by Kyle, Celia
Warren laughed and crouched low to allow the pooch to jump in his arms. “Persia, I’d like you to meet another member of our pack, Fang. Fang, meet Persia.”
Fang stretched herself as far as she could to reach Persia without leaving Warren’s arms. Persia scratched the little dog’s ear and moved in close enough for a few puppy kisses. “Nice to meet you, Fang.”
Having properly greeted their guest, the dog leapt from Warren’s arms and tore off to god knew where, leaving Persia amused at the presence of a dog in a supposed wolf pack. But before she could ask about it, a familiar, gruff voice called out to her.
“Morning, Persia!”
Turning, she watched her boss, Hux Davenport, hurrying across the lawn toward them, a small boy with matching features riding on his shoulders. He smiled as they passed and headed for the waiting van.
What.
The.
Hell?
She turned surprised eyes on Warren. “He’s…?”
Warren grinned. “Yup. He’s taking Little Hux to the van that will drive them to school in town. After what that poor kid’s been through, Hux makes a point of escorting him every morning now.”
Too much information had already filled up her brain. She feared there wasn’t enough room for more, so she didn’t ask what the boy had suffered through. Even if she had, her question would have been drowned out by the sound of several more little ones shouting and laughing and generally being excited kids, all heading for the same van. One actually shifted into a tiny wolf pup, mid-stride, leaving a pile of clothes behind.
“What the…” she gasped, shocked to see a human shift in the light of day. It was much as she remembered from the night before, but much less terrifying and infinitely cuter. And so very real.
Warren chuckled softly. “His mom’s going to give him a time out for ruining his school clothes, for sure.”
The children were funny, but the adults running in circles as they tried to herd the hyper kids into the van drew a chuckle from Persia. Even Hux chased after his son, his mini-me giggling as he tried to evade his papa. Meanwhile, tiny little Fang yipped and chased after everyone.
The terror she’d felt that morning melted away entirely. This was just a community, like any other. Well, not quite like any other, but close enough. People who cared and watched out for each other, loving families just trying to get by, folks who just wanted to live their lives without being gunned down on their own land.
“I can’t wait,” Warren murmured as he stared wistfully at the scene.
“For what?”
“To have some pups of our own.”
Cue record scratch.
Pulling her hand back, she stared at him like…well, like he’d just said he wanted to have pups with her.
Pups!
“Excuse me?”
He turned a perplexed look on her. “What?”
“You want to have what with me?”
“Pups. Don’t you want kids?”
Could he really be that dense? “Whether I do or not, I literally found out just minutes ago that an unknown number of humans can turn themselves into fucking werewolves at will, and quite honestly, I’m having a hard enough time wrapping my head around that. Then you dump this crazy ‘fated mate’ thing on me, and now you already have me barefoot and pregnant with wolf babies? You seriously need to slow your roll, Bubba. Big time.”
“I just—” he stammered for a moment, seemingly blown away by her hesitancy. “I just thought now that you knew the truth, you’d understand. That you’d want the claiming bite that will turn you into a wolf and bond us together for eternity.”
Persia snorted, staring at up at the sky in complete disbelief. “You hear yourself. Right? Tell me you hear how crazy that all sounds.”
“Not to me.”
His eyes glittered earnestly, and for a moment a vision of them doddering through their golden years with dozens of grandchildren running circles around them brought a wave of joy to her heart. But then her brain started working again.
“Warren, come on. That’s not how things work. It’s a pretty idea, but it’s just not what happens in the real world. You know what does? Marriages like my parents’. He’s a workaholic who ignores his wife and probably sleeps around on business trips. She’s a spoiled trophy wife who spends all her time—and her husband’s money—on trips around the world, probably also sleeping around the whole way. That’s what a real marriage looks like. Boredom. Loneliness. Resentment. Distance. I don’t want that for myself, Warren. What I want is to stop my father, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”
If she didn’t get out of there, her brain might explode. Without thinking about it first, Persia broke away from Warren and hurried up the steps to the school van just as the driver closed the door. The man gave her a curious look but then shrugged and drove away from what Warren had called the pack house.
Taking a seat next to Little Hux in the front row, Persia did her best not to look back. If she did, she might change her mind and ask the driver to let her out. But her gaze didn’t seem to want to obey her command. Turning in her seat, she stared out the back window and her heart cracked in two.
Warren stood alone in the billowing dust, watching helplessly as she was whisked away.
Chapter Seventeen
Warren stood frozen in place long after the van carrying Persia had disappeared from sight. Even the dust had settled. All the parents had dispersed to go about their daily business, not paying attention to the heartbroken beta watching his mate run from him. Only Fang remained, sitting near his feet. She craned her tiny neck to watch him and whined softly at his distress, but he barely noticed her.
“Good morning again, Warren,” sang a melodic voice he recognized immediately.
Cassandra had a knack for sneaking up on people, though no one suspected that was her intent. She also had a habit of showing up at either the most or least convenient times. Warren had no doubt that was deliberate.
For the first time he could recall, Cassandra’s presence didn’t have a calming effect on him. Fang stopped whining, but his heart continued to ache. When she caught sight of his face, a whisper of a wrinkle formed between her eyebrows where most adults had deeply etched worry lines.
“I take it your tour didn’t go as well as you’d hoped,” she spoke softly, placing a hand on his shoulder.
Nothing. Not a warming glow spreading through his body. Not even a glimmer of Cassandra’s power could pass through his pain. But her presence did give him an idea. And that allowed a spark of hope to cast a dim light in the darkness.
“Cassandra,” he turned to her with desperation in his eyes. “Make her love me.”
The pack omega didn’t laugh often, but she actually tittered in surprise at his demand. Only once she contained herself did she reply, giving him a sympathetic smile as she realized he’d been serious.
“It doesn’t work that way, Warren.”
“I saw you do it to that hunter guy, Randy Leeper.” He grabbed the hand on his arm and refused to let go. He’d hold on until she made things all better. That was her damn job. “You turned a bloodthirsty hunter into a marshmallow who loves kittens and hugs. It should be a snap to make Persia fall in love with me.”
Cassandra sighed, causing that tiny flame of hope to flicker and dim. “First of all, I wasn’t even sure my powers would transfer to a human, so I can’t say with any certainty how I was able to transform him. But let me assure you, whatever he is now was always waiting just under the surface. All I did was turn his eyes inward, which allowed his true nature to come to the fore. It’s my belief that he’d spent years, maybe all of his life, burying that nature under layers of toxic masculinity.”
“Then turn Persia’s eyes inward so she can see she loves me,” he insisted, not willing to give up.
“Oh, my dear Warren. One isn’t born with love for someone else. It’s created, nurtured, earned. Human love is especially complex since they don’t have our ability to
detect their mate.”
Instead of pulling free from his vice-like grip, she wrapped her other hand around his, clearly trying to give him strength but failing miserably.
“You will have my support in any way I can give it, Warren. A wolf finding his or her mate in a human is… challenging, at best. The wolf must tread carefully and work hard to earn the human’s love. It takes far more finesse than simply throwing her over your shoulder and getting to work making pups the minute you meet. That type of behavior is unfathomable to humans. Most wait years for anything remotely close to that, and sometimes it never comes at all.”
“But what about Val?” He’d grasp at any straw at this point.
Fang yipped at the sound of her mistress’s name and then trotted off toward the pack house to find her. Cassandra gave him a blissful smile.
“Val was a human when she met Zeke, I’ll give you that, but she was far from typical. And don’t forget she’d had many years to accept our existence. It would be unfair and unkind to compare your situations.”
Poof! The ember of hope winked out. Despair gripped him. Releasing Cassandra, he scowled at the dirt.
“Then it’s over,” he murmured, his voice cracking at the end.
She waited a beat, then offered, “Not necessarily. How have you worked for Persia’s love?”
He perked up at that. “I helped get all those treehouses of theirs built, for one. Zeke donated the materials, and a bunch of sentries volunteered to help build them.”
“So…you did anything a generous construction worker with the same goal as the protestors might do,” she noted dryly.
That didn’t sound romantic when she said it that way. “Yeah, but—”
“What else?”
Warren racked his brain. “I, um, worked with my shirt off?”
She seemed wholly unimpressed by that, so he hurriedly came up with something else. “Cassandra, I’ve shown her everything about myself, what pack life could be like, what our future might be. She knows how I feel and she knows we’re mates, but she turned her nose up at all of it. What more can I do?”
Cassandra trailed a ghostly pale finger down his cheek. “My boy, so much more. Can you think of nothing you have in common? Nothing that’s connected you on a non-physical plane?”
The it hit him. “Yes! She loves my wolf. Before she… found out about me, I would meet her in the clearing in Wolf Woods in my wolf form. Once she realized I wasn’t going to eat her for brunch, she opened up to me, venting about this and that. That’s how I got to know her better.”
“I see,” Cassandra mused, a single eyebrow shooting up in amusement. “Unconventional, and perhaps a little deceptive, but clever. Did you touch her?”
“Of course. As much as I could, anyway.”
“Sexually?”
“What? No! Normal stuff, like nuzzling her hand or licking her face, that kind of thing.”
“Uh huh,” she murmured, as if she were mulling over this information, but Warren sensed she already knew what she was about to say. “And how often do you see humans licking each other’s faces?”
His stomach dropped like an old balloon on a cold day.
“Don’t look so dejected, Warren. You and your wolf may have different ways of handling your instincts, but you share the same core personality. If she loves your wolf, I believe there’s hope she’ll grow to love you, if you put in the work.”
“What kind of work? Tell me.” He’d do anything to win her. Anything.
“First you need to find human versions of licking her face. Think about what she likes about your wolf. Besides your fluffy coat,” she added with a wink.
Warren had never felt so confused and aimless. He was usually the one with the sage advice, the conservative plan of action. But now he had no idea how to proceed.
“She likes talking to him, I guess, telling him about all the stuff she’s dealing with.”
“Ah! So, she likes a good listener. When you’re in your human form, do you listen with the same attention as your wolf?”
Of course, he wanted to say, though he knew it was a lie. He’d spent plenty of time chatting and trying to impress her.
“I guess I just think that’s the sort of things friends do,” he muttered, not particularly liking the view in the figurative mirror Cassandra was holding in front of him.
“You don’t think mates should be friends too?” she asked with a soft laugh that sent flames to his cheeks. “For humans, friendship usually comes long before love. You want to be her lover immediately, and I understand that impulse. It’s in your nature. But it’s not in hers, so if you want her, you’re going to have to throttle your instincts and cater to hers. Try being her friend, Warren. Only then will you have a chance at winning her heart.”
“And if that never happens?”
The smile that always seemed to play at the corners of Cassandra’s mouth turned down into a well-defined frown. “Hypotheticals are dangerous, but I won’t lie. When a wolf knows who their fated mate is, but for whatever reason can’t have them, that poor wolf has my greatest sympathy.”
“Why?” he asked, despite his great desire not to. It was always sunny in denial.
“Because that wolf would live the rest of his or her life in abject misery. It’s a fate no normal wolf would wish on their worst enemy.”
A darkness so black and dense that all hope was gobbled up by its gravity clouded his eyes, heart and soul. He clenched his jaw to keep from sobbing like a child in the middle of the pack house lawn. Capturing Cassandra’s gaze with an urgency he felt all the way to the tips of his hair, he took a step toward her.
“Then take it from me now.”
“Take… what?”
“The mate thing. The drive, the connection, whatever it is. I don’t care if that means I’ll be alone for the rest of my life. I can’t imagine a lifetime of this pain. Just do your voodoo and make it so she’s not my mate. I mean, she’s human. It can’t be that hard.”
The look of pity and disappointment in her eyes shamed Warren more than words ever could. Then came her words.
“Warren, I love you as much as any other member of this pack, so I’m going to speak frankly. If you would rather ask for magic that would take away any chance at joy in your future than work for the love of your mate, then Persia isn’t the problem here. You are. To quote a human colloquialism, shit or get off the pot.”
Rage and shame forced him to turn his back on the omega and stomp off in a huff. He’d tried to make Persia fall in love with him, but where did that get him? Nowhere, that’s where. So, he’d just spend his life wrapped in misery so heavy it would eventually drag him down like an anchor. He’d been the pack’s sad sack for years now anyway. Who would even notice the difference?
Just as he entered the forest, he stopped in his tracks, his jaw set.
Unless…
Chapter Eighteen
A heavy silence lay over the previously bustling protest site at the entrance to Wolf Woods. Persia sat hunched over the tiny fold-out table in Betty, triple-checking every piece of paperwork for any mistakes. It all needed to be perfect if she had a chance of winning a temporary injunction against her father. One misspelling could get her motion thrown out of court, leaving him free to proceed with his plans to start tearing down the woods.
After hitching a ride in the van taking all those cute kids to school, Persia had slipped the driver ten bucks to drop her at her at Wolf Woods so she could finalize her paperwork and head to the courthouse. As urgent as the injunction was, though, she continually caught herself staring out the side window of her van toward the woods. More specifically, toward the meadow in the woods. Clear morning light streamed through the trees in pillars of pale gold. Birds did their birdy things, as if they hadn’t a care in the world. Far too much beauty and bliss for her state of mind, so she returned her gaze to the documents and tried not to think about Warren and werewolves and adorable kids who could shift into even more adorable puppies.
> The sound of gravel crunching under tires brought her back to reality. For a brief moment, her heart leapt at the thought Warren had followed her, but one glance out her back window killed that fantasy. Her father’s BMW pulled up directly behind her, as if she needed yet one more dark cloud to fuck up an already grim day.
“Shit,” she muttered, gathering up all her paperwork and shoving it in a folder.
Sliding open the side door and jumping out, she quickly closed and locked the van, just in case. Considering he’d sent one of his hunters to either kidnap or kill her the night before, it didn’t pay to take chances.
“Morning, princess,” Dick flashed a warm grin, as if they weren’t bitter enemies.
“What do you want?” Her hostile tone left nothing to the imagination.
Dick held his hands up in surrender. “I come in peace,” he teased, but Persia no longer trusted any of his tones. “Honestly, I was hoping we could talk.”
Oh, that didn’t sound suspicious as hell. “About what?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” he asked simply.
It was. She glanced at the folder inside Betty and then nodded. “Fine, talk.”
“It’s a perfect morning for taking a walk with your ol’ dad,” he offered his arm.
She ignored it and set off toward the clearing, partly out of habit, but more in hopes he’d see the beauty of the place and decide to leave it undisturbed. A long shot, no doubt about it, but it sure as hell couldn’t hurt.
He quickly fell behind, concerned over low shrubs catching his suit pants or scuffing his polished shoes. Persia continued to trudge along, taking sour pleasure in his discomfort. Once the path cleared a bit, he managed to reach her side.
“You wanted to talk, so talk,” she grumbled, keeping her gaze on the terrain.
“Well, quite frankly, I miss you.”