by Penny Alley
Neoma shuddered. “No.” If rumor could be believed, the Alpha Lauren wasn’t looking for a volka Bride, much less a Scullamy one. From the very first, his sights had been locked on the only chevolak on the Ridge. Neoma hadn’t seen her yet, but she’d caught the woman’s scent once or twice while pilfering food late at night. When she caught whiff of her during the daytime, Neoma had always been careful to walk the other way.
Apparently, her Alpha had heard the same rumors she had. “Hollow Hills will need to be purged before we move in, but there’s plenty of time for that later. I understand his first lieutenant is also running. Michaelson, I believe his name is. From what I have seen, his attention is more appropriately fixed upon the volka ladies. What do you think of him?”
Neoma gave the man standing at the Alpha Lauren’s right a quick glance. Only slightly shorter and perhaps a little broader in the chest, his sandy brown hair was lighter and shorter than Colton’s. She had been careful to avoid him too. She had no idea what color his eyes might be, but he wore the same uniform as his Alpha, with a badge upon his chest and a utility belt complete with gun—Neoma shuddered all over again. He seemed more ready with a smile, but only when laughing, talking, and dealing with volka from anywhere but the Scullamy side of the Ridge.
“I wouldn’t worry,” Deacon soothed. “I count four strong packs in attendance here. Six if you consider the Nabesny or Patoka as ‘strong’…or even as packs. Debatable, I know, but any of their males might Claim you. If you run.”
If? Everything inside of her sank. “Do you want me to withdraw?”
“I don’t think I could bear for you to run.” He sighed. “What if you were taken by someone other than a Scullamy? You and poor, young Scotty would be taken far, far away from me. Is that what you want?”
With all her heart.
“Never.” Her voice shook, and she couldn’t breathe. Her heart was choking her, preventing her from swallowing. She stopped where she was. “I’ll withdraw immediately.” She snapped around. She would have run, but his hand clamped onto her arm, staying her.
“Don’t be hasty,” he said. “People are scrutinizing our every move as it is. To withdraw now, one day before the Hunt, would not paint us in a favoring light. They will call you a coward at best, and at worst, honorless for not keeping the promise you made when you put your mark upon that registry. That shame will reflect on all of us.”
Her skin crawled where he touched her. “What do you want me to do?”
She couldn’t bring herself to look at him. Across the field, another bone-cracking tackle sent a cheer through the watching crowd. She felt sick.
Deacon leaned in to her, breathing in her frightened breaths, and smiled. “I want you to walk with me,” he said, the paternal warmth of his voice never once reaching as far as the ice of his eyes. “Walk.”
She didn’t think she could, but over the encouraging shouts of the crowd and cries of the combatants, the laughing, talking and bartering of the vendors hawking their wares, and all the other volka packs milling among the tents set up across the Ridge above the sleepy town of Hollow Hills, Neoma thought she heard the yips of the children, running in both their human and puppy forms. Matron mamas called encouragement, making games out of hunting and tracking and mock battles that once upon a time had been so important for volka living hidden among humans. Scotty was with them. Safe for now, but safety was such a fragile illusion, especially when it came to children.
Falling into step once more beside the Alpha she feared above all others, Neoma let him take her out of the crowd, beyond the watchful eyes of anyone who might otherwise intervene, and back into the wooded area where Scullamy had staked their temporary camp. She felt the watching eyes when she crossed the perimeter back into the sentries’ militant keeping, every one of them absolutely loyal to Deacon’s smallest whim. Mostly because he accepted nothing less, but also because he bought it from them with things that had not been done in hundreds of years.
Providing members with a place to live was a fairly standard practice among most packs who actively recruited soldiers, but Scullamy was the only place she’d ever heard of that kept volka-only apartments and doled out units like a privilege. Fresh from the Scruff or other packs, new recruits lived in common barracks, while lower ranking soldiers received small one-bedroom apartments. Higher ranking soldiers got bigger, roomier dwellings. Some, like the Alpha’s lieutenants lived in houses, two stories, with flowerbeds and the luxury of grassy lawns where their children could run and play. She’d had that once. It seemed a whole lifetime ago.
The days of rewarding loyalty with horses was long gone. Cars and motorcycles were Deacon’s first reward of choice these days. And as far as she knew, Scullamy was the only place that still practiced the old pravica do sre: the right to wed. Nothing settled a male fresh from the Scruff faster, Deacon was fond of saying, like a Bride. In Scullamy, they were passed out, much like apartments. Neoma had been two weeks shy of her fifteenth birthday when Deacon rewarded Matson with her. Less than a year later, she’d given birth to Scotty. And now, here she was again, that familiar knot of dread tightening in her stomach as she followed her Alpha across the wooded glade, past the widows’ tents to those assigned for potential new recruits.
New recruits were always welcome in Scullamy—especially if they were hardened, accustomed to fighting, and not at all shy about doing whatever might be required with no questions asked. She’d been fortunate with Matson. Rough around the edges, her mother had called him, but he’d never beaten her. That was more than some females in Scullamy could say.
It might be more than she would be able to say after this, too. A man stood outside the recruit tents, sauntering a lazy pace back and forth, staring at the dirt around his scuffed boots. He looked like a biker—worn leather chaps over equally worn jeans, off-white t-shirt stretched tight over a lean but powerful frame. His shoulder-length hair was muddy blond and his eyes when he finally noticed their approach, were as gray as stone. The knots inside her tightened as she drew nearer. When he tipped his head, dragging his assessing stare all the way down and then back up her again, her knees tried to buckle.
“This is Wayman,” Deacon introduced. “He is the latest to join our little family, and I wish to reward him for all the future service he’s going to give me. You will be a good mate for him, I think, and he will be a good role model for our young Scotty. After all, we would not want him to grow up following in his father’s seditious footsteps. Far better it would be if he did not grow up then at all, don’t you think?”
Her knees did buckle then. She might have dropped but for the Alpha’s hand, catching her elbow and holding her steady while his breath caressed her ear. “You are still my ever-obedient Neoma, are you not? Stiffen your back, child. Fortitude. Summon the dregs of what courage it took to sign your mark upon the registry and do now as your Alpha commands. Give him your hand.”
Screams from the past melded with the shouts from the field. The fresh smell of grass and trees, cooking meat flavoring the summer wind…Matson’s blood still hot in her nose after all these years.
Neoma put out her trembling hand. Her fingers looked positively bony compared with Wayman’s.
Wayman noticed. “Kind of scrawny,” he said, his thin mouth curving upward as he looked her over. Those stone gray eyes drifting back to her face, he then turned to Deacon and nodded. “Yeah, okay. She’ll do.”
“Excellent.” Smiling at them both, Deacon passed her arm to Wayman. “I’ll leave you lovebirds to get acquainted.” He started to turn away, but stopped. “Oh, there is one slight problem. Neoma was lonely. She signed up to run in the Hunt. You’ll need to deal with that first thing in the morning.”
Wayman’s smile became a grimace.
“Well, it’s every girl’s dream, isn’t it?” Deacon mused. “To enter a Bridal Hunt. To be competed for and eventually brought to ground by the mate of her dreams—a man of passion and virility.”
That Wayman wasn’t
happy at the thought of expending so much effort to prove he was that mate was etched into every hard angle of his unsmiling face.
“Consider this a test, as well as the first request your Alpha makes of you.”
Except that it wasn’t a request, and no one was fool enough to mistake it for one.
It was almost imperceptible, the lift of Wayman’s chin and subtle flash of throat as he conceded to the older volka’s wishes.
“Good.” Deacon nodded. “In the meantime, you have all the hours between then and now to become better acquainted.”
“Scotty—” Neoma hedged. She took her hand back from Wayman, but she may as well have been caught in quicksand for all the further she could extricate herself.
“Don’t worry,” he told her. “Both I and now our new friend, Wayman, are dedicated to ensuring your son be very well cared for.”
He waited only long enough to be sure she had no other objections, and then Deacon walked away, leaving her alone with the new mate she had just been assigned.
He broke the silence first, his chuckle bearing more disgust than mirth. “I have to fucking run for you?”
Neoma looked at him, not realizing her hands had become fists until she felt the pain of her nails biting into her tender palms.
“I’ll bet the house he promised ain’t nothing but a travel trailer, huh?” Shaking his head, Wayman made up his mind anyway. Tipping his head toward the tent, he said, “Get inside, then. Let’s see if your bony little ass is worth it.”
She’d been so close. So close to getting out. Hungry, tired, and now depressed, Neoma did as she was told.
* * * * *
When she tried to pass him, Gabe Michaelson hooked an arm around Maya’s waist and spun her in a playful circle.
“Gabe,” she both sighed and laughed, and yet it sounded almost tired to him. It left him wondering, and not for the first time, whether she might not feel for him the same way he did for her.
They’d lived in this small town, four doors down from one another since birth. They’d grown up together. The kid sister of his best friend from kindergarten on, Maya had been his first romantic crush. He thought he’d been hers too, especially during her mid-teen years when her feminine curves filled out and her braces came off, and she started smiling and flirting back at him. But then something had happened, and Gabe couldn’t really put his finger on what exactly that something had been. They’d grown up, that was all. Grown up and grown apart. Maya left Hollow Hills for college, her brother moved to California, and Gabe met Colton. She’d been back for two years now, but it was impossible not to notice that something between them had changed.
That was all right, though. Sometimes love—the real thing, not romance novel nonsense and Hollywood movie magic—took a little time. If what she needed was a little bit more, then he could be patient. He could be whatever she needed him to be, so long as she was his. Once he’d won her in the Bridal Hunt and she got a chance to see him as Gabe her mate rather than Gabe her brother’s friend, things might improve between them. No, no might about it. He was positive. Things would get better, because they sure couldn’t get much worse.
“What path are you going to take?” he pressed. “I have to help Cole bag his Bride, but after that…”
Maya laughed again. “Gabe…That’s not how this works.”
“Says who?” he countered, but when she pulled, he let her go. The look she gave him was one of mild exasperation. She softened it with a smile, before stepping up to a food vendor and buying two skewers of roasted meat. One smelled like lamb, the other like chicken. Both were drenched in a thick honeyed sauce, but that wasn’t what he was hungry for.
God, she was beautiful—all long dark hair and dark eyes, her partial Native American ancestry still showing strong despite several generations of Caucasian influence on the bloodline. Long limbs, rounded hips, breasts he ached to get his lips on—one more day, that was all he had to wait. One more day, and then she would be running for a mate and he would be chasing her.
Remnants of her aggressive participation in the pre-Hunt games showed in the bruises she wore, but she wore them like she wore everything else: handsomely. Of course, that might just be him. He had the most fantastic urge to kiss each and every one of those injuries, from the scuffed tips of her pink-painted toenails all the way up to the small cut high on the bridge of her nose. His dark gaze lingered on that cut while she took her skewers.
“You didn’t have to do that, you know,” he finally said.
“Want one?” she offered, but he waved it away. Hard as she’d been playing, she needed the protein more than he did. Licking a drop of honey off her thumb, she bit into the chicken as she stepped into the grass to find an empty picnic table. “What didn’t I have to do?”
As if she didn’t know. Gabe arched an eyebrow at her, which she stubbornly ignored by pretending to scour the field while she ate.
“The chevolak,” he specified. “You didn’t have to defend her.”
“Nobody else was.”
“Because she doesn’t belong here, and that’s coming from someone who likes her.”
“Do you?” She looked at him, but uncomfortable with any conversation that involved Karly, the only human to have, in living memory, defiled the sanctity of a Hunt, now it was Gabe’s turn to look anywhere but back at her.
“Yeah, I do,” he admitted, though he wasn’t all that happy to do so. “What’s happened isn’t her fault, I know that. But that doesn’t change anything. She has no place here, and the sooner she figures that out, the better off she’ll be.”
The better off Colton would be too.
Against his will, Gabe felt his gaze being pulled across the field. Colton wasn’t on it anymore. He’d gone home shortly after the confrontation that landed Karly every bit as battered and bruised as Maya. Joela had been the aggressor in that fight. That made him doubly proud of Maya for standing up to the Scullamy bitch, but it also left him feeling sorry for his friend.
Colton deserved a strong Bride, one who knew their ways and their traditions and who would keep them, the way an alpha’s Bride should. A volka Bride. There wasn’t anything Colton could ask of him that Gabe wouldn’t do, but no alpha should ever mate to a human. Sleep with them, sure. He had nothing against the chevolak as a species, but to take human Bride…it simply wasn’t done. Unless, of course, one lived in the Scruff. Companionship was companionship, after all. And Karly was nice. She was sweet and even somewhat pretty around the human edges, but she brought nothing beneficial to the community. No strength, no social ties with a stronger pack. Nothing but an abusive soon-to-be ex-husband—a cop, no less—who wasn’t going to stop causing trouble until he got Karly back under his thumb. Colton could hardly be blamed for wanting to put a stop to that. Still, this infatuation with Karly bothered Gabe. It bothered a lot of people, both in and outside of Hollow Hills. Theirs was, at best, a tenuous leadership. They couldn’t afford a misstep right now. Regardless of how much he might like Karly, she represented one hell of a giant mistake.
“If the Alpha desires her, doesn’t that automatically give her a place among us?” Maya softly countered. “Who are we to stand between the Alpha and the mate of his heart?”
“The mate of his heart?” Gabe echoed before he could stop himself. He didn’t mean to laugh, but one rolled out of him anyway. “And that right there, is why romance novels should be outlawed.”
Tossing her long black hair, Maya snorted. “You’re running after your heart’s desire. Why shouldn’t he be allowed to do the same?”
“I’m not the Alpha,” Gabe told her. “An alpha has to do what’s best for the community. He needs to strengthen his position, not fall in love. And besides, my heart’s desire is a beautiful volka woman, who would keep our traditions in ways Karly couldn’t, even if she knew what they were.”
Maya hummed, a noncommittal sound. “Perhaps if you saw what I did when the chevolak dared the Deacon bitch out onto the Field, you wouldn’t be
so quick to dismiss her.”
Hooking his arm around her waist again, Gabe spun her into a waltzing step that ended when he got her back up against the nearest tree. His only regret was he didn’t do it further away from the porta-potties. “Perhaps I didn’t notice because I was too busy looking at a different benefit for our pack.”
One small hand, sticky with honey sauce, pressed against his chest. She did not push him away, but he thought he caught a whiff of barbeque-flavored sadness in her exasperated sigh.
“There is no shame in being a first lieutenant’s Bride,” Gabe told her, fighting hard to swallow back a surge of defensiveness. That niggling voice in the back of his head that kept suggesting she might not want to be caught by him grew a little louder.
Maya’s fingers on his chest splayed, as if she were feeling for his heartbeat. “I never said it was.”
“Then what is it?” His chest tightened. “You’re hoping for an alpha.”
Amber fire lit the black of Maya’s eyes. She didn’t push him away; she balled up her fist and slugged him square in the chest, hard enough to knock his arm from her waist and the rest of him a half-step backwards.
“Since when have I ever cared two twigs for rank?” she demanded, no part of her either smiling or soft anymore. “Little chevolak girls dream of big cakes, white princess dresses and fancy June weddings. From the moment I learned of them, all I have ever wanted was to run in a Hunt. So long as the one who catches me is good and kind and strong enough to Claim me, then I will be the most fierce and loyal of Brides! And I don’t care, Gabe Michaelson, if he is alpha, omega, or even from the Scruff, just so long as he is not Scullamy!”
She punched him, knocking him another step back. She was so beautiful. He couldn’t stop admiring her even when she snapped about on her heel and stalked angrily away.