CHAPTER THIRTY TWO
Two. Fucking. Weeks.
Erik should have been glad to see his brother’s silhouette on the horizon, but he knew his aggravation would not even begin to wane until he was back at his den—which was still a fucking hour away.
Sylvestre shifted first. He wrapped himself in a pelt and then pulled Torok from Erik’s shoulder. Erik saw the younger male wince, and he didn’t fault him. While the bears hadn’t killed Torok, they hadn’t been inclined to part with any of their limited food for a prisoner. Torok had been severely malnourished, and despite receiving several good meals, often at the expense of Erik and Sten going hungry, the beta wolf’s strength had not returned enough to make the journey.
The practical thing would have been to stop somewhere safe and rest until Torok recovered. That had been Sylvestre’s idea, and in the past, Erik would have made a similar call. But Sylvestre wasn’t in charge, Erik’s wolf was, and the wolf wanted—needed—to get back to its mate.
And so, the trip back had involved trading Torok back and forth like a heavy carcass, all while barely eating and getting only minimal sleep. Erik was fucking exhausted.
But not too exhausted to fuck.
It was the one thing keeping him going, the thought of shoving her up against a wall and slamming into her until he didn’t know where he began and his mate ended. Then, they would collapse in his bed and he would sleep for a full day. And when he woke up, he’d eat, and then fuck her again. Perhaps not in that order.
A sneer was fixed on Erik’s face when he shifted. Sten approached them, flanked by Beau and Nasak. They regarded Torok with varying degrees of wonder.
“He’s alive,” Beau blurted.
Sylvestre grunted in response, before hefting Torok into Beau’s arms.
“What happened?” Sten asked his brother.
Erik didn’t particularly care to recount the details of their journey, or their encounter with Elena. Had they been alone, he would have told Sten as much, but with the expectant gazes of Sten and his pack mates, he couldn’t bring himself to admit that all he wanted to know was how his mate had fared in his absence.
He gave them the bare facts of what had happened, and grit his teeth each time one of them asked him a follow-up question. He couldn’t help noticing that Beau kept glancing back nervously at Sylvestre, or that Sten seemed to be making it a point to keep Erik talking.
“So what is your plan from here?” Sten asked. “Are we going to head to Siluit to—”
Erik stopped walking. “What is it?”
“What are you talking about?” Sten asked, his expression guarded.
“What aren’t you telling me?”
Sten cast a quick glance at Sylvestre, and then said, “We should talk about it back at the den.”
Erik folded his arms across his chest. “No, we’re going to talk now. What happened?”
“There was an…incident,” Sten said hesitantly.
Looking at Sylvestre, Beau said, “Your sister attacked the human.”
Something in Erik’s chest constricted, and before he could stop himself, he’d grabbed Sten. One large hand fisted the pelt at Sten’s neck, and the other remained clenched and ready to strike at his side.
“Why weren’t you with her? Tell me what happened, now.”
Sten arched his head away from Erik, but made no other effort to escape. “She’s fine,” he prefaced, as if he knew that that had been the first question Erik had wanted to ask.
Sabine was so strong, much stronger than Sten, and in some ways, a more capable fighter than even her brother. Where Sylvestre had brute strength on his side, Sabine was calculating. Unless she was toying with her prey, she didn’t make a move until she knew she’d make a kill. Meanwhile, Erik’s mate was woefully weak and he knew from experience that he could restrain her with a single well-placed hand. And so, from the instant he heard that Sabine had attacked her, his mind had drawn the only logical conclusion: his mate was dead.
He loosened his grip on Sten, but didn’t remove his hand until his brother finished speaking. He only half listened, as it took a significant portion of his focus to keep himself under control, to keep himself from showing how…not right he was.
“She got a bump on her head, but that’s all, and it’s already healed,” Sten continued. “And you have to realize the position you left me in. I couldn’t possibly have stayed with her all day when she was smelling like that, not unless you wanted your pups to have questionable paternity.”
Erik took a step back, even though he wanted to throttle his brother all over again. Even the insinuation that Sten would touch his mate made him sneer, but the others were looking at him speculatively. He shot a glare in their direction, and they averted their gazes, all except Sylvestre, whose face was lined with tension.
Sten said, “I didn’t think Sabine would hurt her. It’s one thing for me to not trust her with my kid. She was negligent, sure, but I never thought she would try to kill one of our own.”
Sylvestre stepped forward, arms open and palms upturned. “Erik, please, this had to be some sort of misunderstanding. You have to hear her out before you…” He trailed off as he saw Sten slowly shake his head.
“I’m sorry, Syl. She’s dead.”
Not since the death of his father had Erik processed so many strong emotions all at once. His first thought was ‘good riddance’ but it was immediately followed by a small pang of grief. Despite knowing that he would have killed Sabine himself, she had still been someone with whom he shared a companionship—something that was exceedingly rare for him.
For a few years, their relationship had been intense and highly sexual. But unlike the others, once lust had faded, something else had been left in its place, a sort of friendship. Sabine had always had an uncanny knack for reading Erik, and there was no one he’d ever enjoyed hunting with quite so much. There had been jokes that had been only theirs, and she had been a vault for their shared memories, oftentimes recalling and reminding him of things that had long since become hazy in his own mind. Now all of that was gone.
Why?
He didn’t realize he’d asked the question aloud until his brother answered. Scratching the back of his neck, Sten said, “I can only speculate. Astrid was as blindsided as I was, but she said that Sabine was ranting about, well, you. We think she was jealous.”
Sylvestre cursed and fell to his knees. Erik watched, feeling both disapproval and envy as Beau fell to the ground beside him and put an arm around his shoulder. He still had no idea what had transpired between Sabine and his mate, but he recognized how easily the tables could have been reversed. His mate could be dead in Sabine’s place, and if that had been the case, Erik would have either lashed out in a truly unpredictable way, or worse still, he might still be standing there, holding himself together by a tenuous thread while he watched his vision of the future fade to grey, and then turn to ashes.
Sabine was his past, and while a small part of him would now be gone from this world, Astrid was his future. He wasn’t sure exactly when, but at some point, even before he’d decided to make her his mate, he had stopped imagining a future in which she did not exist. Perhaps that was why he’d decided to make her his mate in the first place.
“Let’s go,” Erik said to his brother. “I want to run. We’ll discuss this further at the den.”
They shifted and bounded off in the direction of the den, leaving the others behind to deal with Sylvestre and Torok. While it felt wrong to leave them, the cold, logical part of his mind was back in control, and it reasoned that there was nothing he could do for them anyway.
Erik and Sten cleared the hour-long stretch in forty-minutes, both of them out of breath as they finally reached the ravine. Erik took his time going down the narrow pathway, and allowed his muscles to have a brief reprieve.
Once inside the den, they shifted back into human form. The air felt colder than usual, and Erik had to repress a shiver. Even in human form, their bodies were hi
ghly tempered against the harsh temperatures of the arctic, but when exhaustion and hunger had sunk its claws in, their bodies diverted resources to more essential functions.
“How is she still alive?” Erik asked.
Sten was cracking his neck. He looked over his shoulder, and then, in a lowered voice, he said, “You’re not going to believe this, but Ila saved her. She caught Sabine off-guard and managed to stake her on a stalagmite.”
It took Erik a moment to process his shock. He blinked at his brother, and then repeated, “Ila?”
“I know, I can still hardly believe it. But you should know, we’re letting the pack think it was Astrid. Then hopefully they’ll think twice before trying to attack her.”
“They shouldn’t even think once about attempting to harm her, because she is my mate,” Erik said darkly.
Sten lowered his head. “I know that, but they don’t, not really. They know you’re mating with her, but they don’t—”
“Where is she now?” Erik asked, cutting his brother off. He wasn’t particularly interested in what Sten was saying, and they had almost reached the main room and he’d yet to catch even the faintest whiff of his mate’s scent.
“She’s with Ila and Halley. Malina and Lusa might be there as well, they’ve been spending a lot of time with her…” Sten tapered off as he caught sight of his brother’s narrowed eyes. “I couldn’t stay with her all of the time, Erik. You left me in charge of the whole pack and with Sabine gone, I… I’m sorry.”
“I don’t need your apology,” Erik said. “I need you to be better, because I can’t do everything that I used to. Not yet. The thrall threw me off, and it’s going to take a while before I can regain my equilibrium.”
Sten gave him a tight smile. “You’re not going to get it back. You’ll never be who you were before, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. But you will have to adapt to the new normal. In the meantime, I’ll do my best.”
***
“I’m so pretty!” Halley exclaimed, twirling in front of the mirror, much the way Ila often did. The only difference was that when Halley did it, it was cute.
“You certainly are, but don’t let it go to your head,” Astrid cautioned. “There are more important things than beauty, like intelligence, empathy—”
Halley piped, “Knowing how to hear a rabbit under the snow, and being able to track a caribou herd. My papa’s going to actually let me hunt one, once I lose my baby fangs.”
Astrid smiled and shook her head. She’d been with Halley in Sten’s room all morning, working on what would probably be her final dress, at least for a few weeks. Her fingers were on the verge of blistering, but she still had every intention of sewing. Her hands were flat-out itching to cut up what was left of the fabrics she’d pilfered from Ila into small squares and begin making baby clothes.
She had no way of knowing what her baby’s sex would be, but she hoped like hell it would be a girl, because she’d accidentally used the very last of the blue fabric on Halley’s Cinderella dress. She still had a decent amount of green, but most of it was a heavy velvet texture that she thought probably wouldn’t be suitable for a baby.
“Do you think you can make me a tiara, too?” Halley asked.
“If your papa has any spare diamonds lying around,” Astrid said, still sifting through the fabrics. She found a plain but serviceable grey pillowcase and put it in her to-chop pile.
At first, it had seemed strange that within the span of a week, she’d gone from denying she was pregnant to feeling the obsessive need to prepare for what was, at present, still a little bundle of cells. But somehow she knew that making the clothes would help to make her impending motherhood seem more real. Because right now, aside from her violent morning sickness that was—thank God—completely isolated to only the hour before daybreak, she had no real evidence of the life that was growing inside of her.
“Papa, do you have any spare diamonds?”
Astrid smiled a little, but she didn’t turn around. She’d heard Sten approaching, but she’d been making it a point not to interact with him since the previous week when he’d stolen a kiss from her. He had insinuated that he’d only done it to make a point, but she had felt the purpose in the way his lips had moved, and she suspected that if she’d been more receptive, he might not have stopped.
“I’m afraid not, but you already look spectacular. Did Astrid make that for you?”
“Uh huh,” Halley enthused. In a markedly more subdued tone, she added, “Oh, hi Uncle Erik.”
Astrid’s fingers froze in midair, and suddenly she could feel eyes boring into her back. She had to remind herself to breathe, and then to breathe normally so that no one would notice how much she was freaking out. All she could hear was the sound of blood pounding in her ears.
“Go.” Erik’s voice cut through all ambient sound, as if he’d spoken right into her mind.
Go where?
“Come on, Halley,” Sten said, sounding annoyed.
“Bye, Aunt Astrid.”
Astrid blinked several times. Erik had been telling them to go, not her. Which meant…they were alone.
She stood, her back still to him. For two weeks, she’d been awaiting his return in earnest, but with each day that passed, she had become more anxious about what would happen when they were finally back together. Would it be awkward? They were, after all, practically strangers who only shared a bizarre and twisted attraction to one another. And worse still, what if Sten was wrong? What if, now that the thrall had passed and she was pregnant, that elemental pull that had drawn them together had become frayed?
Only one way to find out.
She turned to find Erik leaning in the doorway. He was so much bigger than she remembered, and his towering form filled half of the large entrance. There was a casual air about him, as though he’d never left and had been there all along, waiting for her to notice him.
But when she looked past the surface, she could see the lines of fatigue on his face, particularly around his tired eyes. His posture was slumped, and she realized that he wasn’t leaning in the doorway, he was leaning on it for support.
For a moment, his expression was maddeningly inscrutable, and then he smiled, a small slanting of the lips, but it was all she needed. At once, she felt herself being drawn back into his orbit. Her feet began moving of their own accord and she was going to him, her giddiness making her feel nothing like a woman fast approaching thirty, but rather a schoolgirl, seeing her idol in the flesh.
“You’re back,” she said as she threw her arms around his neck. She had really wanted to say, “I missed you so, so, so much” but the vulnerability in that statement was enough to deter her.
Erik’s strong arms enveloped her, and she welded herself to his chest while he bent to nuzzle the top of her head, the only part of her short body that he could reach without being an acrobat. He made that strange and delightful purring sound. It sent a shock of tiny shivers through her body, and for the first time in weeks, they were the hot kind of shivers, the kind that made her body tingle in all of the right places.
She wanted him to say something, anything so that she could hear his voice again. But he was silent as he hooked his hands under her bottom to hoist her up, and then carried her into the room. She nearly protested as he laid her down in Sten’s bed, but as soon as he was on top of her, she could feel his hard length beneath the pelts he wore, pressing against her with urgent need and her body liquefied.
Erik leaned down, and she thought for a second that he might kiss her, but his head went to her neck. He opened his mouth to hook his canines onto the marks that were now permanently embedded in her flesh, much the same way he was now an inexorable part of her. She expected—almost anticipated—him to bite her, but he only gave her skin a small tug before swiping the region with his tongue.
His mouth moved on, tasting and sucking other parts of her neck and leaving small marks wherever he went. And as he lavished her neck, his hands worked to strip her of
the clothes she’d been wearing. When she was fully naked beneath him, her hands moved to take off the supple black pelt that he was wearing. Erik nipped at her, a gentle warning to stop, and her fingers fluttered back up to lace in his thick hair.
She figured he wanted to undress himself, rather than deal with her fumbling over how to remove the massive pelt. But seconds later, he had pulled his bulging erection from the mass of black fur and was rubbing it against her, his blue eyes glazed with lust. A needy sound escaped her lips as the tip of him brushed against her clitoris. He responded with a soft, almost pained growl as he nudged the head of his cock against her slick entrance.
Her fingers tightened in his hair as she braced herself for the onslaught that would come. But once again, he surprised her. This time, he entered her slowly, and she saw his lips part and his eyes close as he sunk into her, inch by hard, thick inch. It turned out to be a great relief, because in the weeks that he was gone, her body had seemed to have repaired itself from the damage he’d done, and in spite of how wet she was, it burned as her sensitive flesh stretched to accommodate him.
Even after he was deep inside of her, he continued his slow pace. They had sex like this once before, but it had seemed to require a great deal of restraint on the alpha’s part and after a few minutes, he’d reverted back to his hard and fast ways. But this felt different, and she knew that he wasn’t going to suddenly start slamming into her. It seemed as though he was savoring every stroke and relishing each second inside of her.
His body lay over hers as he moved inside of her, leaving just enough space between them for her to breathe. The fur on his pelt was constantly rubbing against her, each soft hair activating a corresponding nerve ending. It felt particularly good against her breasts, and had brought her nipples to stiff peaks. She ran her hands across his fur-encased chest, experiencing a flash of exuberance as she was reminded what he was: a wolf, and not her boyfriend, lover, or husband—he was her mate.
Now she felt stupid for ever thinking that things would be awkward between them, or that he would outright reject her. She realized that while she didn’t know his past, she was part of his present and would be a part of his future as well. She may not have known where he’d been, or the events that had made him the alpha he’d become, but she knew how he made her feel, and for now, that was enough.
Enslaved by the Alpha (Shifters of Nunavut Book 2) Page 26