by Chase, Eva
Maybe to trust me, what he needed was for me to trust him.
Chapter 6
Nate
Orion’s voice bounced off the close walls of the holding cell. “But I cooperated!” my former guard protested as one of my current guards jabbed him with a tranquilizer. “I answered her questions. I didn’t do anything wrong!”
“You talked with shifters you know are out to screw us over,” I replied, just barely holding my anger in check. “You didn’t tell me what was going on. You considered going along with them. Be glad that our dragon shifter is merciful, because believe me, I’d like to do a lot worse to you than this.”
The muskrat shifter opened his mouth as if to argue more, but the drug was already taking effect. His chin wobbled, and then his body sagged. The guard holding him let him drop onto the bench in the holding room. She turned to me. “Should I chain him?”
I shook my head. “If he comes to enough to shift, those things won’t hold him. Just make sure he’s kept tranquilized enough until I decide where he’ll end up next.”
She gave me a sharp nod and threw one last disdainful look at her former colleague. With a sniff, she stalked out of the room. Our would-be-traitor wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
I stalked down the hall, my muscles itching. I wanted so badly to shift. To shift and rage, clawing the floor, battering the walls, letting out every bit of the frustration that had been boiling up inside me since last night.
But I wasn’t just an animal. I knew turning into a raging bear wasn’t going to help anyone.
“Are you all right, sir?” the guard asked me.
“Yes,” I said. “Go on back to your regular duty. And thank you.”
No, I wasn’t all right, not at all. I’d misjudged my own kin. I’d brought my new mate, the mate I’d been waiting for from the moment I became alpha years ago, into the worst kind of danger. I couldn’t even promise her she’d be safe within my estate’s walls.
She should have been looking forward to a grand celebration tonight, one that would have rivaled the reception she’d gotten at the avian estate. Instead we were limiting the guests, checking them over for weapons, setting an atmosphere of anxiety. And everyone would have been anxious anyway after the other night’s attack. Word about that would be all over the countryside now.
We needed to shut those rogues down for good. Maybe we should have before we’d even found Ren.
It’d become easy to ignore the problem over the years. In the aftermath of the previous alphas’ murders, I’d been too busy learning my role to offer a counter-attack. Some of the old guard had tried to track down as many of the rogues as they could, but the perpetrators had gone into hiding. And they hadn’t stirred up much trouble since then.
Because they thought they’d gotten what they wanted, I had to assume.
I prowled through the halls of my home, not entirely sure where I was going but needing to keep moving. I stopped when I spotted one of my attendants coming around a corner.
“Vernon,” I said. “Is the avian alpha back yet? Aaron?”
The panda shifter blinked his big round eyes. “Not that I’ve heard, sir. I can ask in case I missed his arrival.”
I waved that suggestion off. If the avian alpha had returned, I couldn’t imagine he’d have been quiet with his news. “That’s fine. Just come find me if you see him.”
I stalked on, my feet carrying me without thinking to the wing that held my advisors’ quarters. The place where the other night’s attack had been the most brutal. My people had rushed to clean up as quickly as they could, but a bullet hole still marked one wall. There were scratches in the floorboards no buffing was going to erase.
My jaw clenched. I knocked on the first door at my right.
Yvonne opened it a moment later. The stately horse shifter had been one of the first of the former alpha’s advisors to really take me under her wing when I’d been hardly more than a boy. Now, her silver hair was slicked back from her face in its usual braid, but her eyes looked wearier than usual. Heavy with grief.
“My alpha,” she said with a dip of her head. “What brings you here?”
“I just wanted to check in on you. See how you’re doing.”
“Well, about the same. Do you want to come in?”
I accepted the invitation. Yvonne wouldn’t have offered it if she’d wanted to be alone, even when it came to her alpha.
The sitting room at the front of her quarters smelled the same as it had since I was a boy, like clover and sunlight. The coffee table that had used to sit between the two low couches was gone, though. I realized with a lurch of my stomach why. It must have broken in the skirmish.
“If you wanted to change rooms, there are a couple of suites unoccupied,” I said.
Yvonne shook her head. “We lived in these rooms for thirty years, and I’ll remain until you no longer have any use for me as advisor.”
“Well, that day is never going to come.” I gave her a halting smile. It reassured me a little that she managed to return it. I groped for another topic of conversation. “What do you think of our dragon shifter?”
“Oh, she’s a fiery one, isn’t she?” Her smile grew, but it looked bittersweet. “Saying she’ll put an end to the rogues. Is she really prepared for the battle ahead?”
As much as I valued Yvonne, my hackles rose at the question. “Ren has faced more troubles in the last few weeks than most of us have to deal with in a lifetime. I’d say she’s handled herself well.”
“There now.” The horse shifter patted my arm. “I didn’t mean anything by it. Of course you’ll stand by your mate. I simply meant that it seems the pressure on her is only going to keep growing. She’s had no training, no time to even ready her mind for what’s ahead. I hope she can stay steady, but it would be hard for any of us.”
“Exactly,” I said. A little heat crept into my tone, remembering some of the standoffish reactions my guards had given Ren. “It isn’t fair to her, being brought into our world when the community is in more chaos than it’s ever been. But we’ll figure it out, the five of us, together. It’s what the rest of us trained for. No one should question that.”
Yvonne looked up at me with her clear, sad eyes. “Sometimes I think we have human minds just so that we can question things. Even the people trying to show us the way.”
* * *
Ren
“Your guests are starting to arrive,” Alice announced. “Do you want to go check them out?”
I paused where I’d been wandering my sitting room, trying to think if there was anything I’d missed with Orion, some way I could have better won him over.
Some way to feel completely confident I’d won him over at all.
The view out the window told me the sun was still over the trees. “I thought the welcoming party was happening tonight.”
Alice shrugged. “Apparently the disparate kin also have a disparate sense of time.” Her lips curled up at the joke. “I just figured maybe you could use a distraction.”
Yeah, I probably could. I sighed and rolled my shoulders, not sure meeting a bunch more strangers—stranger shifters who weren’t half as impressed by me as the other kin-groups I’d met—was the kind of distraction I wanted. But it was the kind I had.
“I guess I’d better change into something a little fancier,” I said, looking at the jeans and tee I’d pulled on this morning. I’d already checked out all the wardrobes in the dragon shifter suite. There’d been one with casual clothes, thank God, but most were full of the posh formal wear the regular kin apparently liked to see me and their alphas decked out in.
I’d had my eye on one dress already: an ankle-length satin gown in an indigo shade so deep it was almost black. This didn’t seem like the right time for anything flashy. I pawed through the hangers for it and chucked off my clothes to put it on.
“Any news from Aaron?” I asked his sister as I adjusted the fall of the fabric. Even if Nate’s kin didn’t totally buy into me as
leader of the shifters yet, they’d have to admit I at least looked the part.
Alice grimaced. “Nothing so far. But he’s got a few hours left before I’ll be ready to bite his head off. He should have let me go too. Not that I mind hanging out with you, but from what I’ve seen you can handle yourself around here just fine.”
“Hey, I agree with you,” I said. “I guess two golden eagles soaring around together might have looked a little conspicuous, though.”
Alice grinned. “Not half as conspicuous as if he’d had a dragon keeping pace with him.”
“Okay, okay, that was a dumb idea. I fully admit it. But I have a much better one now.” I sniffed the air. “Someone’s roasting chicken. Really, really tasty chicken. What do you say we go find some of that?”
“I’m in.”
My heart started thumping a little faster as we headed toward the house’s main doors. I wanted to peek outside before I walked right out, just to see what I was getting into, but that didn’t seem leaderly at all. Squaring my shoulders, I pushed open the door and strode down to the courtyard as if nothing about the people down there could faze me.
Alice had been right. Several dozen shifters were already gathered on the clay tiles of the courtyard, most of them ones I didn’t think I’d seen in the estate earlier. And all their heads turned toward me as I came down the steps. Quite a few faces brightened up. That made up for the ones that only looked thoughtful.
The atmosphere didn’t feel all that celebratory, I had to say. I guessed it was hard to really party when four deaths and several injuries hung over the estate.
“Hi,” I said, going up to a small cluster of bear shifters who appeared to be happy to see me. “I’m Ren. Um, I think this whole get-together is for you to meet me, so... here I am!”
One of the women touched my arm. Her hand trembled a little. “You’ve been through a lot to make it here,” she said. “I’m glad we could make it here to greet you properly.”
The guy beside her leaned close as if to share a secret. “People are saying you have more fire than the dragons before. A different kind.”
“That’s true,” I started to say. Another of the women laughed with pleasure.
“We can burn all those rogues back to the darkness where they belong,” she crowed.
Okay, that was a more violent turn than I really wanted this conversation to take. “I’ll deal with them as well as I can,” I said, and swiveled to look for someone else to introduce myself to.
By the time Alice and I made it to the refreshments table, I’d endured a multitude of questions about my special fire-breathing, more skeptical looks than I could count, and a few outright glowers. At least I had lots of practice with those thanks to West. I didn’t feel all that hungry anymore, but I grabbed a glass of wine.
Where were my alphas anyway? Nate probably had more estate business to tend to, and Aaron was off on his reconnaissance mission, but the other two should be around somewhere.
It didn’t really matter. I just wanted an excuse to take a breather. I meandered off around the side of the house with Alice in tow.
The gardens on the disparate estate were mostly prickly hedges dotted with flowers interspersed with even pricklier cacti. The vegetation was pretty in its own right, with a pungent perfume, but I was careful not to touch any of it.
“Not the friendliest flowers, are they?” Alice remarked, jabbing the chicken leg she’d grabbed toward one cactus.
“At least people know better than to mess with them,” I said.
Voices carried across the grounds from up ahead. I slowed, my ears perking.
A wall of the same adobe bricks that made up the house stretched partway into the gardens. The voices were coming from beyond its arched doorway. I crept over and peeked inside.
The doorway led into a smaller courtyard with a gazebo surrounded by a moat of burbling water. Marco was leaning against one of the marble posts by the moat, a glass dangling from his hand, his eyelids lowered in a typical languid expression. A few other shifters—ones I recognized from Nate’s guard—stood in a semi-circle around him. Their postures were full of bravado.
“Is that all you’ve got to say for yourself, cat?” one of the guards said. “Look at you. You still think you’re better than us, don’t you?”
“I have total respect for all kin,” Marco said mildly. “Excluding those who align themselves with the rogues, of course.”
One of the others took a step closer to him. “Your kind always turns your nose up at us. We’ve seen it. But the dragon shifter has turned her nose up at you, hasn’t she? Picked our alpha to confirm as her mate without a second glance at you.”
I bristled at the jab, both that she’d made it at all and at the thought of how Marco might respond. When his own people had hassled him about his status with me, he’d put them off with a bunch of blustering about how easily he was going to work his charms on me and finish the “job.”
I almost stepped through the doorway to put an end to the confrontation before I had to hear anything like that again. But Marco’s calm voice stopped me.
“Serenity makes her choices as she sees fit. I’m not so arrogant to think I know better than a dragon.” He gave his harassers a thin smile.
“Aw, look at the kitty cat,” the first guy said. “Completely pussy-whipped and not even fully mated yet.”
Marco chuckled. “I’d rather be whipped by her than left with whatever dregs you court.”
The guy’s face flushed red. “Now listen, you—”
“Hey,” the guard next to him said. “We’ve hassled him enough. Our alpha will be checking in soon. Let’s leave this one to ‘enjoy’ his solitude.”
The first guy let out a huff, but the three of them rambled off in the other direction. Marco rolled his eyes at their retreating backs.
He didn’t even look upset. He’d taken all those comments in stride, even though they must have stung his pride. Instead he’d just sounded proud of me.
I swallowed hard, turning back to face Alice. “Give me a few minutes? I’ll be with one of my alphas, so I should be safe.”
“Sure,” Alice said. “If you need me later, just give me a shout.”
She drifted back toward the party, and I slipped through the doorway. Marco straightened up when he saw me. His eyes, their indigo irises almost the same color as my dress, glittered as he took me in.
“Aren’t you a sight?” he said with a crooked grin. “Shouldn’t you be out hobnobbing with your adoring public?”
I made a dismissive sound. “They’re not all that adoring. Which is fine. The adoring ones are exhausting too. I’m just pacing myself.”
“A wise decision.” He held my gaze with that hint of hesitation I’d felt from him before. “Is there anything you needed from me, Princess of Flames?”
“Can we... talk?” I said.
His grin softened. “I think that could be arranged. Look, we’ve got this handy gazebo right here.”
He offered his hand and led me up the steps. When he sat on one of the benches inside, I took the spot next to him. His presence didn’t set me on edge the same way it had a couple days ago. We still had a lot of ground to cover, and he obviously knew that. But he was trying to make up for the mistakes he’d made. Even when he didn’t have any idea I’d know how he was behaving.
And when I wasn’t on edge, it was impossible to ignore the warmth of his body beside me. The bond drawing me even closer. I curled my fingers around the edge of the bench.
“I wanted to ask... The things you said, that I overheard—the way you talked about me— You said you’ve had to learn not to show any weaknesses around your kin. What has it been like since you’ve been alpha? Before I came into the picture, I mean.”
Marco inhaled sharply. “Princess, you don’t need to hear about that. And I’m not going to insult you by trying to justify what I said.”
His hand was still cupped over mine. I turned mine over to intertwine my fingers with h
is and squeezed. “I’m asking because I want to know. You’re not justifying. You’re just letting me in on things I wasn’t there to see.”
“Well.” He was silent for a moment. “You know the sort of temperament cats have. It carries on to cat shifters. We’ve always had issues with authority. So being alpha requires a certain attitude... of detachment, and confidence. You have to put on a show. I think I’ve gotten fairly good at that, and I’ve still faced over a dozen challenges since I came of age. It’d have been a lot more if I’d had a weaker disposition.”
“Oh.” I said. That had been how many years? Five? And he’d had to fight to hold onto his position more than twelve times already. “That seems like a lot already.” My gaze went to the scar that notched his eyebrow. I raised my other hand to trace the pale line. “Is one of those fights how you got this?”
“The only one I almost lost.” His mouth tightened, but he shrugged. “Dealing with challenges wasn’t fun. But it’s the way it is. I’ve gotten into the habit of turning on that cocky attitude when faced with any criticism. That’s not an excuse for insulting you, though.”
I glanced up at him. “No. But the fact that I haven’t fully taken you as my mate... That makes your kin question you. They can’t even have kids until we’re together.” My stomach twinged with a pinch of guilt. None of the shifters could produce children until their alpha was fully mated. The longer I delayed with Marco and West, the longer their people stayed barren. “I could understand if you were upset that I hadn’t been willing to consummate with you yet.”
Marco blinked at me with what looked like honest surprise. “What? No.” His voice dropped. “I mean, I very much look forward to that time coming... assuming it does. But I’ve always known I’ll have to be worthy of that bond. And clearly I haven’t been yet.”
“But when it could make such a difference—”
“No,” he said firmly. He turned more toward me, letting go of my hand to touch my cheek as he held my gaze. “Ren, do you know what I’ve been realizing the past two days? Feeling this distance from you, watching you come into your own... If I could give the damned alpha position to someone else and just have you, I’d take that deal in a heartbeat. I’ve never wanted the authority as much as I want to earn my place at your side. I wish I could give you more than just words to prove it.”