by Rose, Callie
“Gentlemen!” Elder Jihoon booms in a voice much stronger than I ever expected out of his mouth. The man is small and lithe, so withered a brisk wind could probably knock him off balance. Yet his boom nearly shakes the walls.
My eyes blink open and I gape at the old man in the sudden silence. He hasn’t moved—hasn’t even lifted a hand—but all three shifters have stopped speaking over one another. This man is an elder for a reason more than just his age, apparently. All the men seem to have great respect for both elders, and so did the people back at the barn. They must carry a special status amongst the pack.
“Ultimately,” Elder Jihoon says firmly, “Sable’s wolf will be the one to decide which of you she forms her bond with. When her wolf is ready to come out, she will make her choice.”
“Is there a way to bring her wolf out?” Trystan asks.
“No, we cannot force her out.” Elder Jihoon shakes his head, looking a bit scandalized by the idea. “She will emerge in her own due time. However, putting her somewhere safe and secure with her possible mates could help coax her out. Being alone with you would help the wolf decide.”
I’m too tired and my nerves are too frayed to complain, though I’m tired of being talked about as if I’m not even in the room. Do I get a say in this? The Sable that isn’t a wolf—doesn’t her opinion matter?
Because right now, I just want to go curl back up beneath the covers on Ridge’s bed and pretend none of this is happening. And I definitely don’t want any of them trying to force out a wolf I’m not entirely ready to face. One I’m not sure I even believe exists.
I’ve spent enough of my life having no say in my fate. I don’t want to be at the mercy of any man, no matter how sweet he is.
None of those thoughts make it past my numb lips though, so the conversation continues unabated around me.
“Not to mention,” Elder Barton says, “it’s safer for a new wolf on the verge of bonding to be separated from the rest of the pack. Is there a safe way to achieve that?”
“The mating cabin.” Ridge glances around the room. “It’s empty right now.”
Elder Barton lets out a long, low whistle and shakes his head. “You know I respect your authority as alpha, but I’m not so sure going to a remote mountain cabin is safe for any of us right now. Not given the recent witch activity in the area.”
“We wouldn’t be alone,” Ridge points out, tilting his head in Archer and Trystan’s direction. “The three of us can handle trouble.”
Elder Jihoon chuckles. “The three of you together, alone, would be trouble. You would need a chaperone.”
Ridge shrugs. “If we’re all three committed to pursuing a bond with Sable, it’s our only option.”
Straightening from his position on the couch’s arm, Archer nods. “Then it’s agreed. We’ll take her to the cabin and spend time with her there until her wolf emerges and chooses its mate.”
“We’ll keep her safe,” Trystan agrees, though he doesn’t make a move to step away from the wall.
Then every gaze in the room turns to me.
I freeze, still slouching in the corner of the couch as if I could sink beneath the cushions and hide. They’re looking at me expectantly.
“Um. What?” I ask, my voice small and tinny.
Ridge touches my knee, dipping his head a little to catch my darting gaze. “Do you agree?”
“About going to a remote location with three strange men?” I clarify, hoping they’re all smart enough to hear the madness of that statement. If the words don’t get them, maybe the note of hysteria in my voice will.
But nobody even blinks.
They’re serious.
I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what any of this means.
I can’t deny I’m drawn to them. The way my body reacted of its own accord back in the council’s barn shocked the hell out of me. And to be honest, the strange pull I feel toward each of them is the only reason I haven’t leapt to my feet and made another run for it.
Something is there inside me. Something that senses them. That knows them.
But my self-preservation instinct currently has the floor. The longer they stare, unblinking, unmoving, the more the panic finally presses through.
My heart kicks up its pace, and I’m on my feet before I even realize I’ve thought about standing. I back away from them, even as it occurs to me that I’m backing in the opposite direction from the door.
“Sable?” Ridge’s voice is soothing. The same gravelly voice he used last night to soothe my fears, to ask me what makes it stop?
It’s all too much. Too overwhelming. There’s nothing to make it stop.
“No.” As my breaths come faster, I shake my head wildly, the whole world seeming to spin out of control around me. “No. I don’t want to go.”
14
Archer
The last thing I expected to find when I came to the council meeting today was a mate. Yet, here I am, watching the woman my wolf has claimed tremble like a leaf in a strong wind and aching to go to her.
I don’t though. Not yet.
She’s so terrified.
Vulnerable.
I’ve seen fear like that before. I know fear like that.
And I wish like hell I wasn’t part of the cause of it.
“I can’t do this,” she says in a light, soft voice, wrapping her arms around her chest. She’s wearing a t-shirt and shorts that are far too big for her—a man’s clothes, probably Ridge’s, and fuck if that doesn’t send a hot wave of jealousy rippling through my wolf. “I don’t want to do this. I can’t be a shifter.”
Ridge stands and holds both of his hands out toward her, palms down like she’s a wild pup who needs calming. “Sable, you are a wolf. It isn’t something you can decide not to be.”
She shakes her head, her mussed golden hair flinging about. I can see the whites of her eyes as her gaze darts around the too-small living room. “I’m not a wolf. Just… please. No.”
And then she’s running. Her sneakers slap against the elder’s clean hardwood floors as she launches across the room and through the front door. Trystan doesn’t even have a chance to jolt, still holding up the fucking wall as the door slams into him for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
A surge of emotion flows over me, and I tamp it down, forcing my feet to remain firmly planted. Everything in me wants to follow her and ease her fears. The girl is terrified, more so than seems logical, but I’m well aware that fear doesn’t always follow logic. Been there, done that.
Ridge moves first, taking two steps toward the door. In the same breath, Trystan straightens and makes a move to follow her outside.
But I throw an arm out, stopping them both. “No.”
Both men tense and glare at me, and Ridge snarls, “I’m going after her.”
“Somebody has to,” Trystan adds, his tone scathing.
“Neither of you are capable of understanding her right now,” I say firmly. “Not like me.”
I’ve known Ridge and Trystan for a long time. Almost my entire life, really. That happens when your fathers are the alphas of packs who exist peacefully within a treatise. We grew up together—sort of. I’ve seen them both do a lot of hot-headed things, and they’re both reactionary. They can kindle a temper in two seconds flat.
They don’t have the experience I have. They weren’t captured and imprisoned by witches as a kid; they weren’t mentally and emotionally destroyed by the enemy and then left to figure out how to live again.
I have a unique perspective on trauma they’ll never understand.
“Sable needs someone who can understand her,” I point out. “I know neither of you want to take your mate by force. Right?”
Ridge looks stricken at the thought, and the tension in his shoulders eases slightly. “No. No, never.”
“Of course not,” Trystan says, crossing his arms. I can tell he’s furious at this whole situation, but I know he means it. All of us take the bond seriously, and an imp
ortant part of the mate bond is the willingness of both parties to enter into it.
Wolves don’t mate by force. It’s not our way.
I glance at the door then hold up both palms toward them. “I have the best chance at talking to her. Just give me a few minutes. All right?”
I don’t wait for an answer. The fact that neither of them have kicked into a light jog yet tells me they’re picking up what I’m putting down. They may be jackasses, but they’re not dumb.
As I pass over the threshold, Ridge calls my name and stops me on the elder’s front path. “You should know Sable’s had trauma in her past. She’s been abused.”
There’s an intense level of rage in his voice, and my own rage rises up to meet it. I kinda thought so. You don’t end up with a heavy amount of innate terror like Sable seems to struggle with without something pushing you there. But I hate to have confirmation. I don’t know her yet, and I’m not the kind of narcissist to pretend I do, but this means we stand on equal ground, she and I.
I nod at Ridge. “Thanks for the heads up. I’ll be careful with her.”
Then I leave him standing by the shack, watching me sprint away.
Sable isn’t running. I can still scent her on the wind up ahead, and I follow that liquid sunshine smell until I find her standing outside the cabin I know belongs to Ridge.
She’s on the sidewalk, shifting her weight back and forth from left foot to right foot, teeth digging into her bottom lip. As I get closer, she doesn’t notice me, but she whips around and walks away as if she’s come to the realization that Ridge’s house is not her home.
I give her space as I follow behind her. It’s obvious she didn’t grow up with her wolf close to the surface—if she had, I wouldn’t be able to tail her like this, unnoticed. She would smell me the minute the breeze took a turn or sense me with that deeply innate predator’s intuition.
She stops at the edge of the road where the gravel meets the empty grass that stretches between the village and the forest. Funnily enough, she’s facing east. Ten miles that way, and she’d run right onto my father’s lands. I’m struck by the thought of her there, standing in my home, taking part in my pack and in my life, and something warm and sweet spreads through my chest.
Longing, I realize.
If my wolf is correct and Sable is my mate, that daydream might be a possibility soon enough.
If she doesn’t run away first.
But she’s hesitating, doing that shift, left foot, shift, right foot thing again. It doesn’t take a genius to see she’s unsure about leaving. That gives me hope—and the nudge I need to go to her side.
I don’t say anything as I halt at the edge of the gravel next to her. There’s a half-foot-deep drop to the grass, and the toes of her sneakers peek over that ledge.
My gaze moves up her legs a little, and my jaw clenches. Her knees are dusty and a little scraped up, probably from the way Lawson was dragging her when he hauled her into the council meeting. But there are other, older wounds on her legs too, scars that curve up and around her calves and thighs.
Who the fuck did this to her?
I want to ask, and if I were Trystan, I might. But the whole reason I volunteered to come after her is because I didn’t want her to be traumatized any further. I’m sure poking into her past isn’t the way to ease her panic.
So I just allow the silence to lengthen between us for a few moments, letting her breathing even out a little more before I speak.
“Pack life is intense,” I say. I don’t try to pull my tone or use that ridiculous slow and low, I’m-talking-to-a-crazy-person voice Ridge used with her. I use my regular tone, regular pitch, because I’m ninety-nine percent certain she’s more likely to respond to a voice that isn’t making her feel worse than she already feels.
Sable tucks her hair behind her ear and tosses me a glance that’s supposed to look unconcerned, but the deep line between her eyebrows gives away her anxiety. “Yeah, no kidding. Forcible mating isn’t on my bucket list.”
I rock back on my heels and turn my face into the breeze. “Nah, nobody’s going to force you to be their mate. Hell, I won’t even keep you from leaving if that’s what you want.”
She doesn’t respond. She doesn’t leave, either.
“I get it, though,” I go on, taking her silence as an invitation. “I know what it’s like to feel like you have no control. Like your entire life is spinning out of control, and you have no way to grab the wheel.”
“How would you know?” She finally looks at me—really looks at me with those gray-blue eyes. Something’s different about them, a bit more open. There’s a spark there that I didn’t notice back at the elder’s house. Like she shut down a part of herself to deal with the situation.
Fuck. I know what that’s like a little too well. I feel a fresh wave of anger as I try to imagine what she might’ve been through. If the culprit was in front of me right now, I’d rip his damn heart out and eat it.
I go for candor. What do I have to lose? “Have you heard about the never-ending battle between witches and shifters?”
She makes a little noise in her throat that’s almost a laugh. “A little. I don’t really understand it. I didn’t even know shifters were real two days ago. Or witches either. And I don’t know why witches hate shifters.”
“Well, that puts you in good company.” I chuckle humorlessly. “We don’t really get it either. Basically, witches believe only witches should have access to magic. But magic is what allows shifters to shift. We’re physically powered by the same phenomena that gives them their powers.”
Sable’s brow wrinkles as she processes that bit of intel. She’s adorable, almost child-like in the way she takes in information. I can almost see her working out the pieces of the puzzle, thinking back over recent conversations until she has a bigger picture. “Seems like you should be allies then.”
I laugh. “You would think. Almost like we’re family.”
A sharp pang tugs in my chest at the thought, and I rub it away. I’ve had control of my anxiety for years, but baring old wounds threatens my tenuous hold. I don’t want to scare her off with the full details of what the witches did to me. But more than that, I don’t want to re-open the deep wounds in myself by dredging up all those old emotions, either. It’s a dangerous tightrope to walk.
“But you’re not?” Sable regards me with serious eyes.
“No. We aren’t.” I shake my head. “They hate us. For years, they’ve attacked our kind any way they can. We have protections in place, but when they manage to slip past them, they have only one goal—to destroy shifters. They… hurt me. When I was young. For the longest time, I couldn’t sleep without fear. I couldn’t walk down the street without worrying they’d come back for me. I couldn’t roam the woods or hunt. They took a piece of myself away from me.”
“That’s horrible.”
She’s watching me, her expression enigmatic, but despite the lack of visible emotion, I can tell she’s really listening.
“It’s hard to know who to trust,” I say, looking away from her and out over the darkening forest. I knew that eye contact, and people who appear to be looking much too deeply into your soul, can inspire panic. “In a world where people you thought you could count on are the ones who hurt you, trust is hard to come by.”
Sable makes a humming noise, almost as if she’s trying to convince herself to believe me, to trust me, but she can’t quite do it.
I get that.
“I can guarantee you something,” I add carefully, and her eyelids flicker slightly.
“What?”
I turn toward her so that our gazes can meet. Then I put my hands out, palms up, showing her I’m holding nothing.
Hiding nothing.
That I’m not a threat.
“There’s nowhere in this world where you’ll be safer than with me, Trystan, and Ridge. We’ll keep you safe, Sable. We’ll protect you with our lives from whoever hurt you in the past. And we’ll guide you
until your wolf comes out.”
15
Sable
Archer’s golden, boy-next-door good looks are even more devastating in the oranges and purples of sunset. I have to work hard to focus on his words and not get lost in his brilliant green eyes that remind me of fresh cut grass. He’s taller than Ridge, though not by much, but his presence isn’t as imposing. He doesn’t loom like the other wolves. He doesn’t wear his beast as close to the surface.
Despite everything that’s happened, I’m drawn to him. It’s a stupid thing, really. I shouldn’t be drawn to him. I should be drawn to those damn woods and getting the hell away from this mess before I’m too deep to get out. But something about the weight in his voice tells me he’s not lying. He’s not feigning empathy just to keep me from leaping off this ledge and racing away into the sunset.
Archer’s been through some things. Some really heavy things. The same kinds of things I have.
They… hurt me. When I was young.
I can’t help but wonder at his story. What did the witches do to him that made it so easy for him to relate to what I’ve been through? How is it he really seems to understand how I feel? I hate to think someone took this kind, beautiful man as a child and hurt him the way I’ve been hurt. I hate to think of anybody going through the things I’ve gone through.
Even so, I want to know Archer’s story. I want to know all about him, and I almost ask him to keep talking. I’ll stand on this ledge for as many hours as it takes to learn about him.
You don’t have the luxury of getting to know someone, I remind myself, reaching for the protective walls around my heart. I pull them close and shove them into place to keep him out. Allowing someone into my heart—or even into my head—isn’t an option. When you let people in, that’s when they can hurt you the most.
“Sable?”
My name on his lips jolts me from my dark thoughts. I’m already looking at his face, but my vision went unfocused while he spoke. I realize now he must have finished talking without me even noticing, and I was left staring at him like a freaking weirdo. I lock gazes with him and make a sound that I hope indicates I was, in fact, hanging onto his every word.