He knew Myrna had reacted badly the last time he got drunk, but if she was in heat, she most likely wouldn’t care.
It was a good plan, yet Rafes's stomach churned as he stepped off the drone and offered up a perfunctory smile, while waving for the tourists gathered outside The Wolf House gates. There’d been more out-of-towners coming by over the last few weeks. Looky loos, hoping for a glimpse of the Wild Viking Princess or another Wolf House lawn catfight.
Rafes could only shake his head at the civilians, so bored and ignorant, that they would actually come to The Wolf House, looking for drama. If they only knew what Rafes knew….
Speaking of which, he opened a new bio-message to ask Mehmet for a fully encrypted VR room to meet with Georgina, then possibly with the National Security Committee. He had to make plans, divert resources, perhaps even order a black-ops capture of Damianos Drákon, even though he hadn’t technically done anything wrong—at least nothing they could officially pin on him.
But after entering the house, instead of mentally scribing a message to Mehmet, Rafes eyed the stairs leading up to the second floor…where Myrna was.
And instead of going straight to his office he turned to Craig and Arik. “Assume a post outside my office door. I’ll be there in a few.”
Arik’s jaw worked once. But Craig, as always, took the command to basically get out of Rafes's face and go somewhere where they could be neither seen nor heard with a blank nod. And as they made their way down the hall, Rafes made his way up the stairs.
Why? He had no idea. He just wanted to…he didn’t know. He just wanted to see Myrna. Talk to her.
However, when he knocked on her door, he received no answer.
Rafes’s wolf violently stirred inside of him. She wasn’t in her room. It prowled, slamming against Rafes’s will, ready to force a shift to look for its mate. But Rafes ruthlessly kept his emotions in check, chokeholding the beast as he took the next logical step of simply asking the house for her location. His team had given her a pair of comm rings after her last disappearance for precisely this reason. So that no matter where she went, the linked house would know exactly where she was.
“Myrna Adams. Current Location: Servant Quarters House 8, for scheduled activity: Meditation. She has set a Do Not Disturb command until the activity ends at 6pm. Would you like to override?”
Rafes relaxed a little, as did his beast. Okay, she was still on Wolf House grounds, and had apparently commandeered one of the old cabins as a meditation space.
He should let her be. Go down to his office and order that VR room…
Yet ten minutes later he found himself standing outside the cabin his biosystem’s GPS said was number eight of the fifteen shacks that lined the back edge of the property. The truth was, he hated this section of The Wolf House grounds. They were called servants’ quarters in brochures, but anyone with even a passing knowledge of history, could see that the rundown cabins had obviously started out as housing for the kind of black “servants” who spent over 200 years not getting paid until slavery was abolished in Maryland only a few feet-dragging months before the official Emancipation Proclamation.
Looking at the row of shacks, he suspected most of them were structurally unsound. If not for the nearly hysterical human Baltimore Historical Preservation society, they probably would’ve been condemned a few presidents ago. And house number 8 was the worst of them all, with grey weathered wood, that appeared to be either rotted or infested with termites. Rafes also noticed a hole in the eave hanging over the raised porch, and that two out of the three steps leading up to it were broken.
Why the hell would Myrna choose this cabin of all places for meditation practice? Rafes stepped over the broken stairs onto the creaky porch. He didn’t like the thought of Myrna spending a few minutes in this shack. Much less the hours she’d been dedicating to meditation as of late.
Yeah, she’d definitely need to switch out meditation spaces. He’d have an area set up for her in The Wolf House’s gym, then after the election, he’d divert some of the maintenance budget to building her a smart meditation house, overlooking the small pond at the opposite edge of the property.
With that thought, he knocked on the door and then shook his head at the way it jiggled and groaned under his knuckles, as if even this small action might be enough to make the thing loose its precarious grip on the jamb’s rusty hinges.
“I’m meditating. Please do not disturb me.” Myrna’s voice came floating through the door. Light and almost singsong.
His wolf growled. Wanting to see her. Needing to see her itself to ensure she was all right. And his human couldn’t disagree. “Myrna, it’s Rafes. We need to talk.”
A beat. Then. “I’m meditating. I’ll come back to the house at 6pm. We can talk then. Please do not disturb my scheduled meditation.”
Rafes’s stomach sank. So this morning wasn’t a fluke. She really didn’t want to spend any time with him beyond what was printed in her schedule.
Rafes thought of just going. He didn’t meditate himself, but he knew it was considered rude to interrupt someone in the middle of a session. Also, his wolf was already going crazy inside of him at
the sound of her voice. Logic told Rafes he should wait. Honor her request and go back to the house to deal with Fensa’s dragon bomb.
But something about the way Myrna had dismissed him, just wouldn’t sit in his gut. And the next thing he knew, he was gripping the door’s latch handle and pushing it open.
He found her inside the empty cabin, sitting in a traditional pose in front of the cabin’s back wall with her legs crossed and the back of her hands resting on her knees. The two rings she’d been given lay right beside her on the dirt floor, and she looked fully at peace with her eyes closed, even though it was colder inside the cabin than it was outside. Nowhere near as comfortable as the house, and Rafes wondered once again, why she’d choose this space of all the ones available on the 20-acre property.
“Myrna, I want to talk with you about this meditation stuff,” he said, closing the cabin’s door behind him.
“I’m sorry. But I’m meditating and can’t talk right now,” she said, still not opening her eyes. “Can we talk later when I’m done here?”
Rafes tilted his head. Was she serious? Or just being really fucking passive aggressive? The latter he guessed, his jaw setting. Shit. Knud was right, she was still pissed at him for what happened that drunken night almost three months ago.
He began to open his mouth to apologize again—but then he stopped. Something…something wasn’t right. Something was… missing.
His wolf figured it out first, spontaneously sniffing the air, before Rafes’s human even knew he was doing it. He smelled rotting wood. And grass. And dust. And Myrna…. but the smell was vague. Faded. Like she’d been here, but wasn’t here now, even though she was sitting right in front of him.
“Or…” Knud’s conjunction hung over the space between them like a storm cloud. And Rafes’s wolf growled low and suspicious inside of him as his human looked around for some kind of explanation.
Wait, what was that? Both Rafes and the beast inside of him stilled. There was something glinting on the ceiling above her head. A tiny white circle, no bigger than a quarter. So small, he might have dismissed it if not for two facts: it was the only piece of modern technology other than Myrna’s comm rings in the entire shack. And, it looked like one of those old school hologram stick-em chips. Holochips had enjoyed heavy use back before the humans passed laws against hologram technology that people couldn’t see through. After that they’d been transferred into the toolboxes of criminals and black-ops operatives who didn’t mind risking years in prison if the right ultra-realistic hologram could help them pull off their mission.
His brother, Knud, used to be a black-op. In fact, he was the one Rafes had depended on to do all of the Lupine Council’s dirty work before Knud went and caught a pesky conscious.
Rafes lowered his gaze back to his meditating fat
ed mate, Knud’s “or” now taking on a different tone inside his head.
Rafes reached out. And just as he suspected, his hand passed through the front of her chest, her body distorting and twisting around the organic material, disrupting the holochip’s ability to project.
Eventually the Myrna hologram gave up, blinking out to reveal something even more horrifying than this fake version of his mate. A hole in the rotting wall behind where the meditating hologram used to be.
It was narrow enough to be fully hidden behind the hologram, but large enough for the woman that hologram was pretending to be to slip through. And beyond that he could see the large woods that sat directly behind The Wolf House. The ones, which, if navigated correctly could dump you out just outside of downtown Baltimore.
Rafes bore down before the beast could overtake him, but it was a close thing. And even after the wolf was subdued, cold rage iced through his body, as he wondered, where exactly was his mate?
26
Myrna
“Ready for your big debut?”
Myrna glanced up from the script she was going over one last time, to see Wrath Gualla, standing in the open door of the large dressing room she now shared with Sana the Terrible. Wrath’s own dressing room was twice as big, according to Sana, who professed not to care about the size difference, but did bring it up oft. Yet here Wrath was in their smaller space, dressed not in his usual rehearsal joggers and tight t-shirt, but spiked, fur-lined wrist guards, a fighting skirt, and a leather armor vest with a short fur cape sewn into it.
“I am jealous of your splendid fighting armor,” she confessed, standing up to show him her own “fighting armor.” She’d also been given spiked wrist guards to wear for her wrestling match, but the rest of her outfit was little more than a bikini with golden underplating, which somehow managed to both secure her breasts so that they never moved and push them up so that her cleavage was put on full display. No true warrior princess would ever wear an outfit such as this into battle in the cold of the Northlands. And Fenrir Wolf forbid there was actually any weapons involved. Myrna could easily imagine any worthy enemy going for her soft belly, if only to teach her a lesson about leaving it so exposed.
Yet did Wrath gaze upon her outfit with much admiration in his eyes. “Yeah, you definitely look ready to kill it out there tonight.”
“Do I?” Myrna asked, clutching her mostly bare tummy. “For though I am excited for this match of pretend fight, I have a very odd feeling inside of my stomach. It as if a flock of geese are readying to fly south for the winter.”
Wrath stepped further into the room, his expression amused. “You’ve really got a way of putting things, Myrna Warrior Princess. But yeah, sounds like you’re processing some stage fright.” Then, as if just striking upon a new idea, he tilted his head down to say, “Hey, I’ve got a meditation station in my dressing room. You should come back there with me. I’ll show you some breathing exercises. Help calm you down.”
“No time for breathing exercises, Romeo. We’ve only got fifteen minutes till showtime,” another voice answered before Myrna could.
Myrna looked over Wrath’s shoulder to see Sana stride into the room wearing her own completely inadequate fighting armor, a red and yellow halter top paired with extremely short shorts. She came to stand beside Myrna with folded arms and glared up at the large wrestler.
Yet Wrath Gualla continued to smile at Myrna. ″That’s too bad. Maybe next time.”
“Yes, maybe next time. I do thank you for the invitation,” Myrna answered.
“Know what, Sana? We’re going to have to talk about this new storyline,” Wrath said, still smiling down at Myrna while addressing the woman who would be playing her mother in the ring, but also served as something called the VP of Production at IWF. “If she’s supposed to be the daughter of you and my uncle Notorious African, then that would mean we’re cousins. Could make it messy down the line if we want to work any real-life storylines into the show. You downloading me?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it. You want to wink-right on her. I’ll talk to Dad, and we’ll take it under consideration. Now get outta here, Wrath. Me and Myrna need to go over her lines,” Sana answered, jerking her head toward the door.
Throwing one last lazy smile at Myrna, Wrath departed the room. And Myrna could not help but notice how Sana watched him go, her deep sunk eyes narrowed like…well, a disapproving mother.
“What has passed then, Sana? You appear upset with Wrath Gualla,” Myrna said.
Sana unfolded her arms with a sigh. “Nanh, hon, just pissed he’s right,” she answered, her real Baltimore accent—or as Sana called it, her Ballmer accent—even more pronounced than the false Russian one she used in the ring. “Technically he’s right. This is a family show. So, if you and Wrath are planning to sign paperwork…”
Sana trailed off expectantly, but Myrna shook her head. “I do not understand your words.” At moments like this, she realized how kind her Project Fair First Lady team had been with their own word choices these past few months, because at least ten times a day, something came out of Sana and the other wrestler’s mouths that Myrna could not understand.
“He’s feeling you. Do you want to smash uglies or what?” Sana clarified off Myrna's confused look.
“Feeling me? Smash uglies?” Myrna repeated, still bewildered.
“Thought people from Norway were supposed to be good at English!” Sana complained, yanking on the silk red robe she would wear into the ring. “Look, Wrath likes you, which ain’t no little thing, considering him and Savage are our biggest stars. Do you like him, too? Because if so, we’re going to have to make some changes to next week’s Myrna Daddy reveal script. Also, you’re going to have to sign a waiver saying it’s okay for him to hit on you and you won’t be suing us for sexual harassment after you two break up.”
“What?” Myrna asked, grabbing for her own golden silk robe even as she tried to make sense of Sana’s words.
“Sorry, Myrna, it’s standard procedure. Work relationships can’t go forward without explicit consent from both—”
“No, I mean Wrath likes me?” Myrna asked. “In the way of a male who would seek out a mate?”
“Or you know somebody looking to get laid. One of those,” Sana answered, her tone dry.
Shocked by the revelation, Myrna’s mouth dropped open. For she never would have guessed had Sana not told her.
“So, do you want me to put in a last-minute change to next week’s script?” Sana asked, her tone impatient as she guided Myrna toward the door.
Myrna inhaled deep, but in the end, she answered, “No, thank you,” remembering her promise to Knud.
“Okay, I get that my brother can be an asshole, and usually I don’t go in for all that destiny fated mate bullshit, but in this case, I’m going to have to make an exception,” he’d said after she showed up at his door.
He'd taken her into his bathroom to talk out of the earshot of Layla’s famous parents and all the humans currently occupying his space, and they’d talked of a great many things. Their childhood growing up in Colorado… according to Knud, Rafes had always been uptight. “Four going on forty. That’s just the way he was. But he can be fun, too. You’ve just got to give him a chance.”
When Myrna had insisted that she had already given him a chance, and that she was sure he preferred Layla, he’d guessed, “So that’s why you chose to come here instead of to your brothers. You wanted to see her for yourself, didn’t you?”
Myrna couldn’t argue with the underlying truth of that statement. So she pointed out, “My brothers would simply offer to kill him if they knew he harbored thoughts of another woman. And I don’t wish for them to spend time in one of the buildings you call prison.” But then she'd grumbled, “This was not a wise endeavor. She is even more exquisite than her hologram. And I wish she were not so funny and nice.”
Myrna truly could not see how Rafes could resist such a charming beauty, but for some reason Knud had just
laughed. “He’s not into Layla, trust me. He didn’t even try to go for it, when Layla was in heat. He wants you or he wouldn’t be on his way here now. Just give him some more time to show you how much he likes you…like, until the election. Three more months to show you he’s a loving guy under all that Asshole in Chief. Do that, and I’ll help you with your wrestling thing, and then after that, if you still want to leave him, I’ll walk you through it, step by step. Promise.”
She had thought the brother Rafesson believed to be in the habit of acquiring bonus points for every act of defiance, would want to help her escape quietly, before Rafesson arrived at his apartment more than anyone. But to the contrary, Knud had convinced her to stay, insisting that his brother needed her and wanted a relationship with her.
Knud, she could tell, was no longer the irresponsible boy who had drawn the ire of everyone in their longhouse with his behavior—willful and impetuous, even for a pup of four winters. And he’d sounded so sure that his brother would eventually reveal himself to her as someone different from the cold male who’d kissed her a few times, then pushed her away as if repelled by her. Who’d claimed he could not lay with her unless he was well and truly drunk.
So she’d gone back to The Wolf House, wary after her encounter with Rafes, but wanting to believe his brother. Clinging to the hope that Rafesson was not, as she suspected, another Jelling prince with an even more handsome appearance.
And to a point he had been right. Rafesson did need her, but not for the reasons his brother believed. After his apology, there had been no affectionate words or even a whisper of a kiss. Only discreet compliments for pretending to be the opposite of herself and breakfasts filled with monologues about rising poll numbers. Their relationship had cooled to the point that this morning Myrna had truly been surprised when he asked her to accompany him to Michigan.
The Brothers Nightwolf Trilogy Page 61