Chapter 25 Before Dominic
Dominic POV
That afternoon Everett was at the West gate with his good hand wrapped around the top rail, testing his injured shoulder with cautious movements against the sling.
He should have been in the infirmary. The snow had started again, thin and dry, the kind that could stack fast, and Everett stood exposed to it.
His borrowed jacket hung loose across his chest. The collarbone showed sharply beneath the flannel, and he looked thinner than he had that morning, as if the hours since Liza refused him had taken another measure of strength.
I stopped short of the gate because I didn’t want to stand closer.
“Dominic.” He let go of the rail. “I was hoping to catch you before dark.”
“You’re supposed to be inside.”
“I know.”
I waited. The gate stood between us. Past it, the bridge ran out over the river, and beyond it lay the territory he’d broken and the Beta he couldn’t control. The wind off the mountain brought woodsmoke and nothing from the East bank.
“I need to ask you something,” he said.
I didn’t answer. That was answer enough.
Everett drew a breath that moved his whole chest. The sling shifted with it, and I saw the effort it cost him not to wince.
His blue eyes sat deep in the hollowed sockets above dark shadows.
Whatever the rejection sickness had been doing to him before the avalanche, the dislocated shoulder and the open bond had finished the job. He was burning from the inside.
“Liza agreed to come to the gathering,” he said. “You know that.”
“I was there.”
“She said how I cross is between you and me.”
“You don’t need my leave to go home.”
“I do.” He held my gaze. The guarded calculation he’d carried to this gate that first afternoon was gone. I saw honest fatigue, deep in his bones, the kind that comes when a man has stopped performing and started surviving.
“I could cross the river alone,” he said.
“I’m East Alpha. The bridge is open, and Kurt hasn’t blocked the road to it.
I can walk into that hall under my own authority and face whatever comes.
” He paused. “But Liza is leaving from your territory with you and Shane. If I plan my crossing around hers without your leave, I turn her choice into another thing I presumed I could control.”
I felt my wolf stir. He’d named the problem exactly, and it was the one I’d been turning over in my own head since that morning.
“You want to cross with us,” I said.
“I want your leave to cross under your protection, on whatever terms you set. Through your gate.” He said it without decoration.
“I know what that looks like. I came here as a supplicant. I’m standing in your territory wearing your pack’s clothes.
I’m asking the Alpha who sheltered the woman I rejected to walk me back across the river so I can try to undo what I did to her. ”
Snow gathered on his eyelashes. He didn’t blink it away.
“I also owe you something I haven’t said.”
I crossed my arms and felt my left side pull. The stitches held, but the tissue beneath them protested whenever I moved too fast or braced too hard. Everett had watched Liza tend this wound. He’d felt her sleep in my arms through the bond he kept open. He’d felt every moment I’d spent inside her.
I said nothing and let him talk.
“I treated your shelter as theft,” Everett said.
“When Liza crossed the river, Kurt told me you were exploiting a bonded wolf to undermine my authority, and I let it stand because it was easier than admitting she left because I made her leave.” His voice stayed level, but the tendons in his right hand were rigid. “I’m sorry. For all of it.”
Behind me, boots crunched on packed snow. I didn’t turn. Two of my wolves, Mel and one of the younger gate guards, had walked down from the lodge. They stopped when they heard Everett’s voice, but they didn’t leave.
Everett saw them. He kept going.
“Your side took the damage. Your fence. Your hut. Your people.” He touched the front of his sling as if reminding himself which arm still worked. “And you. Kurt put his teeth in you because you were standing between him and the woman I threw away.”
I heard Mel shift his weight. The younger guard said nothing.
“I should have come to your gate the morning after I rejected her,” Everett said.
“I should have told you what I’d done, asked if she was safe, and left without demanding her back.
That’s what an Alpha does when his mess lands on another pack’s ground.
Instead I sent enforcers to the river and called it security.
” He met my eyes again. “You did what I should have done. You let her work. You acted like her mate and her Alpha. I did neither.”
I could feel the two West wolves behind me listening.
They would carry this back to the common room before dark.
Every wolf under my authority would hear that the East Valley Alpha had stood at my gate and called Dominic Salvi the better man.
The knowledge sat in my chest, a weight I hadn’t asked to carry.
Everett extended his right hand.
I looked at it. His fingers were raw from the cold, his knuckles scraped from hauling snow and digging at the slide. It was not a hand that had seen much work before this winter.
I didn’t take it.
His hand stayed out for a moment. Then he lowered it without comment.
“If Liza is separated from me or Shane for one minute on East ground,” I said, “it ends in a fight. No challenge or discussion. My wolves and yours. Whatever Kurt has planned, whatever you’re hoping to say on that stage, none of it matters if she’s standing in a room full of your enforcers without one of us beside her. ”
“I understand.”
“Do you? Because when I say a fight, I mean I will come through whatever is between me and her, and I will not stop to ask questions first.”
For a moment I saw the pride that had made Everett reject Liza surface behind his eyes, and then I saw him push it back down with deliberate effort.
“If anything separates her from you or Shane,” he said, “I’ll be the one standing in front of her until you get there.”
“You can barely stand at all.”
“I know what I can do.”
The snow thickened around us. Flakes caught in his hair and on his shoulders and on the gate rail between us.
“You haven’t earned my leave,” I said. “You have it because Liza chose to go, and she chose how she’s going.
Shane drives. I ride with them. You cross ahead of us at the river.
If you’re on the East bank before we arrive, you can draw Kurt’s attention to yourself and away from the bridge while she crosses. ”
Everett absorbed that.
“You want me as bait,” he said.
“I want you where Kurt is looking. If that keeps his wolves pointed at you instead of the bridge approach, then you’re doing something useful.”
His mouth twitched without humor, then went flat.
I left him there and walked toward the lodge.
My left side burned where the stitches ran beneath the bandage, and the cold had stiffened the muscle so that each step sent a dull ache radiating from my hip to my armpit.
Behind me, I heard Everett’s boots on the packed snow as he moved away from the gate.
Mel and the younger guard stood aside to let me pass. Neither of them spoke, but I felt their attention on my back. They had heard enough.
? ? ?
Inside the lodge, I went to the common room and stood by the window that faced the pines.
The fire was low. Someone had let it burn down to coals during the afternoon, and the room smelled of old smoke and coffee and the wet wool of drying jackets.
Through the glass, the snow fell steady and gray across the tree line and the rooftops and the road that led to the bridge I’d just given Everett permission to cross.
My wolf wanted to pace.
Everett remained an ache beneath the bonds Shane and I shared with Liza, unresolved and outside my control. Neither of them had accepted the other’s rejection, so their bond stayed open. I had no right to decide what she did with it.
Still, I wanted Everett kept away because I was afraid of what she might feel when she watched him bleed for the words he should have said the night he rejected her.
I pressed my hand flat against the cold glass.