Chapter 23 The Second Wave
Everett POV
It hit around midnight, and I knew.
Liza’s desire and pleasure built in my chest and gut. I recognized what Dominic drew from her. I recognized what Shane did too.
This was different.
This was both of them.
Knowing both men were with her hurt more than feeling her pleasure. I lay on the infirmary cot with my left arm strapped to my chest and my right palm flat on the thin wool blanket, and I felt my mate come apart between two men who had earned the right to be there.
The arousal was brutal. My cock went hard, straining against the borrowed canvas pants, and my stomach lurched as a cold sweat broke out across my skin. Desire and nausea struck together until I couldn’t separate them.
I drew slow breaths. The ceiling above me had a crack that ran from the overhead light fixture to the far wall. I’d been staring at it for hours before this started, counting the smaller fractures that branched off it because counting was better than thinking about where Liza was.
Now I knew.
Beneath every physical surge, Liza felt protected and held by men she trusted with all of herself.
The wave deepened, and the force of it drove through the open bond. I felt her breath catch and hold, felt her body tighten and arch in a rhythm that had nothing to do with me.
I swallowed against another surge of sickness. My hips jerked once against the cot, involuntary, and the shame of it burned worse than the arousal.
Liza had no reason to think about me at all. The bond I refused to release dragged everything through whether she intended it or not.
I no longer believed she would come back. That hope had died somewhere between Shane’s mark and the avalanche.
The second wave hit.
Stronger. Fuller. The force of Liza’s pleasure left me shaking. I felt her climax and the raw joy of a woman held by two men who would fight, bleed, and freeze on a mountainside for her without asking her to be less than she was.
My fingers knotted in the blanket. I forced them open and pressed my palm flat again. I did not touch myself. I had already taken enough from Liza Mallory.
I lay there while she came.
Sweat soaked the pillow beneath my head. The arousal throbbed and the nausea rolled, and I kept my eyes on the crack in the ceiling through every second of what I had thrown away.
Both of them made her happy.
I reached for anger out of habit, searching for someone to blame. But I had run out of lies. Liza had been free. Dominic had sheltered her and left the rest to her. Shane had said what he wanted and let her answer for herself. I was the only man in this tangle who had decided for her.
The pleasure eased. I felt Liza settle into something warm and still and complete, the deep peace that came after being thoroughly loved by people who loved her back. Her body was growing heavy between them as two men held her close and kept the cold out.
I stared at the ceiling and let it pass through me without fighting.
The pain is yours, I told myself. You made it when you rejected her. Her pleasure belongs to her. The sickness and jealousy are yours, Everett. So fucking own them.
I turned my head toward the dark window. Snow still fell, lit orange where the infirmary’s porch light caught it. My shoulder ached beneath the sling. My stomach was hollow and sour.
I closed my eyes. Sleep didn’t come, but I slipped into a gray, exhausted stillness. The bond hummed faintly, and Liza’s sleeping contentment carried a trace of warmth through me when I held very still.
? ? ?
A hand on my good shoulder brought me back.
“Alpha Pryce.”
I opened my eyes to weak gray light. The storm had thinned to scattered flurries. A West wolf I didn’t know by name stood over me, young, bundled in a heavy coat with snow on the collar and melting in his hair.
“I’m not an Alpha here,” I said. My voice came out dry and cracked. “What is it?”
“There’s a man on the East end of the bridge. One of yours. He won’t cross.”
I sat up too fast. The sling held my arm tight against my ribs, but the torn ligaments underneath sent white-hot pain from my collarbone to my fingertips. I waited for it to loosen, then swung my legs off the cot.
“How long?”
“Maybe twenty minutes. Asked for you by name.”
“Take me down.”
The guard hesitated. I was a guest here. Less than a guest. Driving me to the border was not in his orders. But I was also a sick man with a strapped arm who could barely stand without the wall, and whatever waited on that bridge wouldn’t wait for Dominic to come down off the mountain.
“I’ll stay on the West bank,” I said. “You can stand right there and watch.”
He found me a lodge coat, helped me into it, and drove me down in one of the trucks. The road was plowed but slick, and dawn hadn’t fully broken. The trees on both sides hung heavy with fresh snow, branches bent low enough to scrape the roof. I rode in the passenger seat with my pulse climbing.
Craig Lutz stood at the East end of the bridge.
When I stepped onto the West half, he came out to meet me without crossing the river’s centerline.
He looked older in the gray dawn, his jaw set hard.
He wore a black jacket with the East Valley patch on the breast, and his expression cycled through relief, then pity, then a careful blankness that told me he’d been rehearsing this.
I stopped about ten feet from him with the boundary between us. Below the concrete, the river ran narrow and dark between shelves of ice that had grown out from both banks and nearly met. My breath made clouds.
“You look awful,” Craig said.
“I know.” I waited. “You walked out here before dawn. Talk.”
He glanced past me at the West guard leaning against the truck, then back. His eyes dropped to my sling.
“Kurt’s been busy,” Craig said. “Since you crossed, he’s been holding nightly meetings in the lodge hall. Your hall. On the platform.”
My platform. The same one where I’d taken my oath and rejected my mate. I felt something clench beneath my ribs that the sickness could not account for.
“He’s telling the pack you’re compromised,” Craig continued.
“That the open bond is making you too sick to lead. That Dominic is keeping you as leverage, and once you’re too weak to challenge, West Valley absorbs our land.
Everything Kurt’s been saying for years that West wanted, he’s now saying they’re about to take. ”
“None of that is true.”
“I know that.” Craig said it flat, without hesitation.
He’d let Liza through at this bridge the night she left; he wasn’t a man who denied what he’d seen.
“But Kurt’s got close to half the enforcers behind him now, and the rest are keeping their mouths shut because nobody wants to be the one who speaks up. Sound familiar?”
It did. It sounded exactly like what had happened the night I rejected Liza, when wolves sensed something was wrong and chose silence because their new Alpha spoke with authority and conviction.
“The full moon is in two nights,” Craig said.
“He’s called a gathering. If you’re not standing in that hall, he tells them you’re dead or a prisoner, and he takes the pack by default.
If you are there, he challenges. And right now, Everett…
” He dropped the title. Used my name instead.
“Right now, I don’t think you survive that fight. ”
He was right. My wolf was depleted and my injured arm was strapped to my chest. Kurt was rested, healthy, and backed by wolves who’d spent years swallowing his version of the river.
I looked east. The road disappeared into the dark stand of pines, and beyond them, across the valley, sat the lodge where I’d been raised. The hall where I’d taken my oath. The platform where I’d done the worst thing I’d ever done.
“I’ll be there,” I said.
Craig’s eyebrows went up. “You heard the part where I said you can’t take him.”
“I heard it.”
He studied me. The river churned beneath us, loud and cold. Wind came off the water and got under the borrowed coat.
“Some of us remember what you were supposed to be,” Craig said. “Don’t make us wrong twice.”
He turned and walked back into the dark on the East side. I watched him go until the pines swallowed him, then stood on the bridge with the cold, the river, and the faint pulse of Liza’s sleeping peace beneath my breastbone.
I would not go back in the dark. I wouldn’t slip through a side door at dawn and pretend I’d never left.
I would walk through the front doors of that lodge, step onto the same platform, and face the same room where I’d rejected Liza because of her scar.
Kurt could challenge. The pack could choose.
But they would hear the truth from me first.
The guard drove me back. Through the trees, I could see the distant white face of the mountain catching the first light. Somewhere up there, in a patrol hut with a narrow cot and a woodstove, Liza was sleeping between the men she’d chosen. She’d come down when the road opened.
I needed to see her. What had happened with Dominic and Shane was hers, and I would not ask her to defend it. I needed to tell her what was happening across the river. Then I would ask something I had no right to expect and take whatever answer she gave.
Back in the infirmary, I sat on the edge of the cot. My shoulder throbbed. My stomach was empty. Gray morning light flattened the ceiling crack into a narrow seam in the plaster.
“When the patrollers come down from the upper mountain,” I told the guard, “I need to speak with Liza Mallory. Will you let her know?”
He wrote it down.
I sat there in the brightening room with my useless arm and waited.