Chapter 10 Everything She Feels
Everett POV
The first bolt of it hit while I was pointing a flashlight at a cracked soffit on the lodge’s east wall.
I thought it was the sickness again. Three weeks of it had taught me the warning signs. Nausea rolled low in my stomach, cold spread outward from my chest, and wrongness lived under my skin like a second pulse. I braced a hand against the log siding and waited for it to pass.
It didn’t pass.
The nausea twisted into something else entirely.
Heat flooded my abdomen and dropped lower, heavy and liquid and unmistakable.
My cock stiffened so fast it hurt, and the flashlight beam swung wild across the snow because my hand was shaking.
The bond between Liza and me opened like a blown door in a storm.
I’d tried to sever it, she’d thrown my rejection back at me, and neither of us had been willing to finish killing it.
The arousal pouring through it was hers.
I understood before the second wave hit.
Someone’s hands were on her, and she wanted them there.
Every nerve in my body lit up with pleasure that wasn’t mine, sensation routed through a connection I couldn’t cut and couldn’t control, and the knowledge underneath it was worse than the feeling itself.
She was with him.
I didn’t need a name. I’d felt the pull three weeks ago when she crossed the river, felt her shock and attraction land on something in West Valley and hold there. Dominic Salvi. It had always been Salvi.
The flashlight hit the snow. I put both hands on the lodge wall and pressed my forehead against the rough timber while her pleasure climbed.
I could feel its rhythm. There were no images, only raw sensation, and the bond dulled none of it.
She was safe. She felt safe. That registered first, and I hated that it mattered to me.
Then her body clenched around a man who wasn’t me, and the orgasm ripped through the bond and left me doubled over in the snow.
My cock throbbed against my thigh, painfully hard, while my stomach heaved.
I gagged into the dark. Arousal and revulsion shouldn’t have been able to coexist, but the bond didn’t care about what should be.
It delivered what she felt, and what she felt was extraordinary pleasure in another Alpha’s hands.
My body responded as if I still had a claim on her.
I’d forfeited any claim on her. My rejection had set her free of the sickness the moment I spoke it; she still felt me, faintly, and her answer had cost her nothing more. Only the wolf who’d spoken first stayed bound.
The wind drove snow against my face. The storm had brought down two aspen branches onto the lodge’s north roof and torn loose a section of gutter along the kitchen wing, and I’d been out here with a flashlight and a clipboard making notes because that was what a responsible Alpha did during a storm.
He assessed damage. He prepared. He didn’t stand in the snow with an erection he couldn’t use and his mate’s pleasure running through him like voltage.
It came again, slower this time, patient and thorough. Salvi knew what he was doing. Her pleasure spread into my chest, my stomach, my cock. Beneath it, I felt some guarded place in her opening to him.
She had never let me anywhere near it. I’d never asked.
I pressed my fist against the wall hard enough to scrape skin. “Stop,” I said, to no one. To the bond. To her. To the Goddess who’d matched us and then watched me throw it away. “Fucking stop.”
The bond didn’t stop. It was built to connect mates across distance so they could find each other, protect each other, know when the other was in danger or pain.
It worked perfectly. Right now it was telling me, with no room for doubt, that my fated mate was being thoroughly fucked by the Alpha of the rival pack, and she was coming apart under his hands.
Her second orgasm hit harder than the first. I went to my knees in the snow and bit through my lower lip trying not to make a sound.
Blood filled my mouth. I bucked against empty air, and the arousal crested with nowhere to go, because my body had already proven it would take no one else.
Three weeks ago in this same lodge I’d tried to kiss Stacy Vogel and my cock had gone dead and my stomach had turned inside out.
The bond owned me. It gave me Liza’s pleasure and denied me any relief, and the cruelty of it was so precise it felt designed.
Then her pleasure settled into a low hum that was worse than the orgasms because it was contentment. She felt held. She felt chosen. She felt like she’d found somewhere she belonged.
I told myself she had gone to him so I would feel it, that West Valley had turned her anger into a way to humiliate me and my pack. Rage rose too fast for me to examine that story too closely.
? ? ?
The half shift came before I could get my shirt off.
My shoulders widened, my jaw extended, and fur erupted along my forearms and across my chest, shredding the fabric while I stood in the deep snow behind the lodge.
I snarled at the dark trees and the falling snow and the faint glow of the West Valley lights across the river, and then I forced myself back into a man’s body.
I was bleeding from my lip and both palms where my nails had gone to claws and dug into my own skin. The shirt was in shreds. I stood bare-chested in the storm wearing wool dress pants and soaked leather shoes and felt the cold close on me.
“Alpha.”
Kurt materialized from the direction of the kitchen wing, his own flashlight cutting a yellow line through the snow. He looked at my torn shirt, the blood on my hands, and my bare torso steaming in the cold air. His expression didn’t change.
“Boundary report,” he said. “A West patrol shifted its route closer to the fencing an hour ago. Two of their people ran the south stretch.”
I wiped blood from my chin with the back of my hand. “Salvi’s pushing the line.”
“He’s been pushing it since she crossed.” Kurt kept his voice level. He’d been telling me for three weeks that West Valley was exploiting Liza’s presence, that Salvi had taken in a rejected East wolf to embarrass me and gain leverage. I’d told him he was wrong. I’d believed I was right.
I wasn’t willing to believe that anymore.
“She went to him.” I heard the words come out flat and hard and didn’t recognize my own voice. “Tonight. She went to Salvi.”
Kurt’s pale eyes caught the light. He didn’t ask how I knew. He’d been a wolf long enough to understand what the open bond could carry. “Then he has everything he needs. Your rejected mate in his bed and your authority undermined every day she stays on his land.”
The rational part of me knew that charging into West Valley over a woman I’d publicly discarded would destroy what was left of my credibility. I had held the pack together by staying polished, composed, and outwardly strong.
But the rational part of me was losing ground.
“Push our patrols to the river,” I said. “The bridge approach, the south drainage, and the fence line from the highway to the upper boundary. I want our people where they can see theirs.”
“Rules of engagement?” Kurt asked.
“Any West wolf on our bank gets challenged. If they run, let them run. If they don’t—” I stopped. My teeth were still too sharp. I could feel the half shift pulling at my jaw, wanting to come back. “Handle it.”
“Understood.” Kurt’s voice held no surprise and no objection. He’d been waiting for this order since the night Liza walked out.
I picked up the flashlight from where I’d dropped it in the snow. The clipboard was somewhere under a drift. “Get me a dry shirt.”
“Inside,” Kurt said. “I’ll bring coffee.”
He disappeared toward the lodge entrance while I stood in the dark and bled into the snow. Salvi had taken my mate. Put that way, it was a territorial offense instead of a personal failure, and I held on to it.
? ? ?
I sat at the Alpha’s table in the empty lodge hall with a dry thermal pulled over my head and a mug of coffee I couldn’t drink.
The nausea had returned the moment Liza’s pleasure faded from the bond, and now it wouldn’t leave.
I’d tried water first. It came back up in the bathroom off the kitchen corridor while I held the edge of the sink and watched my reflection in the dark mirror.
My blond hair was matted with sweat, my blue eyes were bloodshot, and blood crusted my lower lip.
I looked exactly like what the old stories said happened to a wolf who rejected his mate and then refused to let the bond die.
I splashed cold water on my face and went back to the hall.
The insignia sat where I’d left it, on the corner of the ceremonial table. Liza’s East Valley patch. I’d meant to throw it away. I hadn’t.
I picked it up now and turned it over in my fingers. I could still smell her on it if I brought it close enough. The scent was faint, buried under weeks of dust and cold air, but it was there. Pine smoke and snow, and under it the note my wolf had known before my brain caught up.
She hadn’t been thinking about me. That was the part I couldn’t swallow.
The whole time Salvi’s hands were on her, the whole time she was breaking apart under him, I hadn’t felt a single pulse of anger or satisfaction or revenge directed my way.
I’d felt her pleasure, her trust, her release.
I’d felt her body accept another man completely.
And not one flicker of it had been about punishing Everett Pryce.
I had no part in any of it.
The coffee mug sat untouched while the fire settled in the hearth and the wind pushed snow against the dark windows. I put the insignia back on the table and pressed both palms flat against the wood and breathed through my nose until the nausea backed off enough to think.
I could end this. The bond, the sickness, and the transmitted sensation could all be over in five words.
I accept your rejection, Liza. That was all.
Accept what she’d said in this same hall, and the bond would close, and I would stop feeling her and she would stop feeling me, and I could kiss Stacy or anyone else.
Five words. Simple.
I couldn’t say them.
If I accepted her rejection, then hers stood and mine didn’t.
She’d rejected me right back in front of every wolf in this hall, and accepting would mean admitting that her rejection mattered.
That I had something to lose. That the Alpha who’d told the pack his mate’s face was a distraction had been wrong, and the woman with the scar had been the one making the right call when she dropped my insignia and walked out.
I would rather be sick.
The nausea rolled through me again, and I leaned over the table and breathed.
The bond had gone faint. Liza was drifting toward sleep, warm and satisfied, and even that much made my stomach clench.
I could feel her heartbeat slowing. Her body cooling against someone else’s warmth.
She was falling asleep in Salvi’s arms, and I was sitting alone in a cold lodge with a mug of coffee I couldn’t keep down and a torn insignia that smelled like a woman I’d had for ten seconds and thrown away.
I pushed the coffee away. The smell alone made my throat close.
My wolf paced inside me, restless and furious and aching.
He didn’t understand the politics or the posturing.
He understood that our mate was warm and safe and being cared for, and we were here, alone, bleeding from our own claws.
He wanted to run to the river, cross it, and fight Salvi until one of them was dead and the other had Liza.
She doesn’t want us, I told him. The thought tasted like the blood still crusting on my lip.
He didn’t accept that. He never would.
I sat in the empty lodge until the fire burned low and the cold crept in from the walls and the sickness made me bend over the table with my head in my arms. The storm battered the roof.
Somewhere outside, Kurt was already repositioning patrols, already moving wolves toward the river, already using the latitude I’d given him to turn my jealousy into a border war.
I’d said handle it. I hadn’t said how. I hadn’t said where the line was. In my anger, I’d given Kurt all the room he needed to escalate, and the part of me that should have cared couldn’t find the energy.
My mouth tasted like blood and bile. My body ached from arousal that had found no outlet and nausea with a cure I was too proud to take. The bond flickered once more as Liza stirred in her sleep, then settled into the low pulse of her contentment.
I pressed my face into my folded arms and didn’t move until the windows turned gray with dawn and the coffee was stone cold and Kurt’s boots crossed the hall floor behind me.
“Alpha,” he said. “Patrols are in position.”
I lifted my head. The room tilted, righted itself. “Good.”
“You should eat something.”
“I’m fine.”
Kurt studied me for a moment, his expression unreadable. He set a glass of water on the table and headed for the door.
I drank it. It came back up before the door closed behind him.