by Erica Woods
“And what of the consequences, Ruarc?” Lucien asked intently. “Think of what you will be giving up.”
I fidgeted in my seat. What would Ruarc be giving up to be with me? A hope for a proper mate? A woman who was wolf, as he was, and thereby foregoing something they all possibly longed for? And kids . . .
“Told you to drop it,” Ruarc snarled.
He probably wanted kids. Even if I’d wanted to bring children into the world—something I could never do while I continued to share my body with a monster—could he even have kids with a human, someone a whole different species?
Doesn’t matter, I told myself firmly. You’ll be gone long before this becomes an issue.
My eyes burned.
Lucien turned his glacier stare on Ruarc. “I was simply saying—”
“I think that’s enough, Lucien.” Ash gave a barely perceptible nod in my direction. “Some things must come in time.”
I pushed all conflicting emotions down—no point dwelling on something that would never matter. “So . . . Human mates?”
“Humans are lesser,” Lucien said coldly. “Most wolves consider them pests at best, meat at worst.”
“Not lesser,” Ruarc gritted out. “Different.”
The only thing I heard was ‘meat.’ “You . . . you eat humans?”
“We do not,” Lucien replied with a grimace. “But some do.”
I struggled to swallow past a sudden wave of nausea.
“Do not worry, Hope,” Ash said. “There are few who consider humans food. Humans are, in general, safe. But we can come back to your questions later. If you and Ruarc are pursuing a relationship, you need to know what to expect. The most important thing is that you always have a choice.”
Adamantly putting aside the whole ‘meat debacle’ for the time being, I glanced at Ruarc. He looked tense, but there was no doubting the possessive glint in his eyes when he met my gaze. When the time came, would he let me go? Did I want him to?
Almost as though he’d heard my thoughts, his expression tightened until his jaw looked ready to snap.
“Ruarc?” There was steely expectancy in the way Ash called his name.
Blue and silver clashed. Several tense moments passed before Ruarc snapped a clipped, “Yes.” His biceps bunched below his black shirt when he rolled his shoulders. “Her choice.”
Gaze lingering on Ruarc, it took a second before Ash looked back at me. “Other than that all you really need to know is that regardless of what happens between you and any of us”—my stomach flipped—“you’ll always have a place here. A home.”
A home . . .
I glanced over at Lucien. To my surprise, he didn’t object. Instead, he gave a barely perceptible nod when he met my gaze, and for the first time, the coldness in his eyes didn’t faze me.
“As long as you don’t betray us, that is,” he said, ruining the brief moment of peace with a chilling smile that was little less than a baring of teeth.
I flinched, and Ruarc turned to Lucien with a warning growl.
The sound that came out of Ash then shouldn’t have made all the hairs on my body rise. It shouldn’t have made my heart skip a beat and my mouth go dry.
But it did.
It wasn’t a roar. It didn’t resemble the rumble Ruarc sometimes made—the one that made my skin prickle and my blood heat. And it wasn’t even a growl. It was quieter. Softer. And a primal part of me screamed that it was much more dangerous.
“Enough,” he said, that one word so low I barely heard it. He closed his eyes and drew in several deep breaths, and when he flicked his gaze over my face, the blue had gone so pale it nearly resembled ice. Or a very hot fire. “It goes without saying you cannot tell anyone about what you have learned here.” The blue deepened. “Our world’s survival depends on secrecy, which is why our first and most important rule is to keep humans in the dark. All humans.”
Uneasy skittered across my back. “I won’t say anything.” And I wouldn’t even if I had someone to tell.
“Good,” Lucien said. “The Council executes those that do not abide by their laws. They wouldn’t simply kill you.” A bitter twist of his lips. “They’d kill us as well.”
My fingers bit into the sleeves of my borrowed sweater.
Thank god I hadn’t eaten anything yet or it would all have come back up. One of my biggest reasons for leaving was to protect the guys from the Hunters, and they were telling me someone else might kill them? Because of me?
“Who . . . what is the Council?”
“Our leaders.”
Leaders? The leaders of the lycans . . .
My eyes closed. A spark of something, something sharp and unfinished sliced through my mind. It cut until it found a quiet corner, dipped its root to test the soil . . . And then it grew. Swelled. Until I could taste the possibility on my tongue, the bitter flavor tinged with a wild, wild hope that seemed as inconceivable as escaping the Hunters had once been.
But then reality intruded and the world turned gray. None of it mattered. Not if the guys who’d rescued me might lose their lives.
“They’d . . . they’d k-kill you? Why?”
“We are accountable for you now, Hope. For you and your actions,” Ash replied. “The moment we brought you, a human, in under our roof, you became our responsibility.”
Trepidation was barbed wire wrapping around my middle, squeezing and tearing until I could barely breathe. “You never said what prompted this discussion, and I know it wasn’t Ruarc,” I added. “You were all here already. Waiting to talk. Why?”
“You deserved to know.”
The words were delivered in his usual monotone, but his jaw . . . A muscle jumped once at the side of his jaw, as if he was trying too hard not to grind his teeth.
“Is this about the Council and their rules? Will they find out—Oh, god, do they already know?”
“No.”
I sagged in my chair.
“Tim’s death was not your fault.”
I jerked back, only Ruarc’s hand coming to squeeze my shoulder kept me in my seat. “What?”
“Tim grew up in a pack that considered humans prey. That we”—his voice grew sharp edges—“protected you, treated you as pack . . . that’s what sealed his fate. Once he decided to leave his old pack, his death became inevitable. If not here, then another place, another time. And most likely with many human victims left in his wake.” A short pause. “Do you understand what I am saying, Hope? It was not your fault.”
My left foot kicked out, catching the edge of the desk in my haste to get up, to run. “I don’t—”
“Not your fault,” Ruarc growled.
“No.” It was not an agreement, but a desire to end this part of the conversation. It wasn’t important. Not when I felt like I had a blade pressed against my neck, ready to cut. There was something they weren’t telling me, something bad, something— “You still haven’t told me why.”
“Does it matter?” Ice and silk. Lucien’s voice was ice and silk. “It’s too late now.”
“What’s too late?”
“You have already seen too much,” Ash said. “If you were to ask the wrong questions of the wrong people . . .” His eyes bored into mine. “Pieces of knowledge . . . suspicions . . . Those are often more dangerous than seeing the whole picture.”
“Blake kindly reminded Ruarc of his precarious situation before they left last night, and, of course, the muleheaded male made it worse,” Lucien said.
“Don’t remember you arguing,” Ruarc growled back.
“Perhaps because you have the memory of a rock!”
“Rocks don’t have memories.”
“Exactly.”
Squishy rubber gripped between my fingers, I twisted and twisted and twisted.
It sounded bad. The whole thing sounded really bad. Lucien’s anger with Ruarc, how Ash said I’d seen too much, and the vague memory in the back of my head of Ruarc losing his temper with Blake.
They’d broken the rules
and now the Council would try to kill them.
“What do we do?”
“About?”
“About you! You guys are in danger now that I know, aren’t you?”
Lucien turned his head so slowly I had time to count the seconds. Six. It took him six seconds to look my way. “You are worried about us?”
“Of course I’m worried about you! Why wouldn’t I be? You’ve just told me—” A lock of hair fell over my eye. I swiped it away, hoping they didn’t notice how much I was shaking. “Look, there has to be some way out of this. Or around it. If the Council kills the people who fail to keep the lycan thing secret . . .” I trailed off at the unsettling quiet that had fallen over our little group. “What?”
Something flared in Ash’s eyes and was gone before I could pinpoint the emotion behind it. “We are not currently in any danger.”
They weren’t? Then why—
“Oh. It’s just me?” The notion didn’t really disturb me. Better me than them. Especially when it would’ve been my fault—if they hadn’t saved me in the first place I would never have been in a position to see what I’d seen. And I had the whole Hunter section after me already. What was one more enemy?
“Oh?” Lucien impaled me with a stare made of iced-over swords. “That is your reaction to realizing your life could be forfeited? Oh?” His voice grew in volume, nostrils flaring with each, clipped enunciation. Why this was what got a reaction out of him, I would never understand. “And no, you are not in any danger. Not yet.”
“Oh—I mean, uhm . . . Sorry?”
A strange half-growl came from Ruarc, while Ash tilted his head and once more drummed his fingers against the desk.
“Sorry?” Lucien gritted his teeth and speared me with another of those weaponized glares.
I looked down.
“Don’t,” was Ruarc’s instant command. “You’re not beneath him.”
“What?” I was quickly losing control of this whole conversation. They’d flooded me with information—information I felt I’d handled quite well considering I’d just learned there were such things as werewolves—uh, lycans, prowling the darkness—but now my head was starting to spin.
“Lowering your gaze is a sign of submission,” Ash explained. “When you instantly look down and keep your eyes away, you are telling the other wolf that you are lesser. That you accept his dominance over you, his place above you.”
“I . . .” What on earth did you say to something like that? I’d learned to keep my eyes down as a captive. As a way of mollifying my tormentors and avoiding extra punishment for being ‘cheeky’ or ‘thinking I was their equal.’ It was a survival instinct—one I doubted I would be able to get rid of just like that.
“Can we get back to the part where the female apologized for thinking she was in danger?”
If Lucien’s voice had been a whip, I’d have been flayed by now. I was about to apologize when Ruarc growled a warning.
Wait a minute. How do I know its a warning?
That struck me as odd, too. I’d often been able to tell what their various sounds meant. Was that an instinctual thing left over from the days when humans huddled in caves—aware of the dangers lurking right outside their unprotected shelters—or was it a thing lycans could control? Like a defense mechanism against humans, a way to communicate without words when the world was yet young and humans traveled in large packs and spoke a different language?
“Back off,” Ruarc barked, and it was only then that I noticed how close Lucien was. He towered over me, staring at Ruarc with a strange light in his beautiful, cold eyes.
The screech of a chair sliding over hard floor made me cringe. With slow, controlled movements, Ash rose. “That’s enough for one day.”
“Wait,” I cried, a thought having just occurred. “T-Tim he . . .” My voice broke, and three growls filled the room. It was freaky, but at the same time, I found it weirdly reassuring. “He scratched me. With his claws, I think.” Acutely aware of Ruarc’s protective heat behind me, and knowing the fury vibrating through him on my behalf could ignite at the smallest provocation, I aimed my next question at Ash. “Does that mean I’m . . . infected?” I didn’t know a lot about werewolves, only what I’d seen in the few movies allowed me, but they all had that in common. Get bit or scratched and you turned furry on the next full moon. If werewolves were based on lycans it stood to reason they could share some similarities.
“No,” Lucien snapped. “You can’t catch wolf. It is not a disease.”
My jaw fell open as Lucien stalked past us. “Lucien, that’s not—”
The door slammed shut behind him.
I looked up at Ruarc, prepared to share a what-the-hell moment, but his jaw was as tight as Lucien’s had been, and his eyes were shuttered with steel.
“I . . . I didn’t mean it like that.” I shot Ash a pleading look when Ruarc’s expression remained the same. “I-I don’t know anything about lycans. You said to ask questions . . .” My voice dropped off as my chest clenched painfully.
“Hope is right, Ruarc,” Ash stated. “She needs to ask these things.”
A jerky nod.
I swallowed back more pleas for understanding and stared glumly down at my hands.
“Hope.” Ash looked at me in a way he never had before—intent, yes, but almost like what he was about to say was painful. “Lycans are born. Not made. You can never be changed.”
I nodded—because he seemed to expect some kind of reply—but I didn’t understand his somber tone. I didn’t need to be wolf to care for Ruarc. Or to be with him, for whatever short time we had.
Biting my lip, I glanced up at my . . . my boyfriend.
Nothing.
Nothing in his eyes, nothing to give away his feelings, only the tense line of his jaw pulling on his scar and leaving his lips a grim line.
“I . . . I guess I should—”
“Let’s go.”
Before I could stutter a reply, Ruarc pulled me off the chair and out the door.
40
HOPE
My mind was reeling when Ruarc dragged me out of the office.
Werewolves . . . mating . . . several males? It was all too much. I hadn’t even remembered to ask some of the questions burning a hole in my head. Like how old they were.
Centuries?
The thought was scary and felt utterly unreal, but Ruarc had used that word the other day. Maybe it wasn’t a metaphor like I’d thought, but an actual, literal statement.
It wasn’t until the smell of hot chocolate reached my nose that I realized we were in the kitchen. In a daze, I looked for Ruarc, finding him by the stove. The sleeves of his shirt were rolled up to expose thick forearms and angry looking veins as he furiously stirred a wooden spoon through hot liquid.
Some of the cocoa splashed out, landing on the back of Ruarc’s palm. I gasped as the tan skin—interwoven with lines upon lines of thin, white scars—reddened.
He didn’t seem to care. Instead, his pale, silver eyes were narrowed in my direction. “So?” Angry. Almost accusing.
“So?”
“I repulse you now?”
I stared at him, my body locked in place. What was he talking about?
His breath hissed out through clenched teeth. “Knew it. Don’t blame you,” he said, but his hands curled into tight fists.
With a hesitation stemming from years of being rejected, I moved until I stood right behind him and gingerly touched his back. He jerked away. “I . . . I don’t know what is going on,” I said, misery filling my voice and making it sound thick. Uneven. “You don’t repulse—”
Ruarc spun around, lips pressed in a tight, uncompromising line. “Doesn’t matter. Still want you.” He shook his head, eyes filled with self-loathing. He ran a finger across his jaw by his scar, tracing the white line until it ended by his nose. “Hate this. Fucking scars and fucking lycans.”
Catching my trembling bottom lip between my teeth, I tried to follow his jumbled thoughts. Did he .
. . did he think I didn’t want him anymore now that I knew what he was?
“No,” I whispered, gathering my courage and putting my hand on his chest. This time he didn’t jerk back. “The whole lycan thing . . . It doesn’t change how I feel about you.”
A violent shudder ripped through his body. He leaned down, putting his forehead against mine. “Can’t let you go.”
When I didn’t pull away he lowered his head, moving slowly and watching me with an intent that bordered on obsessive. Still not breaking eye contact, he snaked an arm around my back, dragging me forward until I was flush against him.
He was so close now that I could count the specks of darker silver in his irises.
A sound, halfway between a moan and a whimper, stole past my lips, and finally his mouth came crashing down on mine.
That first touch of his mouth drained my lungs of air.
Calluses rubbed against my nape as his hand closed, the grip firm and possessive and so . . . so . . .
My eyes fluttered shut and a deep, unsettling throb began between my thighs.
He claimed me. There was no other word for it. His tongue invaded my mouth like a conqueror set on victory. He licked, nibbled, sucked, and bit until my mouth felt foreign; swollen and hot.
Lightning seemed to dance over my skin, leaving it pebbled and so sensitive each touch spilled fire across my flesh.
His free hand skimmed up my back, down to my waist, settling on my lower back and pressing me impossibly closer.
I moaned and clutched him closer.
“Mine,” he growled and spun us around.
Then I was on the counter with my legs spread almost painfully wide to accommodate his large frame. He pulled me to the edge, my core pressing against the hardness in his jeans.
My whole body jerked as I felt him there; layers of clothes separated us, yet it was the most intimate moment I’d ever experienced. He moved, an involuntary jerk of his hips that immediately stilled and ended in a deep groan.
My stomach tightened, my breath halted, my eyes rolled back in my head.
I’d never felt anything like this.
Keeping a tight grip on my nape, Ruarc dragged his lips over my mouth and groaned again. The sound rumbled from his chest, powerful and male and so attractive I squirmed. And when he fused his mouth over mine once more, swallowing my soft whimpers, my nipples tightened with an invisible string connecting them to my lower belly and the pulsating point between my legs. Each thrust of Ruarc’s tongue in my mouth sent signals to all three parts, and they fed off each other until I felt dizzy with the strange, almost painful pleasure coursing through my body.