by Eden Beck
Kaleb and Marlowe pile into the Jeep and offer me a hand inside while the other members of the pack take off—some from vehicles parked on the road, and others just head off into different directions through the woods.
Romulus heads back in the direction of his stolen car with only one narrow-eyed glare back at me.
I pause before taking the hand offered to me.
I stand there in the middle of the road paralyzed, as I watch everyone else disappear.
At long last, I’m alone with them. With Rory. With Marlowe. With Kaleb.
It’s like another dream.
But when I turn around, Rory is standing right behind me, and unlike the dreams that leave me grasping for air, he immediately grabs me in his arms and kisses me. Really kisses me.
His arms tighten around me and I wrap my tongue around his as it pushes into my mouth. My head is overwhelmed with all the emotions that I feel screaming for my attention as I completely lose myself in Rory’s embrace.
“Alright, Romeo,” I hear Kaleb call from the car. “You don’t get to claim her yet. Come on, let’s get out of here.”
Rory pulls away from me but lets his face linger near mine for a moment so that what he is about to say is heard only between the two of us.
“I’ve been strong, and calm, and level-headed enough for all three of us,” he says. I can hear the ragged breaths that he takes between every few words. “But I cannot bear to think of a life without you Sabrina. Promise me that you will not ever, ever be with anyone else. Please, I need to hear you say it.”
Rory looks at me as though his whole soul is exposed. Vivian was right; even the strongest men can be broken by love. For the first time, I really feel the love that Rory has for me, and I can see it on his face as if he is incapable of hiding it anymore.
“If what Romulus just said is true …” he says, his voice dripping with desire and hope, “then it’s finally possible. We’d never have to be apart.”
He pulls me even tighter. “Promise me.”
He waits on my words as if they can control him and I feel a surge of longing come over me.
“I promise,” I say. “So long as you keep your promise to me, then I’ll never let another human touch me. So long as you turn me, I am yours forever.”
I expect him to argue.
I expect him to disagree.
But instead, he just grins.
Seemingly satiated, Rory exhales and takes my hand to walk me to the car. The other boys ride in the back of the Jeep and howl at the crisp, fresh air and the open moonlight.
In a few hours, the eclipse will be here, and I will be allowed to stay and be with the boys while they shift.
I will be allowed to watch the ritual that I was forbidden before to be a part of.
I sit quietly in the passenger seat of the car while Rory drives. My face is pressed to the glass as I watch the moonlight reflect off his bare chest. I wonder if his wolfish senses can tell how much I want him. All of them.
I can’t imagine ever wanting anything more.
26
Sabrina
You’d think that after so much time apart I’d be brimming with questions—that I wouldn’t be able to keep my hands off of them.
But after the way they left, I keep finding myself reluctant. It hasn’t settled in yet that they’re back. That they’re here.
More than that, it hasn’t settled in that they’re here to stay.
Really stay.
With me beside them.
When we get back to the house, all attention turns back to Romulus. The puncture holes in his neck are so deep that I can see the dark purplish tissue of his exposed muscle. Amazingly, it’s already stopped bleeding and I can only imagine that it has something to do with how the wolf-blood inside him congeals differently than that of a mere man.
If it was me who was bitten, as I have been before, I’d be in the hospital instead of home.
There’s a slight musty smell to the house—a remnant of the emptiness that’s occupied it these last months.
Months.
Just thinking of it, of the time we were separated, hits me like a punch in the gut.
Lydia is reaching for a fireplace poker and as I foolishly stand there thinking she’s going to stoke the cracking fire in the hearth, she instead presses it up against Romulus’ open wounds to cauterize them. For a minute, I feel like I’m going to be sick. She is a lot tougher of a woman than I’ve given her credit for, because she doesn’t so much as flinch.
Romulus looks at me quietly from over the lip of his whisky glass as he calmly pours himself a draught and takes a sip. He doesn’t make a sound at the searing of his flesh, in fact, the only sound he makes is a relaxed sigh as he appreciates the fine spirits.
The tension seems to melt away from his shoulders even as the skin of his neck burns back together. Lydia sits down beside him after she’s replaced the poker in its spot on the hearth and the two of them start to talk in hushed voices. He holds her hand against his thigh and Lydia looks at him in that way she does, as if she just absolutely worships him.
It’s a private moment, one I suddenly realize I shouldn’t be playing party to.
“Come on,” Kaleb says, sensing the same as he grabs my hand. I don’t pull back. I glance once more at Romulus and Lydia in their private moment and feel a pang of jealousy.
Kaleb and I follow Rory and Marlowe up the stairs—towards their bedrooms.
We all gather in Rory’s just like we used to … on the odd occasion Romulus wasn’t following us, watching and waiting like an overbearing mother hen.
Tonight, we all sit around on the corners of Rory’s large four-poster bed while Rory grabs a T-shirt to pull over his head. Kaleb stretches his legs out into the center of the bed and Marlowe leans back against one of the bedposts.
Although they all can’t help but seem excited and anxious about the eclipse tonight, they also seem much more at ease then I expected them to be. Even Rory seems like he’s finally winding down, finally able to take a breath without punching someone in the face.
And suddenly, I find that I can breathe too.
And with that breath, all the questions start rushing in.
“What did Remus mean by the blood oath that he made Romulus swear to?” I blurt, suddenly into the silence. “I’m guessing the whole bloody biting-neck thing wasn’t just for show.”
Rory comes to join all of us on the bed as I speak. Instead of sitting in the empty corner, he comes to sit next to me.
His hand reaches towards me, stopping just inches from actually touching me, as if he’s reconsidering.
“That wasn’t just an empty gesture,” Marlowe answers, from the other end of the bed. “Swearing on blood is a pretty serious thing, especially between brothers.” He looks over at Rory and Kaleb with a raised eyebrow. “I’m not really sure what’ll happen when Romulus breaks it. I don’t think a blood oath has ever been broken between the packs before … at least as far back as I can remember.”
Rory speaks up now. “I have,” he says, his voice quiet. “And when Romulus breaks it, it’ll be tantamount to declaring war between our packs.”
War.
There’ll be nothing to stop Remus from coming for his brother’s pack, his family, if that happens.
“So … so you think he’ll actually do it?” I say, hardly daring to breathe again. My voice comes out so small and quiet that if they weren’t shifters, they wouldn’t be able to hear me. “What he said earlier then … he really meant it?”
It’s too much … too fast … to believe it.
Rory and Kaleb seem to agree because they don’t say anything to the contrary.
“I don’t know why Romulus would risk breaking his agreement with Remus for me,” I say, forcing my voice a little louder, bolder. I pull my hand away from Rory’s. “Are you sure that’s what you want? Are you sure it wasn’t better for you, easier, when you were gone? When you didn’t have to constantly worry about me?”
If what Vivian told me is true, he couldn’t even stay away from me for long. But I imagine that at least Romulus was happy about having the other two boys away from me for a while.
“Are you kidding?” Kaleb says, suddenly. He sits forward so abruptly that it startles me. “Do you not have any idea what kind of torture we went through trying to stay away from you? I thought that at the very least, Rory’s reckless stupidity would have shown you how much the three of us need to be with you.”
I look between Kaleb and Marlowe and see the same look in their eyes that Rory had back in the woods. It looks like an aching plea rooted so deeply inside that it wraps around the very fiber of their being.
I know how that feels, it’s how I felt while they were gone.
Without them, I was gone too.
I suddenly find it difficult to swallow.
“None of us could even think straight,” Marlowe adds. “It was pure hell. After a while of not being able to eat, or sleep, or even act like a wolf properly … Lydia started to get seriously worried about us.” Marlowe pauses thoughtfully for a moment. “Sabrina,” he says. “I know it’s hard for you to understand how this makes us feel, but—”
“She can feel it,” Rory interrupts.
Both Kaleb and Marlowe reel back in shock.
“What?” Kaleb asks.
Rory shakes his head, as if he’s struggling with his own disbelief when he says, “Sabrina can feel the bond too. I don’t know how it’s possible, but she can. She told me.”
Both Marlowe and Kaleb stare at me.
“It’s true,” I say. “I can.”
“But …” Marlowe starts, his head cocking to one side, “only shifters can feel the bond.”
“I’m telling you,” Rory says on my behalf. “She can. She described what it felt like in perfect detail.”
The three of them look around at each other for a minute, not quite sure what to make of it.
“Okay then,” Kaleb says, practically bouncing on the end of the bed where he’s perched. “Let’s test it.”
“Test it? There’s no way to just test the bond,” Marlowe says with a skeptical laugh.
“Why not?” Kaleb reaches across the bed and grabs my hand as he pulls me toward him. Rory looks as if he’s about to protest but Kaleb shakes his head at him. “Just let me try something.”
Rory sits back down and watches carefully as Kaleb and I sit facing each other with our knees touching.
He reaches for my hands and lays one of them against his chest and the other on his forehead, before closing his eyes.
“Close your eyes,” he tells me. “And tell me what you feel.”
I do as he says and sit there with my eyes closed, feeling awkward.
I’m not any sort of psychic and I can’t really call upon the feelings that I had of the boys on a whim. They just happened and I couldn’t really control it.
I get ready to open my mouth to say that I can’t feel anything, but then I feel a chest up against my back and a finger pressed to my lips to shush me. I can feel Marlowe sitting behind me and I can tell that it is Rory’s finger against my lips. I keep my eyes closed and I relish in the feeling of the three of them cocooned around me.
This is my safe place, here between the three of them.
This is the spot that I never want to leave.
But then, as the moments pass, I begin to feel something else. I feel a sorrow that falls over me so deeply that I feel like I am drowning. Try as I might to gasp for air, my lungs are left empty.
I feel a heat in my veins that burns so hot it feels like my skin is turning to ash from the inside out. A million thoughts start to scream inside my head, and they are all voices of despair and dread and they sound like my own voice shouting back at me. My heart starts to race and pound uncontrollably as I begin to worry that I’m having some sort of cardiac episode.
And then a throbbing between my legs begins to intensify to such an unbearably painful point, that I can’t help but thrust my eyes open.
All three of them are staring at me with their mouths agape. All three of them look as if their eyes have been set on fire. The golden glow of their irises spark with flickering specks of amber and I can see the labored rise of fall of each of their chests heaving.
Kaleb looks at Rory in an astonished bewilderment.
“What was that?” I ask, my hand fluttering back to my own chest in some effort to get my beating heart back under control.
Kaleb looks at me with smoldering eyes wildly out of control … but it’s Marlowe who answers.
“That was how we felt while we were apart from you,” he says, quietly. He looks away from me, almost like he’s ashamed for doubting me in the first place.
“What? How did I feel that?” I ask.
“I told you,” Rory says to his brothers before turning back to answer me. “We all just thought about how we felt while we were away from you, we let ourselves really feel it again just now. And when we did, you felt it too. I can see that you felt it.”
This time when he reaches for me, I don’t pull away.
Still, even Rory looks a little stunned. He’d already believed me before, but I think that seeing it has made it undeniably real.
There’s a slight shuffle of sound at the bedroom door and we all turn to see what it is. Romulus is standing in the doorway, looking at his three sons and their ignited eyes. He doesn’t look angered or even surprised.
Instead he looks at the three boys with empathy.
“Do you know how this is happening?” Marlowe asks him from the bed.
Romulus walks slowly into the room with Lydia appearing at the door a moment behind him. She looks at the boys with the same sort of compassion that Romulus has, and she gives me a reassuring smile as she nods at her husband and then leaves to go continue preparations for tonight. It’s almost like she’s honoring this moment for Romulus to come and talk with us alone.
This is his fight.
This is his wrong to right.
“I’ve seen many bonds before,” Romulus says as stands beside the bed to talk with us. “But this is something of an anomaly.”
“How can Sabrina feel this too?” Rory asks. “She’s human. I thought that was impossible.”
“It is,” his father answers.
We all sit there in silence trying to wrap our heads around what is going on until Romulus starts to speak again.
“But impossible things happen all the time. No one has ever heard of a human being able to feel the bond. But there’s something different about you, Sabrina … I see that now. I’ve tried to deny it for a long time for my pack’s sake, for my family’s sake.”
“Controlling shifter abilities is difficult even for a shifter. Yet you are somehow able to control that part of my boys involuntarily. The bond you have with one, or maybe even all of them, is greater than anything I’ve ever seen in all of my many years.”
He pauses a moment to clear his throat.
“It is because of this that we will turn you and you will join us fully.”
Even though he’s mentioned it already once before, back in the forest, hearing him say it to me now … it’s different.
It’s final.
It isn’t a declaration made in the heat of a moment. It isn’t driven by adrenaline or rage.
It’s driven by something else.
When Romulus looks at me, I see the apology in his face. I see how it’s pained him to see what he’s done. To his family. His sons.
To me.
Romulus walks over to the far side of the bedroom and pulls a calendar off the wall. The boys flaming eyes show no signs of fizzling out as they watch him bring the calendar over to the bed. He flips the pages until they reach further toward the back of the calendar and holds it out to me.
“Choose a date anywhere in this month,” he says, pointing to the page.
; I look at the empty white squares on the page and point to one randomly. Then he takes it back and takes a pen off the top of Rory’s desk. He circles the square that I pointed to in a big blue-inked oval.
“This is the date that is set for your turning,” he says as he holds it up for all of us to see before walking back over to tack it back up on the wall. “By the next eclipse, you will become one of us.”
A Note From The Author
Thank you for reading Wolf Broken, the second book in the Wolfish series. The next (and final!) book should be out mid-October, 2020, and can be ordered on Amazon here.
If you enjoyed Wolf Broken, please consider leaving a review on Amazon!
Xoxo,
Eden
Also by Eden Beck
Wolfish
Wolf Bonded
Wolf Broken
Wolf Bargain
Hawthorne Holy Trinity
Dirty Liars
Dirty Fraud
Dirty Revenge
The Monster Within
Where Monsters Hide
Where Monsters Lie