Ian's Choice (Wolves' Heat)

by Lynne, Odessa

  “The buckle is significant to you?”

  Ian raised his head, his heart in his throat as it occurred to him that they might have destroyed the buckle when they found the tracker the same way Craig had destroyed his phone. “It’s a family heirloom. What did you do with it?”

  Please.

  Craig sat up, not taking his gaze off Ian. “I have it,” he said, and Ian sighed roughly and pinched the bridge of his nose against the wash of gratitude he felt.

  “Please don’t lose it,” Ian said. “I want it back.”

  “You’ll have it back. But we have a trap to lay first.”

  “What? No. You can’t do that. What if—”

  “Stop.” Craig’s gazed fixed on Ian. “If you’re going to tell me this tracker wasn’t put in place to locate our dens, don’t say it unless you’re willing to stake your life on it. Not even my standing as Alpha will save you if you lie about this and breeding wolves and children die because of you.”

  “I—” Ian felt trapped, because he didn’t know. He just didn’t know if he trusted Brendan the way he used to. Didn’t know if Brendan would have betrayed both Devon and himself to try to force his hand.

  Craig shook his head. “Don’t speak, then.”

  “No,” Ian said. “I have something to say.”

  Craig didn’t move, except for the flex of his fingers. Ian saw that Craig’s claws had finally extended fully from beneath their dark covering, and he swallowed against the nervous twist in his stomach. He meant to do this.

  “I’m not one of the renegades,” he said and he heard the conviction in his own voice, every bit as strong as the denial in his heart. “But I made a deal with someone when Devon went missing and they think—they think I joined them. They think I’m one of them.”

  Craig roared, and Ian had just enough time to scramble to the floor in a low crouch and cover his head before Craig was on him.

  Chapter 15

  Ian’s eyes squeezed shut against the pressure of claws at the top of his spine. His hands protected his neck, but those claws could punch right through the skin and muscle of his upper back and rip out his vertebrae. He’d heard stories.

  Why had he confessed the truth of his situation?

  Because on some level he had begun to trust that Craig wasn’t going to kill him. Not intentionally.

  So even as Ian resisted the image of himself as someone who waited for death to take him, he submitted, because his resistance would just invite Craig’s instincts to take over.

  He was also counting on his confession being seen as a form of submission.

  He could hear Craig’s panting breath, the prickle of claws on his skin. “You’ll help me trap them.”

  Ian let out his held breath and loosened his white-knuckled grip. “I don’t know if I can.”

  “You will submit.” A claw dragged over the bumps of his spine.

  Ian shivered. “I will. I do. I submit. But I don’t know if I’m trusted enough to be of any help at all. I think—”

  Craig crouched behind Ian, and a claw scratched lightly downward, heading toward the small of Ian’s back.

  Ian fought the flush crawling over his skin. “I think you’d be better off to do this without me.”

  “We’re going to mate. I won’t be doing anything without you. You don’t seem to understand that yet.”

  “No—” Ian cleared his throat. The adrenaline was bleeding out of him, in sweat and nerves, and he lowered his hands to his thighs and eased forward from his crouch onto his knees to take the pressure off his calves. The throb in his wounded leg intensified before leveling off into a low ache. “I don’t understand any of it,” he continued. “We—our cultures, we’re really not the same. You say things I don’t understand all the time, and then you seem to think I should know what to expect from you. But I don’t.”

  “You didn’t believe I was going to kill you. I know that.”

  Ian felt the touch of Craig’s cheek against his shoulder, the soft graze of skin on skin enough to take Ian’s attention away from the point of Craig’s claw resting at the base of his spine.

  “I gambled,” Ian said.

  “Your gamble shows me that your mind is trying to accept what your instincts are already telling you about us. Do you see me as a friend or as the enemy, Ian?”

  “Of course you’re—not my friend,” Ian said, changing his phrasing at the last moment, because declaring himself Craig’s enemy might be just as dangerous as a refusal to submit would be. He didn’t know how Craig might react and he wasn’t ready to find out. He continued with the rest of his thought, though, because he had a point to make. “Submit and live. That’s what I’ve been taught since I was eighteen. It’s what I teach others.”

  Craig huffed out his breath as if Ian’s words had disappointed him. They probably had. Craig planned for them to mate, after all, whatever the nuances of that term meant to the wolves.

  I will be your life, Craig had said.

  Meaning to Ian that Craig would steal away every bit of free will he had in exchange for hot sex. That wasn’t a deal Ian was ready to take no matter how much he liked the way he felt when Craig was rutting up against him or had his mouth and tongue on Ian’s cock—or his claw on Ian’s spine as it was right now, and what did that say about him?

  It spoke to a truth Ian couldn’t believe.

  “You don’t feel like my enemy when I’m fucking you, and once we mate, we’ll be as close as we’ll ever get. If you do believe you’re my enemy, then I accept that it’s my responsibility to stop you from harming anyone, and thereby bringing harm to yourself. I’ll take care of you.” Craig’s mouth came down over the top of Ian’s spine and Ian made a short startled sound.

  Teeth grazed bone and tongue swiped over skin, leaving behind a wet streak that cooled quickly in the swirl of warm air from the room’s vents. Craig drew his claw up and his mouth down and they met in the center of Ian’s back and Ian bowed away from the teasing touch, but then Craig’s other hand came around his ribs and held him in place. Ian’s stomach tightened at Craig’s touch, his muscles trembling under Craig’s warm palm and the gentle scrape of the very tips of Craig’s claws on his skin.

  All Ian wanted was for that hand to move down and palm his cock, cup his balls, and give him something to push against. His cock was already half erect. Craig pressed his forehead against Ian’s back between his shoulders and pushed Ian forward. Ian caught himself on his hands, flat on the thick carpet that stretched from beneath the bed.

  Craig curled over him, thighs and chest pushing against Ian, coarse hair tickling his skin. Ian’s ass clenched as the wet tip of Craig’s cock poked at him behind his balls. In all the times Craig had fucked him in the ass, he hadn’t once done it from behind. Ian hadn’t really wondered why not, until now.

  “It has a special meaning,” Craig said, almost as if he could read Ian’s thoughts. “The submissive pose, the same for male and female alike. You’re giving yourself to me like this, saying you’re ready to mate.”

  Ian heard the difference this time, the slight inflection in the wolves’ language, the thing that gave “mate” an alternate meaning, something more.

  “I’m not saying anything. You chose this position, not me.”

  “Because it’s time.”

  Ian gave a short laugh, more disbelief than humor. “Glad you know what I’m thinking when I don’t even know.”

  Craig pressed a kiss to Ian’s shoulder. “Claim you don’t want this and I’ll stop, but I’ve seen the way you react when I need to fuck you, when I talk about mating you. You want what I can give you as badly as I want to give it to you.”

  “You’ll stop.” Ian cleared his throat, but he couldn’t get rid of the unsteadiness in his voice. “You won’t kill me for not submitting?”

  Craig dragged his face along Ian’s back. “You’ll still submit. I’ll put you on your back and have you the same way I’ve had you every other time I’ve mated you. We’ll fuck, while I
think about mating you, and you’ll crave something you won’t let yourself have yet.”

  “Then it doesn’t even matter. I’m human. Do it in whatever position you want. It doesn’t mean anything, it’s just another way to fu—”

  Ian yelped as Craig yanked his head up by his hair.

  “What the hell!” Ian said. “I thought you didn’t want to hurt me?”

  Craig’s fingers pressed against Ian’s skull, his teeth going to Ian’s throat in an unpleasant reminder of just how vulnerable he was. Ian tried to twist his head away, but Craig’s hand in his hair wouldn’t let him.

  “Submit,” Craig growled at him and then kept growling in a way that set Ian’s hair on end.

  Ian stilled.

  Craig tugged Ian’s head around and kissed him hard, leaving Ian’s mouth wet and his bottom lip stinging from a soft bite.

  “It always means something,” Craig said in a harsh burst of words. “Always. You’re a blessing, and your submission is a gift from the universe. Even if I didn’t want to mate you, nothing we’ve done here deserves to be belittled.”

  “Okay, okay,” Ian said softly. “It’s not just fucking. It’s—” He found himself at a loss for words to describe whatever this was. “It’s special.”

  Craig reached over to the nearby beside table. He dropped a small blue jar to the carpet in front of Ian. The lube rolled to a stop against Ian’s fingers.

  Then Craig covered Ian’s hands with his own, the shaft of his cock rubbing into the heat of Ian’s crack as he rocked forward. Ian didn’t want to think about this. If Craig hadn’t told him what it meant, if Craig had just done it. But now it wasn’t going to happen without Ian making a conscious choice.

  “You know what this means now,” Craig said, his breath feathering across Ian’s neck and ear until an uncontrolled shudder went through him. “You can’t claim later you didn’t understand.”

  Ian stared at that small blue jar and then clenched his hands into fists and said, “Not now.”

  He could feel his arms shaking, tremors faint and shivery, but his muscles weren’t fatigued and Craig’s weight on his back wasn’t a burden he couldn’t carry. But he wasn’t ready for this.

  “Not now,” he said again. “Not yet.”

  And why had he felt the need to add a qualifier to his rejection? Why had “not now” not been enough?

  Ian’s nerves stretched tight as he waited for Craig to do or say something, and he hated the way he hoped Craig would do it anyway, just push until the head of his dick breached Ian’s hole, then Ian wouldn’t have to decide anything.

  He wouldn’t have to make a choice at all.

  Craig didn’t.

  He hugged Ian, wrapping his arms around Ian’s middle and brushing his face against Ian’s sweating back. “Later then. I’m going to put you back on the bed. We don’t have much time and I want the taste of you on my tongue when I defend what’s mine.”

  Ian let Craig haul him to his feet and ignored the shaky feeling under his skin that felt a lot like disappointment as Craig pushed him back onto the bed and licked his way over every inch of Ian’s cock before he brought Ian to a hard climax with his lips wrapped around Ian and his own cock in his hand.

  Chapter 16

  “He’s the only one who can do it.” The comment came from a wolf Ian hadn’t seen before, standing behind a table that Ian was pretty sure Craig would have normally been seated at but wasn’t because of Ian’s presence.

  Ian stood beside Craig at the opposite end of the room, so close that their thighs and shoulders touched, as if the distance made it easier for the few mated wolves who’d been allowed to meet with Craig to tolerate Ian and his human scent.

  The precaution didn’t feel adequate to Ian, who kept catching sight of the other wolves’ flickering gazes. He could feel their discomfort all the way across the room and his own unease ratcheted up every time he caught another one staring at him.

  Craig’s heavy hand hadn’t left the back of Ian’s neck once in the ten minutes or so they’d been standing there, Ian getting warmer by the moment in the stuffy building where they had gathered, a good hundred feet from the house.

  Craig’s hand squeezed lightly every time Ian shifted uneasily, but his attempt at comfort—if that’s what it was—didn’t do a lot to help.

  Ian hadn’t known why he’d been brought along. Seemed to him it would have been smarter and safer to leave him in the bedroom where he’d been holed up since they’d arrived and have Craig tell him the plan later.

  But then he had discovered his part in things and realized why he had to be here. As far as Ian was concerned, the plan to trap the renegades sucked.

  If it weren’t for Craig’s hand on the back of his neck, there was no way in hell he would still be standing here.

  Ian slipped his belt through the last loop with sweaty hands and fit the buckle to the notch that would hold it in place. He curled his fingers around the metal face of the buckle and waited for further direction.

  One of the wolves who had met with Craig while he’d been feeding Ian breakfast that morning spoke up. “We’ve had the tracker’s signal cutting in and out in different locations for the last four hours. We’ll bring it back online as soon as he’s in position.”

  “They don’t trust me that much,” Ian said. “If they figure out I’m just bait, they might decide to just kill me and be done with it.”

  Craig’s scowl gave Ian a nasty little surge of vindictive satisfaction. Served him right. Ian wasn’t looking forward to camping out in the woods in this weather and then having to play double agent.

  He hadn’t liked the look of the low, dark clouds outside and the storms that had passed through last week had brought tornadoes with them.

  Ian looked sideways at Craig and shrugged. “They’ll want proof.”

  Which might not be entirely true, but only if Brendan showed up.

  Then again, Ian didn’t want Brendan to show up, because Brendan knew him too well not to be suspicious if Ian didn’t act entirely normal.

  Earlier, Ian had heard Craig talking to one of the wolves about a scatter shield, something he’d never heard of before, obviously some kind of alien technology to protect the den from discovery. Unlike the other house he had been kept in, this place seemed to be a much larger complex of houses and outbuildings, spread through the woods in a way that gave privacy to smaller groups but that was still protectable, with the help of their technology.

  Craig glanced at him.

  One of the wolves hurriedly stepped forward, handed Craig a phone that looked remarkably similar to the one Ian had owned, and then stepped back quickly.

  Craig offered the phone to Ian.

  Ian stared at it for a second before he took it and turned it in his hand. It might not be his phone, but it was a damn good approximation.

  “Take that,” Craig said, gesturing, “and when they find you, show them the pictures. There’s just enough there to make it look like you scouted around as much as you could with your injury. Give them the phone if they want to take it back with them.”

  Ian tucked the phone into the front pocket of his jeans. “What if they want me to go—”

  Craig interrupted, his voice hard. “Do not go with them. Whatever excuse you have to make, because if I have to stop you from leaving the area, we’ll kill them all.”

  Ian mashed his lips together. He jerked his hand up, then aborted the gesture and shoved his hands under his arms because he didn’t know how else to control the anger that made him want to lash out, but he couldn’t fight off the words.

  “So,” he said. Then again, “So. You’re making me choose between letting you murder a bunch of humans, my people, or coming back to you.”

  “I told you I wouldn’t let you go. You knew that.”

  “Yeah. I knew it. We’re going to mate, remember?” Ian rolled his shoulders but he couldn’t shake the tension that made it hard not to raise his voice. His first try to continue ended when hi
s voice cracked and he had to start over. “I knew it but you just took away every bit of choice I had. You’re blackmailing me with other peoples’ lives.”

  Funny how he hadn’t even thought of not coming back until Craig had put the lives of these renegades in his hands. Now he was angry. Furious.

  Submit or die was a choice, a choice he made every time he let Craig near him, because the outcome affected only him.

  Leave or stay wasn’t a choice, because other peoples’ lives would be at stake. Other people would die. People he didn’t know, but people other than himself, nonetheless.

  He scrubbed his fingers through his hair and the movement jostled Craig’s arm but didn’t budge his hand from its position on the back of Ian’s neck.

  Craig pulled him around to face him and Ian scowled and then dropped his hands at his sides and looked at Craig with brow furrowed, the disappointment and hurt he couldn’t stop himself from feeling in his gaze despite his best effort to shut it down. “At least I could have fooled myself into believing I had a choice when—if—I came back. But now…” He growled through his teeth in a very human way, but then stopped abruptly.

  He couldn’t do this.

  Craig started at him, fingers brushing lightly over Ian’s neck. The gentle caress made Ian angrier, a reminder that Craig might as well own him right now, because Ian’s choices had been narrowed down to none at all. He had felt lucky to have any choice at all after his earlier bad decisions and he hadn’t realized the illusion of that choice had been so important to him until Craig stripped it away. Because submit or die was nothing more than a consequence disguised as a choice.

  Submit. Make it through. He would find a way out of this when the heat season ended and he could leave without having to worry about a lust crazed wolf chasing him down. Because, by God, he had a choice.

  He’d always had a choice. That hadn’t been an illusion.

  He’d set all this in motion in that one night, when he’d known in his gut, his instincts screaming at him that Devon couldn’t handle those guys and their ribbing despite Devon’s claim otherwise, and then the next morning, he’d found Devon gone. Missing. And Ian had known he had to find him.