“What did you say to him?” Ginnifer asked.
Astrid shrugged. “I told him that he should either start paying me, or go see a therapist.”
Ginnifer laughed, but immediately felt bad. She took a small sip of water, but her stomach wasn’t having any of that.
“I’m going to go take a bath,” she said, heading towards the bathroom without waiting for a reply.
“But it’ll get cold!”
She closed the door behind her and turned on the sink faucet, bracing herself to throw up. Mornings had been rough the past few days. And afternoons, and evenings, too. Her insides continued to churn, but after a moment the worst of it subsided, and she leaned back against the door.
Tentatively, she placed a hand over her abdomen. When she thought of the tiny embryo, she had trouble feeling anything but dread and anxiety. But there must have been a wisp of something more, because for all the times she’d thought about termination, she couldn’t bring herself to so much as make the call, let alone follow through with it.
She sighed. “What am I going to do with you?”
The obvious answer was to return to Nunavut. Just thinking about telling Zane she was pregnant and that she was staying to be his mate made her emotional, but wisdom told her she was tunneling. Once the joy of being back with Zane wore off, she’d be bound to him and Siluit. Living in the den had been an incredible experience, but she wasn’t sure that she wanted that life. Even if she was willing to give up on her career and all of the modern luxuries, life on the tundra was perilous, and not an environment in which she’d want to raise a child.
But raising a shifter in Miami would also be difficult, if not impossible. The only thing she could think to do was move somewhere more rural, where she could raise it away from the confines of human society. Either way would take sacrifice, but at least with the latter option she might be able to live a semi-normal life.
Ginnifer took a long, hot bath, and for the first time since her injury, she undertook the laborious task of washing her hair with one hand. The bathroom connected to her bedroom, and when she walked inside, it was apparent that Astrid had not been using her bed.
Everything was how she’d left it, the surfaces cluttered with books, unopened junk mail, hair pins, and empty glasses, all filled with evaporation marks. She searched the clothes on the floor, until she found an outfit that smelled as though it had only been worn once. She was careful to button the shirt all the way up to its high collar so that it hid the puncture marks on her neck.
As she made her way down the hall, she heard Boaz’s voice. By the time she made it to the living room, she recognized it for what it was, but her heart still continued to pound. Astrid sat on the couch, an empty plate in front of her on the coffee table. She held Ginnifer’s camera in one hand and a mug of orange juice in the other.
“What does it feel like to shift?” Boaz asked from behind the camera.
He was filming Tallow, who was naked, save for a fur pelt across her midsection. “How am I supposed to answer that? You might as well ask a fish how it feels to be wet all of the time.”
Astrid chuckled. “She’s so human, I can’t believe it.”
Ginnifer sat down beside her sister, putting her hand on the back of the couch. “That’s Tallow. She’s a beta female. She comes off like a real bitch but…well, that’s kind of what she is.”
Boaz asked, “How do you decide which form you want to be in?”
Tallow said, “Human form is best for communication, and that is all. But oftentimes it is easier to remain in human form, particularly when you don’t wish to be hassled with undressing.”
Boaz said, “There are…certain activities that happen when you’re undressed, that you still do in your human form. Like bathing.”
“And fucking?”
“Uh, yeah, I guess, but it’s not that I’m interested in that. I’m more curious about whether you—you wolves, like to, you know, do it like that.”
Astrid looked up from the camera, just as a wicked gleam flashed in Tallow’s eyes.
“Is Boaz propositioning her for bestiality?” Astrid asked.
Ginnifer reached over to press pause before things escalated. She’d let Boaz borrow her camera several times, as it took better video in low light than his own. But she hadn’t expected him to fill it with weird things like that.
“I’m sure he was only asking in the spirit of knowledge,” Ginnifer muttered, setting the camera aside.
“Hey, I was enjoying that.”
“You can watch it when it’s finished.”
If Astrid went digging through the video files, she’d inevitably come across something that Ginnifer didn’t want her to see.
“Fine,” Astrid said, gathering up her dishes. “I have to go to work anyway. Do you mind watching Noona until I get off?”
“She’s my dog,” Ginnifer reminded her.
“Riiiight. Somehow I forgot.”
When Astrid had left, Ginnifer grabbed her bag from the floor, pulling out the case that held their memory sticks. They’d painstakingly organized over a hundred of them, each with small name labels and numbers that corresponded with the notebook details written for the different scenes.
She ran her finger over Zane’s row, one of the shortest. Boaz had had a difficult time getting near the alpha, and almost every time Ginnifer had filmed him, the intimacy between them was palpable. She wasn’t sure how much of the footage would be useable in the final draft.
Ginnifer skipped over the row, still not ready to see his face. Instead, she went to Boaz’s SD cards, most of which were filled with interviews she hadn’t seen. She recognized the first one that she put in. It was a video he’d taken during their first trip to the inlet. Ginnifer took in the familiar landscape of the nighttime tundra, her heart aching.
When they reached the docks, Boaz asked Tallow to wait while he took out his Bolex. He was starting to explain the differences between the two cameras when the video feed cut out. At the start of the next scene, Tallow was sitting across from him on the boat, her hands on the oars.
“Don’t look so sad,” she told him. “This camera seems much lighter.”
Ginnifer remembered that he’d dropped his Bolex in the water shortly before this scene. She also remembered that this was one of the scenes that Boaz had said was private. She considered fast forwarding through it, but curiosity stayed her finger.
“The picture quality is…never mind.” Boaz shook his head. “So, Tallow, can I ask you a question?”
Her mismatched eyes shifted in his direction.
“Um, are you and Zane, like, I don’t know, are you like, his girlfriend?”
Tallow narrowed her eyes. “Alphas don’t have girlfriends, Boaz. They aren’t teenage boys. Why would you even ask me that?”
“It’s just…you’re very beautiful, and I could imagine a girl—woman, like you, being with a man like that.”
Tallow’s expression was unreadable. “What about you? Are you with that female? Her scent is all over you.”
The camera shook. “No, it’s not like that. Ginnifer and I have been friends since we were kids.”
“Oh?” She arched a brow. “And you have never once considered staking your claim on her?”
Boaz laughed, but the sound died off under Tallow’s penetrating gaze.
“I guess… There might have been a time when I thought we’d be together. But that’s over now. She’s with Aaron and there’s no way I can compete with him. It sucks, but she’s my best friend, and that’s enough.”
Tallow was quiet for a moment, her eyes going distant as she stared over the water. When she spoke, the words flowed from her lips with an eloquence Ginnifer had not known she possessed.
“I was ten when my grandmother sent me to Siluit. I was supposed to live there until I came of age, and then Zane—a boy two years my junior that I’d never met—was going to become my mate.”
“That’s…terrible. You didn’t have any say in it?
”
She shook her head. “My mother had been a pariah for mating with a human. She died giving birth to me, but my grandmother never let me forget what I was. When Zane’s father broke off an agreement to take my aunt Shale as his mate, my grandmother brokered a new arrangement for Zane and I to become mates.
“It was a blatant insult. Zane was Ephraim’s only son, and he came from a line of pureblooded shifters. Any pups Zane and I had would’ve been tainted by my father’s human blood, our daughters might have been sterile. My grandmother wanted to sabotage Siluit’s bloodline, and I was her tool.”
Tallow spoke in such a matter-of-fact tone that it felt like she was talking about something that happened to someone else.
“The day I arrived in Siluit, everyone was kind to me. No one had ever been kind to me, and I thought they were all pretending, that it was some kind of trick. I snuck out of the den and I ran as fast as I could, until I’d climbed onto a hill overlooking the inlet. When I went to climb down the slope, there he was, sitting there with his pelt wrapped around him, watching the horizon.”
“I knew who he was right away, even though he didn’t look anything like what I’d imagined. He was…beautiful, even at that age, and I was drawn to him.” A small smile tugged at her lips. “But I still hated him.
“I stalked over to him, and when he finally looked up at me, I asked him what he was doing. He told me that he was waiting for his mother to return. I didn’t know much about his mother, only what I’d overheard from others. I called Zane stupid, and I told him his mother was dead. I thought he’d get angry. People usually get angry when I say things like that. Or cry. But he didn’t do either. He just turned away again and told me that she couldn’t be dead, because she’d promised to come back for him.
“I sat next to him, and I listened to him tell me about his mother, and I told him about mine, and we stayed there until the sun set and we were called back in. And that’s how I began to fall in love with him.”
She looked at Boaz again, her lips flattening. “The rest is even more depressing. I won’t bore you with it. All you need to know is that we did not end up becoming mates, but he is my only true friend, and that is enough.”
There was more, but Ginnifer shut the camera off, no longer able to listen over the sound of her sobbing.
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
Indigo sat on a flat rock, her head resting on her hands and a sullen expression on her face. Her violet eyes flickered to Zane as he approached, but she didn’t appear hostile this time, only resigned.
“I wasn’t going any farther,” she muttered.
Exhaling heavily, Zane sat down beside her, close enough so that their shoulders could touch. A week on the tundra during the long days of summer had darkened her tan skin, making her freckles almost invisible. Her chestnut hair, which was always meticulously combed and pulled back, hung in wild tangles around her face. She smelled like mud and tears, and Zane could see the dried remnants of both on her streaked face.
She asked, “Are you angry?”
“Furious,” he said mildly. “There is no one in this world that can make me angrier than you can.”
Indigo rested her head on his shoulder. “That’s because you love me.”
He put an arm around her to pull her closer. For once, she didn’t squirm away. He wondered if her sudden inclination to be affectionate was only a ploy to get out of trouble. Then he begrudgingly admitted to himself that it might work.
“Do you have any idea where you are right now?” Zane asked.
Indigo looked around at the mountainous wasteland. The earth was covered in red and yellow vegetation, and there were more rocks than there were stout green shrubs. In spite of the season, no prey stirred for as far as Zane could see, not even a hare.
She nodded towards the west. “Amarok is that way.”
It was a decidedly vague answer. Zane could have said as much while standing in the den.
“A few more hours and you would be in scent range of their scouts,” he told her. “They’d either kill you or find some way to use you against me.”
The Amarok pack would take any opportunity to subvert him and claim Siluit territory. Their massive territory encompassed at least six regions that had belonged to the packs that they’d conquered, and their careless overhunting had driven off the caribou herds.
“Maybe,” she said, and her lack of certainty reminded Zane of her naiveté. “All I know is that he’s over there.”
This again.
Ever since the snow had melted, Indigo had been running off, disappearing for days. Each time, he or Breeze had to hunt her down, and each time, she claimed that she’d been following the trail of her mate.
Her insistence concerned him. Indigo was half human, and while that made her blood more pure than nearly every shifter he’d ever met, it narrowed the odds that she would ever become a mother. Further working against her was the fact that she was well past the age by which her fertility would have become apparent.
All of this had led him to believe that her pursuit of a mate was an adolescent act of rebellion, but sitting beside her now, he recognized the pain and longing in her eyes, and it told him that he was facing an even larger problem than he’d thought.
“Indigo…” Her name was a sigh on his lips. “You need to stop doing this to yourself. You can be happy without having a mate or pups.”
“Because that’s working out so well for you,” she said flatly. “My mate is out there, I’ve smelled him and it feels like…like my heart is too big for my chest and it compresses my lungs and I can barely breathe and all of the sudden there’s too much blood in my body.”
Indigo blinked rapidly. “And then I lose the trail, and all of the places where there was so much…muchnesss, there’s nothing anymore. And I feel like a husk. I don’t like doing this. I hate it…” She looked up at him, her violet eyes large and watery. “Tell me I’m wrong, Zane. Tell me I’m going crazy and that’s not what it feels like, and I’ll give up, I swear it.”
Zane shut his eyes. From somewhere in the darkness, he heard his dormant wolf let out an agonized whine. He rested his head against hers.
“Please, come home with me for now, and I promise, we’ll figure this out together.”
***
“Thank God, I’ve been trying to get ahold of you for two days. Don’t they have cellular service in Edinburgh?”
There were dark circles behind Rita’s crooked glasses and a coffee stain on her blouse. Behind her, Ginnifer could see her apartment, and it was even messier than when she’d left the week before.
Jack had been on the other side of the counter, pretending to organize the rack of overpriced candy bars. He caught Ginnifer’s gaze, his brows drawn together as he mouthed the word Edinburgh.
Ginnifer shifter her attention back to the Skype chat. “I’m not staying in Edinburgh exactly, it’s a more rural part of the countryside.”
“Do you at least have a landline number where I can call you?”
Ginnifer thrummed her fingers on the counter. “I’ll look into it later. Right now, I have places to be, so let’s make this quick.”
“Your agent wants me to send her the bonus scenes, but I can’t find them anywhere. I also needed the subtitle text, like, yesterday.”
“Remember what I told you before I left? Everything you need is—”
“On the cloud drive, I know, but you left over a thousand files on here and you didn’t organize anything into folders, and—”
“Do a search for the file na—”
“—none of these files are properly named. It took me five hours to find the final draft and you know what you had it labeled as? Movie05.”
“That’s because it was the fifth draft,” Ginnifer said sheepishly. “Okay, okay, I could have made things easier for you and I’m sorry. But it’s all there, I promise.”
Rita’s shoulders slumped. “I’m sorry, I’m so stressed. I wish you could have stayed to help me finish th
is.”
“I wish I could have, too,” she said with sincerity. “But I couldn’t put this trip off any longer.”
With the counter to shield her from view, Ginnifer pressed a hand to her belly. For the first couple months, it had been a struggle to hide her persistent nausea and her new fondness for rare meat, but her flat midsection had managed to keep the baby a secret. However, once she’d neared the end of her fourth month, she’d abruptly ballooned, and it was getting to the point that no amount of layered black clothes were going to disguise the rounded bulge.
“I’ll be in touch, Rita. You’ve got this.”
As she ended the Skype call, Jack offered her a Sweet Marie, but pulled it away as soon as she reached for it.
“Who was that? Your boss?”
Ginnifer snorted and snatched the candy bar. “That’s my intern. I’m the boss.”
“I bet you are,” Jack said with a grin. “So what is it that’s got her so pissed? And why does she think you’re in Ireland?”
“Scotland, silly, and she’s upset because I dumped the entire post-production of an independent film release on her at the last minute. Basically, she hasn’t slept in a week, and she probably won’t for the next month.”
“Ouch.”
Ginnifer took a bite of the candy bar, speaking through a heavenly mouthful of nougat, caramel, and peanuts. “If you knew what I was paying her…eh, never mind. Thanks for letting me use your computer, and you know, everything else.”
She put a twenty on the counter and grabbed her purse. Jack went ahead of her to the door and opened it for her.
“See you tomorrow?” he asked hopefully.
She only smiled at him.
With the long winter gone, Nunavut was much warmer than it had been the last time she was there, but it didn’t feel like it. After a Miami summer, the cold, dry air made her shiver even under her heavy coat.
Capturing the Alpha (Shifters of Nunavut Book 1) Page 22