by Aidy Award
He was so fucked.
Max blew out a long breath, shook his head at himself and climbed into the car. The cab was already filled with the scent of her, and it went straight from his nose to his cock. The natural scent of her was the greatest aphrodisiac and he was going to have to be very careful not to react. He couldn't control the way his pants got tight, sitting here next to her, but he could hold back the groan pushing at the back of his throat, and his wolf inside growling to get out and claim what was his.
He cleared his throat. "Okay, so home?"
"I kind of don't want to go back there and be all by myself."
Shit, shit, shit. She was asking him to stay over. There was no way he could control himself if he did that. No, sleeping at her house, whether he was in her bed, her room, or even under the same roof without a chaperone was a very bad idea. Where else could he take her?
Max turned the key and gave the car a little rev to get her going as fast as possible. He tore out of the parking lot and headed toward the one place he would not be able to give in to this all encompassing need to kiss her, bite her, fuck her.
His mother's house.
Besides. His mom would be much less likely to end him with Gal standing right there.
It took only a few minutes for Gal to figure out where they were headed. "Oh. I don't want to impose on your mother. She must need--"
She stopped mid sentence and turned sideways on the long bench seat to face him. "All those packs of clothes and things I saw at your mom's house, they're for when everyone shifts and needs new clothes, aren't they? But where were all the men's clothes? Do little kids shift too? Do all pack members keep stashes like that at their houses? How many pack members are there?"
The questions might keep pouring out of her if he didn't give her some answers pretty quick. It was more than cute how inquisitive she was. He really liked how her brain worked on high speed all the time. "Whoa, whoa, Gal. One at a time."
She clamped her mouth shut, folded her hands in her lap, and looked at him expectantly. See. Adorable.
"My parents' home, the whole estate is the pack headquarters. Any Troika pack member is welcome there anytime, so we have a steady stream coming and going. My mother keeps extra clothes not just for shifting, but in case of emergencies when we might need to call the women and children in to one safe location that we can defend."
"Like during a pack war?"
The lightness from earlier was rapidly fading. "Yes. This started off more like a dispute, but the situation is quickly devolving and with no Tzar to bring down an iron fist, I'm afraid out little pack battle is going to become an all out all pack war."
"Tzar? Like in Russia? Were the Romanoff's wolf shifters?"
Max chuckled. "No. They weren't, but long before their reign a wolf shifter did sit on the throne. During the dark ages my people were unruly and humans rightly feared us. We were hunted almost to extinction. The first of the Volkov's took the throne and changed everything. The packs all swore an oath to disappear from human society and keep our kind a secret. Those that didn't were killed."
"But you're clearly live among the rest of us now."
"After a few hundred years our numbers recovered and it was difficult to keep our packs hidden. When humans began crossing the ocean and settling in America, we came along pretending to be any other immigrants. With our success integrating into society but still keeping our true selves a secret, the Tzar slowly allowed the packs in Russia and Europe to do the same."
"You said there is no Tzar now. What happened? What instigated this war?"
"The Tzar," Max sighed, "was assassinated about a month ago, and he had no heir. Packs around the world are using that as an excuse to run amok. There are many who don't agree that we should remain hidden."
"Do you think you should?"
No one had ever asked him that before. In fact, he'd never had an in depth discuss about pack politics with anyone before. You either believed what the alpha believed or you were the bad guy. He really hadn't worked out what his own feelings were. "It's not that simple. Those who want the end of that law, they call themselves one-bloods, don't want to just come out tell humans we exist. They believe that shifters are superior to humans and that we should rule over them."
"Geez. They sound like white supremacists, like Nazis. Do you think everyone who wants to end the secrecy feel that way, or are there other groups who simply aren't voicing their opinions fearing backlash from the one-bloods?"
"I don't know. I think you're probably right. There may even be some in my own pack who'd like to reveal themselves to select special humans in their lives."
"Huh. I, uh, bet there are."
Max pulled into the driveway of his mother's house and switched off the car. He could happily sit here talking to Gal like this for hours. His family and most of his pack probably wouldn't think revealing his true nature to her was a good decision, but he would never think otherwise. This one short but deep conversation with her had solidified ideas in his own mind about how all of wolf kind operated and how he might become a better leader to his own pack someday.
She would make a good wolf matriarch. He'd already broken one law, would another make much of a difference?
They walked into the house, hand in hand, and where he had planned to separate himself from her touch upon when they found his mother, he decided not to. "Mom. Galyna's back with us for another night. There have been developments in the skirmish with the Grimm's. They've taken Zara."
To her credit, Selena didn't even blink twice when Max spoke about pack politics in front of Gal. She simply nodded and got up to make drinks for them all. "If it's just us tonight, I'll get one of the guest rooms ready. You can tell me more about what our plans are to recover your brother's mate over dinner."
Max nodded and then what his mother said hit him over the head like a ton of lead-filled bricks. He literally lost his footing and had to grab onto Gal's hand a little tighter to remain upright. "Mom?"
"Oh don't be so dramatic, sinochek. It's not like we didn't all know he was head over heels in love with her. It's perfectly obvious she's the perfect match for him. It would be a great dishonor to his memory if we pretended anything otherwise."
"Wait. His memory?" Gal touched his arm. "Max, where is Niko? Zara thinks he's in Russia."
Fuck a duck. "He is. He was. Damn. Remember, I said the Tzar was assassinated and that started this whole war?"
Gal went all wide eyed and looked between him and his mother. "Holy crap. Niko was the Tzar?"
"No, kroshka," Selena interjected saving him from having to admit such a dark failing to her himself. "Nikolaus is accused of killing Tzar Mikhail Volkov. I refuse to believe it. They say he is dead, killed by the Tzar's guard while trying to escape. So we mourn his death."
Gal stared hard at Max's mother, who stared hard back. "You don't believe he's dead, do you?"
Max was finding it hard to swallow at that moment.
Selena shrugged. "Some things a mother knows. Some things she does not. I simply have a feeling that the Troika brothers' story is not finished."
He should have spent more time with his mother this past month. They'd gone from Niko's death to war so fast that they didn't have time to grieve. She was in the denial stage. Max understood. He certainly hadn't made peace with any of the changes and his mother hated change. "Mom, we all wish Niko wasn't gone."
She waved him off, but not before he caught a glimpse of her wolf shining behind her eyes. "Enough. There is nothing more to discuss right now. Except what kind of wine you'd like with dinner and how we will take over the Grimm pack and crush their balls with under our claws."
Selena walked off into the kitchen and he and Gal quietly watched her go. Gal leaned closer and whispered, "your mom is kinda fucking cool."
"I know." Didn't mean he wasn't a little worried about her. But giving her a project. He could see she was already scheming something that had to do with him bringing Galyna home.
The three of them ate dinner together and discussed more ins and outs of pack politics, the implications of one-bloods infiltrating nearby packs, and how to find Zara. Selena answered all of Gal's questions, and didn't seemed fazed in the least that she was laying out hundreds of years of wolf-shifter secrets to a human. She treated Gal like she was already part of the pack.
Max was good with all of it until Gal asked about mates.
"Zara and Niko weren't married. She doesn't even know he's a wolf, does she? So how can she be his mate?"
Selena sat back and took a sip of wine. She looked at Max, then over to Gal, and back with a grin on her face. Uh-oh. Max knew that look. It was never good. His mother had machinations with him in mind. "Since the beginning of the reign of the Volkov's wolf shifters have mated wolf-shifters. We could not intermingle with humans, so there was no other choice. We learned as a species to suppress our need to find our fated mate."
"Fated mates are a fairy tale." He didn't believe in happy ever afters. Did he?
"No. They are not." His mother rolled her eyes at him. Never a good sign. "Every shifter has a true mate, the one that the fates have chosen especially for them. It comes with the magic that gives us the ability to be two forms in one. Two must always become one. A few of our kind still find their way to their true mate, but many do not simply because we were forbidden to look."
"The only thing forbidden is to reveal ourselves to humans." That and to bite them. Which suddenly seemed like a strange taboo to Max. A wolf's bite didn't turn a human into a shifter like in the movies. But the sheriff had clearly bitten Key, and it had changed her.
"Exactly." His mom raised an eyebrow and her wine glass toasting his statement.
Okay, he could buy that humans might be true mates to wolves. He sure as hell felt something more than simple lust when it came to Galyna. But how would he know? It had to be more than a feeling. It had to. "If that was true how would anyone even know if they'd met their true mate?"
"Finding a true mate may be hampered but the old traditions haven't changed in a millennium, Maxsim." She was telling him in so many words he was being a dumbass and the answer was right in front of him.
"The mating ceremony? It's just a ritual." He'd witnessed dozens of them and there had never been anything special. Nothing more than the wolf equivalent to a wedding. But without the flouncy dresses and a lot more biting and sex.
"For most. But for a lucky few, it's when they know they've found their true mate. The full moon is only a few nights away. You'll see." She did that thing where she looked between the two of them all meaningful-like. Did she really think Gal might be his true mate? It wasn't like she was going to be allowed at the mating ritual with a dozen packs there and his father bringing some wolftress for him. He'd be expected to forge alliances, not whimper about true love.
"Dad is your true mate? Is that how you know about all of this?" Maybe if his parents had been lucky enough to find a true mate, he could too. Maybe his father would understand if Gal turned out to be his fated mate.
"He isn't. But we have made a strong alpha pair and we got you three out of the deal. So it all worked out. But who is to say what would have happened if I'd made a different choice and chosen to to follow a fate now laid out for me by wolf law." Selena pressed her lips together and gave him and Gal a sad smile. She got up from the table, took her wine glass, and went into the kitchen.
"Holy crow. Dude." Gal grabbed his hand. "Your mom knows who her true mate is and it's not your dad."
Max had a feeling his mother knew exactly who his true mate was too. It wasn't any wolftress from another pack his father was bringing home either.
He'd already revealed his true form to a human and his mother hadn't even blinked twice. Instead she told him a fairy tale and given him a sad warning about choices. She was crafty, was his mother. A smart son always did what his mother told him to do.
Max may not be as big and strong as Niko, but he was smart.
Tonight he was going to prove that. He stood up from the table and held his hand out to Gal. She took it with a smile. Max kissed her knuckles and pulled her up and into his arms. "Come on, kiska. There's something I've been wanting to do with you since the first second I knew you were back in town."
Actually, it was something he'd wanted since they were in school, but until tonight he never could have admitted even to himself that he'd been in love with Galyna his whole life.
Gal
Max led Galyna down a hall she hadn't seen the last time she was here. This was going toward a part of the house that seemed more on the private side. There were family pictures on the walls instead of art and she caught a peek into bedrooms that had at some point definitely belonged to teenage boys.
"Wait. Is this your old room?" She tried to stick her head into a room with blue walls and a poster of an old muscle car that looked a lot like Max's hung slightly askew on the wall.
He yanked her away. "It is, and tomorrow I'll let you gawk at my teenage awkwardness all you want."
Gal laughed right at him. "You were never weird like the rest of us. Did you even see the size of my glasses back then? No, you were the popular hot guy they make teen heart throb movies about."
Max guided her into the last doorway at the end of the hall and into a sumptuous bedroom with a huge bigger than king-sized bed, and a bevy of romantic candles lit and scattered throughout the space. The scene took her breath away. It was perfectly romantic.
He pulled her into his arms and rubbed his cheek against hers. "I was awkward around you."
If this was how wolfmen started the foreplay, she liked it. Gal tipped her head to the other side so he could rub her other cheek. "Me? When did you even say more than three words to me before the other night?"
He nuzzled her starting at her jaw and worked his way down her neck and back to her ear. "I didn't, because every time I tried my brain froze up and my dick got hard and I'd have to hide in the bathroom thinking of baseball and England or whatever had nothing to do with the way your ass swayed from side to side as you walked toward class."
Oh man. The way his breath wisped across her skin had her eyes rolling back in her head, it felt so good, and naughty at the same time. It was almost enough to distract her from his completely made up story about having a crush on her in school. "No way. You... no. I am not going to believe for a second that you had a crush on me in high school. Max, I would have died and thought I'd gone to good-girl heaven if you'd even--"
He cut off all her denials by pushing his hands into her hair, pulling her head back, and crushing his mouth down on hers. He pushed his way into her mouth testing and teasing her, forcing her mind to give up its protests in favor of something much more fun. She couldn't get enough of him, of the way he was devouring her with the intensity of his kisses. He went from foreplay to full-on need in an instant taking her with him.
Gal ran her fingers under his shirt and backed up toward the big bed pulling him with her. They bumped into it and she sat, breaking their kiss. "That thing you've been wanting to do with me... it had better be take me to bed. But I'm warning you Max, if your phone rings this time, I'm shoving it up your butt and not in a fun way."
"Wow, kiska, your dirty talk is turning me on." He pushed her back onto the mattress and crawled up over her. "Say something else naughty."
"Be careful what you wish for, you scallywag." She was barely keeping a nervous giggle in. He was clearly a sex god and she was nothing more than the librarian who catalogued books about sex and gods. But boy did she have an encyclopedic knowledge of both. It had to come in handy eventually. Now or never, nerdy girl. She might be horrible at talking dirty, but he wasn't. She'd just have to get him to give up on even attempting to get her to do it and take over. "I'm a librarian and happen to know a litany of medieval and Shakespearean swear words that will knock your socks off."
Max drew her arms up over her head and captured them in one hand. "Seeing as we're both fully clothed, I think my socks
and yours need knocking off."
Okay, Shakespeare hadn't done it. Time to bring out the big guns. "Just remember you asked for it. Come on down here and sard me, you rapscallion. Sard me so hard, you turn me into a driggle-draggle."
His eyes twinkled and his lips moved into a mischievous grin. "Good try, my dirty librarian. How about instead I strip you naked so I can finally lick, and kiss, and touch, and caress every inch of your curves like I've been dreaming about?"
Yeah, that was more like it. Except now she was having just the teensiest moment of worrying the second he got her clothes off he would be disappointed.
She had great boobs, sure. That came with the territory and he'd already seen those. More than once, he'd mentioned her ass, and Gal's was a whole lot bigger than Kim Kardashian's. She was no swimsuit model. She had stretch marks and cellulite and -oh crap - had on granny panties instead of the the pretty lingerie she'd wanted to wear the first time they got naked together.
Was she going to let a pair of ugly underpants ruin her sexy-times? Or spend the night alone because what those panties covered wasn't up to society's beauty standards? She might. If the man looking down at her was anyone else.
The way his eyes glowed with his hidden wolf inside, the way he licked his lip and sucked it between his teeth while staring at her mouth, and especially the way he was patiently waiting for her to say yes, helped her get over her worries. "Talk to dirty me like that, my big bad wolf, and you can lick anything you want."
She pulled her hands out of his grasp and grabbed his shirt, yanking it over his head, wanting so much to feel his skin against hers. Gal pressed her fingers against the nearest muscle that clearly needed stroking. "You are incredibly hot, do you know that? What are you doing with a girl like me?"
Shit. Gal yanked her hand away and grimaced. She had not meant that last part to come out of her mouth. She absolutely did not want to screw this up by letting him see her insecurities. She was already fighting against the curse of the granny panties, she needed to at least pretend she was a confident sexy woman. That's what guys wanted, so said Cosmo. "Forget I said that."