit that this gets to me.
I might not like pack politics or my family’s dynamics, and I’ve grown to hate the weight of the expectations on me, but there’s something about waiting for the full moon to hit just right.
It makes me remember exactly who I am. It lets me feel the power in me. The power the moon gave me, like new blood inside me. A different, better homecoming.
I haven’t run beneath a full moon in a long time.
I can feel the urge inside me the way I always do.
It’s a drumbeat all its own. It feels the way Ty makes me feel—and it’s all wrapped up together.
Longing for the change, the lightning burst into fur.
Desperate to run as hard and as fast as I can, barreling through these woods and deeper into the mountains, free and whole and covered in moonlight.
The longing for him, too. To meet him in our wolf forms on a night like this and let that magic I know we have between us explode, taking us to a place I’m not sure I can really imagine.
I know that it will change us, that claiming. What I don’t know is how.
Much as I like to pretend it isn’t there, down deep there’s that part of me that’s just a girl. A wolfgirl who was taught from birth that her greatest purpose in life was to carry the king’s babies and make this pack stronger.
It’s not that I don’t want those things. I just want them in my time, not anyone else’s.
I feel certain a woman can have any number of great purposes.
I have to physically restrain myself from looking back toward Ty, then. I don’t need to catalog his expressions when he looks at me to know how sick of my shit and my timeline and my resistance he is. He’s made that clear.
Most recently earlier this afternoon, when he found me in the little cottage where I live, down in Jacksonville on the oracle’s land, something I decided I should do back when we all believed we’d have to trick Winter into figuring out her visions of the rising death goddess.
Ty was not exactly thrilled with that choice, mostly because he knew perfectly well that the main reason I’d made it was to distance myself from the pack. From him.
Again.
When he showed up this afternoon, he held me down, pinning my wrists high up over my head while refusing to sink deep inside of me, and he got directly in my face.
Up close, no matter how pissed he is, he’s even more beautiful than he is at a distance. It’s truly unfair.
Tonight, Maddox, he growled at me. I’m not playing with you anymore.
So I bit him.
I gave him something else to worry about. He gave me a number of ways to repent for that choice. And we ended up the way we always do. Sweaty and torn open and tangled around each other like we were supposed to be fused into one from the start. Like maybe the moon got it wrong.
I can feel him watching me as I move around the fire, making my way across the hilltop. I feel him the way I always do. His gaze, the weight of it—he might as well have his hand wrapped around my throat.
I can feel that, too, and my whole body goes hot at the image. The memory. The anticipation.
Still, I don’t look back.
There’s too much wolf in me tonight, teeth bared and pressed just there beneath the surface. I’m too close to forgetting myself.
I wind my way through the crowd. And the pack might like to growl to indicate they think I’m falling down on the job of being Ty’s queen—which isn’t unfair, it just isn’t as black and white as they’d like to believe—but they’re still my pack. I’m still theirs, they’re still mine.
I get smiles and hugs now that I’m within reach. Heads tipped to mine. Those already wearing their fur whine slightly and butt their snouts against me. Unlike humans, wolves touch. This is how we remind ourselves who we are. This is why this place and these people were so hard for me to leave.
This is why I came home instead of running away, every summer. This is how I entangled myself with Ty in ways that can never be undone, when the smart move would have been to get on a plane and fly to a wolfless place and let them figure it out however they could in my absence.
I missed my chance on the planes, thanks to the Reveal. Any wolfless places out there are now firmly out of reach.
When I get to where my family sits, they’re lounging around in their usual configuration toward the back of the gathering. The better to highlight my family’s elevated status. To indicate they’re not like everyone else milling around—though not as clearly not like them as they’d prefer.
My uncles squeeze my hands as I pass. My aunts press their shoulders against mine. They all murmur their greetings without the hint of a reproving growl.
Up close, it’s sometimes hard to remember why I go to such lengths to steer clear of these people. And it would be so easy to simply drift into the familiar, the expected, here. It would feel good. It would be celebrated.
And then, I remind myself sharply, you’ll look around one day and realize that you’ve made a whole life that has nothing to do with you.
Mates of kings have status, but they’re still just mates.
Wolf packs are about the males. That’s the way it’s always been. That’s the way everyone thinks it always will be. Females are good for sex, breeding, and raising the young. They are known for tempests in teapots and other such “dramas” that the males can dismiss. Condescendingly, of course.
I learned a lot of words and phrases for this kind of environment when I was in college, but I quickly discovered that no one here wants to listen to a lecture from the one female around who doesn’t have to follow the rules.
Yet, my uncle Ezra said one summer, his gaze hard on me. You don’t have to follow rules yet, girl, because Ty gives you too much leeway. That won’t last.
I pretend I can’t remember how satisfied he looked, in advance, that a comeuppance was en route. Better to promote family harmony than the alternative, which I sometimes think might explode out of me like a comet when I least expect it.