Asher went upstairs to bed after a while, but he hesitated in the doorway when he saw Eira. She sat on his bed, on top of the sheets, wearing only his large t-shirt, hands tucked under her thighs. She glanced up at him, and then looked away.
He stepped inside and closed the door. “Hi,” he said.
“Can we not talk?” she asked. “Can we just … go to bed?”
Asher nodded and came over to the bed, settling close to her. He stood between her knees and she tilted her head up so she could keep looking at him. He reached out and brushed her hair away from her eyes gently, smoothing it out. She closed her eyes and his fingers traced down her cheekbones, her jaw, her lips. He bent his head and pressed his lips to hers. She opened up to him, tilting her head and inhaling. Her tongue darted out to feel the seam of his lips, and he deepened the kiss. His fingers traced down her neck and finally stopped where he could press his two fingers to her pulse point, lightly hesitating.
She gasped, fingers grasping him harder. He bit her lip before pulling away. “Mo’s not mad at you,” he said, lips warm against hers.
She sighed and pushed him away, shoving him with a palm to his face. “I said I don’t want to talk.” She rolled over so her back was facing him.
Asher shook his head. “I’m just letting you know, that’s all.” He curled his fingers discreetly to get a read on her actual reaction. Beneath the annoyance and anger, there was relief. “Like Mo could be mad at anyone for more than five minutes,” he said.
She grabbed a pillow and pulled it to herself. “Stop reading me.”
“No,” he said. He finished changing into sleep clothes and he crawled onto the bed, nudging her until he was positioned above her, straddling her waist, and he leaned down to kiss her gently. She rolled her eyes and made a show of being put-upon, but she was pleased. He could tell. “Now get under the blankets. It’s freezing.” He pulled the quilt down and tugged her under the blankets. Asher wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her close, nuzzling her neck and breathing warm onto the curve of her shoulder.
After a while of lying there and breathing together, she turned around. Her eyes were closed, but she reached for Asher’s hand and brought it to her throat. He pressed their soul-marks together. Her fingers wrapped around his wrist tight, and held on. Her lips parted like she wanted to say something, but it seemed like she was hesitating, couldn’t get the words out. Asher pressed close and kissed her.
He already knew.
She tangled her fingers in his hair and pulled him closer, deepening the kiss. They breathed together, his hands slipping up under her shirt to touch bare skin. Her skin was soft and silky, drawing his hands from the curve of her hips, the flat plane of her stomach, the swell of her breasts. He pulled back, breathing hard, and looked at her kiss-red lips. The primal part of him growled in satisfaction, the need to claim and mark. He leaned down and bit her lip again, sucking, and she gave a soft moan.
He tugged on her shirt. “Can I take this off?”
She nodded, wiggling for a quick second, and then the shirt was off, forgotten in the blankets next to them. He kissed her, lips, jaw, throat – he lingered over the soul-mark on the soft part of her throat. She gasped and tightened her grip on his hair, a shiver racing down her back. He smiled. “Feel good?” he whispered against her skin.
She gave a breathy laugh, and then said, “Let me show you.”
“What?” he asked, but she had already grabbed his wrist and brought his hand to her mouth. Before his brain had fully caught up, she took his first two fingers into her mouth, red lips stretched around them, her tongue sliding along the length and curling, drawing his fingers deeper into the wet heat.
“Oh, fuck,” he whispered. His vision tunneled, and the only thing he kept awareness of was Eira, her body under his, her lips, her tongue, and the way that his cock had gone suddenly, unbearably hard.
She continued the attentions for a while longer, and then released him with a wet sound. He breathed hard, and then said, “So, yeah, that feels good.”
She laughed and curled her fingers around his. “I could tell.”
He leaned down to kiss her again, soft. He held her and they didn’t talk for a long while, just breathing together.
Later, when the moonlight was the only thing lighting the room through the curtains, Eira shifted, moving so the line of her back wasn’t pressed to Asher’s front. She took a deep breath and turned to face him. His arm loosened around her waist and then drew her close again.
She didn’t know how to start. “Ash.”
“Hm?” he hummed, sleepy. “What’s up?”
“I’ve been thinking.” She reached out and twisted a strand of his hair around her finger. She wanted to touch him. Something to ground herself.
“Sounds shifty,” he mumbled. She was quiet. “Thinking?” he prompted after a few seconds.
“About where you found me,” she said. “I think I should … go back there.”
That woke him up a little, his attention snapping back into focus. “What? Why?”
“I need to remember what happened.” She searched for words. “I need to know. It might jog some memories.”
“No,” Asher said. “It doesn’t matter. If you did or if you didn’t, the end result is the same. You stay here, with me. With us.”
“It matters to me,” Eira said. “I need to know for myself. Because I can’t … I feel like I’m standing on a tightrope and I’m falling.” He opened his mouth, but she cut him off. “I know, I know you’re here. I get that. But I can’t keep going with this huge … ambiguous, threatening thing hanging over me. I keep seeing his face, Asher.”
Asher was quiet for a while and finally, he asked, “Did you love him?”
“Jesus, Asher, this isn’t about your jealousy right now,” she said.
She started pulling away, but he tightened his hold. “No, I’m sorry, that’s not what I meant. Well, it is, but that’s not how I meant it.” She relented and fell back into his arms, frowning at him. “I’ve thought about it,” he continued, “but I guess I thought about it more in terms of what happened to you, you being hurt.”
“Don’t phrase it like I’m the victim,” she said.
“You don’t know what you did or didn’t do,” Asher said. “Besides, that’s not the point. Do you miss him?”
Eira was quiet for a while, looking at the very light dusting of freckles on Asher’s shoulder. She took a deep breath and was glad that she could feel both of Asher’s hands, so she knew he wasn’t reading her right now. She didn’t know what her emotions were doing, tangling strangely in her chest, so never mind worrying about Asher sorting that out. “I don’t,” she said finally. “But I should, right?
“Not necessarily,” he said. “You can feel how you feel.”
“If he’s dead, I should be sad. I should be … having trouble adjusting to this sudden, really huge change in my life. Right?” She hesitated. “I shouldn’t be happy.”
“I want you to be happy,” Asher said. “Whatever else is going on right now, I want you to be happy.”
“I am,” she admitted. “I was today.”
He kissed her hair and she closed her eyes for a little while. “I don’t miss him,” she said. “I didn’t love him.” Which was a shitty thing to admit, probably, but it was so true.
“Why were you married, then?” he asked. “And to the Alpha.”
“Because he saw me, and he wanted me. Rainer gets what he wants.” She knew her voice sounded bitter, and she tried to tone it down.
Asher sighed. “I know I’ve said it before, but I really hate Blackwater.”
Eira laughed softly. “I don’t disagree.” She bit her lip and leaned her forehead against his chest. “I just … I wasn’t happy, but I don’t think I could …”
He kissed the crown of her head. “We’ll figure it out. I promise.”
She sighed. “I want to go see if I trigger any memories.”
“Okay,” he said. “J
ust … let me go with you.”
“You don’t need to.”
“I want to.” He rolled a little onto his back. “I was going to go drive out to see my mom in the morning, but I can be back … in the afternoon, if you want to go.”
She shook her head. “Don’t worry about it. Go see your mom. We’ll figure it out some time.”
He pulled back to look at her. “Can I ask you something?”
His tone was more serious than it had been before. “Yeah,” Eira said, feeling like there was a rock in her stomach, heavy.
“If you did kill Rainer,” he started. His eyes searched her face. She didn’t know what her expression was giving away, but it was enough for him to continue. “If you did kill the Alpha, that puts you as Alpha next.”
Everything stopped for a beat. She heard the words, but it took her a second to process them, because the idea was so foreign that she didn’t know what to do with it. “No it doesn’t,” she said.
“Eira, it does.”
“I’m … I can’t. That’s not how it works there.”
He shifted so he could sit up and see her better. “I don’t know about their pack’s traditions,” he said. “But I know that it doesn’t actually matter if you’re female. If you killed him, the Alpha power will transfer to you.”
“I don’t feel different,” Eira said. She didn’t, did she? Maybe she didn’t have a very good baseline to compare it to, if she didn’t remember?
“I don’t know as much about transferring the Alpha position like that,” Asher admitted. “Our pack usually relinquishes the power when a new Alpha rises.”
Eira knew that was possible. She’d never seen it, but she’d heard of it. When an Alpha was nearing the end of their time, a new Alpha would step in, and the power would transfer to them. Slowly, peacefully, as long as both parties were willing.
Blackwater wasn’t like that. The power of Alpha only transferred violently, when the Alpha was killed. Rainer had held it for almost ten years, and that was uncommon.
“I didn’t see a mark,” Asher said. His tone made it feel like an offering.
Eira hesitated. “Is there always a mark?”
“I haven’t heard of an Alpha not having a mark to show.” Asher sat up a bit and reached up to the neckline of his shirt, pulling it down to expose the curve of his shoulder and his collar bone. There, starting in the hollow above his collar bone, and spanning over his shoulder and down most of his right pec, was the mark of his pack. It was a pale black, like it was faded out – or not all there yet, Eira realized. Rainer’s had always been dark and slightly raised, like a new tattoo. The tips of the claw started at the top of Asher’s shoulder, the pad of the print ending at the curve of his pec. She reached out and touched the edge of the mark, tracing it with her fingertip. Asher shivered.
“Not really something you can miss,” Eira said quietly. “If I did have one.”
“Maybe you haven’t accepted it,” Asher answered. He reached out to touch her shoulder, the unmarked skin.
“What does that mean?”
Asher sighed. “Like I said, I only know about the mark transferring this way.” He shrugged his exposed shoulder. “But there’s a certain amount of intent behind it, right? I have to accept it; she has to release it. Maybe it’s like that, even if you’ve killed him?”
“If I don’t want it, it won’t come to me?”
Asher lay back on the pillows and pulled her down with him. “No one really knows how it works, but I don’t think want has much to do with it.”
Eira sighed and wrapped her arm around Asher’s middle. Asher leaned down and kissed her forehead. “If you need to go, then we will. I’ll go with you. We’ll figure out what you can remember, and what you can’t.”
“Go see your mom,” she said. She hated saying that, and she wanted to just get up and go now, but she realized the irrationality of that.
“And if you can’t remember anything,” he said, hesitating, “then we’ll figure it out some other way. I think Blackwater would probably let it go, and you’d be safe here at the very least, but if you need this for your own peace of mind, then … we’ll figure it out.”
Eira leaned in and kissed him. “Thank you,” she whispered.
CHAPTER SIX
IN THE MORNING, she felt Asher roll out of bed and she was dimly aware of him moving around the room, leaving to shower, coming back, pressing a kiss into her hair. She stretched and gave a sleepy murmur of “Drive safe,” and then Asher was gone.
Eira sat up in bed, and took a deep breath. She didn’t wait for him.
She changed into something that would be easy to take off once she got past the houses and into the wooded area. Tights and boots, a sweater, one layer. Her heart pounded a bit too quickly, and she closed her eyes and tried to center herself, calm down her beating heart and mute her emotions.
If Asher felt what was going on, he would come back.
And she didn’t know why, maybe it was stupid, but she wanted to go by herself. It was her burden to bear, it was her troubled situation, and she didn’t want to put it on Asher if she could help it. So, if she could go alone, and if anything there triggered any memories, she could work through it alone.
And then she’d know one way or another.
Maybe it would help. Maybe it wouldn’t. Somewhere deep inside, she didn’t know what she wanted the outcome to be. If she hadn’t killed him, then someone had done this to her. If she had done it, then she was an Alpha-killer. Rainer’s death was directly her fault, the blood on her hands.
Literally.
She made it out of the house without anyone noticing her. Mo was asleep, she could scent him in one of the upstairs bedrooms, and no one was visiting the house with both Asher and his mother gone. The walk through the neighborhood was relatively short, and soon her boots were crunching in the snow that covered the path through the woods. She could smell the way, though, the path that many had followed before her, whether or not she could see the well-worn ground beneath the snow.
Once she was sure that she was out of sight of the neighborhood, she pulled her clothes off, leaving them in a small pile near the base of a tree, where it would hopefully be protected well enough by a low branch.
She took a deep breath, and exhaled, letting her wolf surge forward and landing with fur and claws and teeth. She shook out her coat, bristling in the cold before she adjusted, white fur blending into the fresh snow, and then she took off down the path. She knew the general area from what Asher had described, and she knew that she would be able to pinpoint it exactly once she got closer.
Three days was not enough for nature to wash away all evidence that she’d been there. Especially blood on snow.
She found the trail, and it was quite a ways off the known path, into the thickly wooded area where she knew people didn’t often wander.
She had purposefully gone away from where people might find her. She shook her head, huffing a breath, and picked up her pace. Eventually the scent of blood thickened, even days old, and she found the tree that she’d huddled up against.
That, she vaguely remembered.
She shifted back, like she had the first time she’d been here. Her soft human feet slid in the icy snow, sinking down to her calves. She remembered that, too. She’d been hurt, but she’d made the effort to pack the snow down around the base of the tree and huddle into it as best she could. There’d been a point where she realized that she was going to pass out, and probably die.
She remembered thinking that she wanted to be buried human.
If anyone ever found her.
She wasn’t sure if she’d meant to be found. The memories weren’t that clear, and she wasn’t sure if it was blurred with shock, or if she’d taken a hit to the head, too. Probably both.
Eira took a deep breath, tasting the air. The faint scents of the blood in snow lingered, mixed with something odd. Wolf and blood. Probably a leftover scent from her. But mostly it was ice and pine and the dis
tant scent of smoke from a fireplace.
There wasn’t anything here.
She tried not to be disappointed, but the feeling swamped her all the same. She had hoped that coming out here would help her remember anything useful. Honestly, she’d hoped for an easy answer, one way or another.
She stood up, hand on the bark of the pine, and took in the small cluster of trees. Something was … off, about the way the snow fell over between two larger trees. It looked recently disturbed, but settled. That was … not right.
She moved toward it. She knew she was leaving deep footprints in the snow, so there wasn’t going to be any denying that she’d come here, alone, after she’d promised Asher that she’d wait.
He’d forgive her.
He might be upset for a while, but he’d forgive her. She was already planning out her apology.
She walked toward the two trees, because maybe there were more disturbances in the snow? It hadn’t stormed since she’d woken up. Maybe that had been the direction that she’d come. Maybe there would be some other hint along the way. She walked along for a while, finding just small markers that she’d passed through that direction once.
A twig snapped behind her and she jumped out of her skin, spinning. She pressed a hand to her chest, breathing fast. “Shit,” she whispered. “Stupid. It’s nothing.” There was nothing there. Just an empty, peaceful forest around her. She had to stop scaring herself like that, or there was no way Asher wouldn’t pick up on it.
She walked for a little while more before deciding to turn back. Her human feet were numb with cold now, and she was tired and disappointed. There was nothing here. No memories to suddenly fall into, and no clarity to be found.
Taking a deep breath, she got ready to shift – and an arm wrapped around her throat, thick and corded with muscle. She couldn’t see who it was, but she was pulled back against their chest – they were taller than her, by at least a foot. A hand came up to cover her mouth, smothering her with a wet cloth, the sharp bite of chemicals –
And she –
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