by Odessa Lynne
“He meant a lot to you.” Rick’s words weren’t a question. A question would have been pointless. Cam was pretty sure the tremor in his voice was giving everything away.
“He might not have been of this world, but this world is an emptier place without him in it. That’s all I know.”
“He was your mate. Your affection for him is a tribute to his character.” Rick’s claws had started to peek from beneath the dark material of what passed for fingernails on the wolves’ fingertips. “But he is dead and he wouldn’t want you to be without a mate.”
“He didn’t go back to the ship after the heat. He was concerned that my father would use what leverage he had left and demand that his alpha reject his claim on me. You’re an alpha. Would you have split us up?”
Rick’s eyes glittered with a measure of regret, but he nodded, once. “You were too young.”
Cam’s mouth tightened but he returned Rick’s nod. “Maybe I was. I don’t care. I don’t know if I can ever love somebody else the way I loved Henry. Maybe I’m being a fool to think what we had was so damn special.” He took a deep breath before he continued. It didn’t help. His voice still came out too thick. “But it felt special.”
“It’s possible . . .” Rick stared at Cam, his gaze flickering over Cam with a longing Cam didn’t understand.
He wasn’t even sure why he thought it was longing that had etched itself around Rick’s eyes and mouth, but he believed it with an unwavering certainty.
“He might have been your true mate.”
“True mate,” Cam repeated. The words had a familiar ring to them. “He said something like that once.”
Cam closed his eyes and tried to remember, but the words eluded him. “It didn’t make much sense. I remember that much. He spoke in the wolves’ language—your language—and it sounded almost like a song. So beautiful when he said it.”
He remembered that day. He could almost smell the sweat that had soaked Henry’s skin after they had fucked. That had been the day he’d promised he wouldn’t let Henry regret mating him. Cam had made a lot of promises that day.
“He worried about it,” Cam said, “what it could mean.”
A soft shuffle made him reopen his eyes.
Rick stood in front of Cam, the heat of his body so close Cam could feel it. Rick had crossed the room so quietly Cam hadn’t even noticed. He had an odd look on his face, one Cam couldn’t decipher.
Cam straightened away from the wall. “I’m not done talking,” he said. “I want you to hear how Henry died. And then I want you to tell me how much you’re looking forward to having a mate who doesn’t know if he can ever love you. Maybe you’ll change your mind.”
“Your submission is enough.”
“What if that’s all you ever get?”
Rick leaned forward, his eyes closing and his nostrils flaring on a deeply indrawn breath. He reopened his eyes and pressed his hand against the door beside Cam’s head. His claws clicked against the metal. “Your scent steals my control and your submission gives it back to me in the same breath. The signs are clear. I won’t reject the universe’s gift because I don’t understand it, and neither should you.”
“I’m not sure we inhabit the same universe.”
“The diviners spoke to me when I came of age. The message they gave me wasn’t what I wanted to hear. But I’m starting to recognize that I won’t understand my fate until I’ve accepted it.”
“What’s that mean?”
Rick shook his head. “Another time.” He brought his other hand up and caged Cam against the door. They stood face to face, Rick breathing slow, deep breaths, while Cam’s heart started to thud heavily.
Rick’s gaze flickered over Cam again. “The healing technology is sweetening your scent. I find it more appealing every time you return.”
“You smell like you haven’t had a shower in a few days.”
“That’s probably the pot in the corner. Your companions are afraid to come into the room and remove it.”
Cam glanced to the side. He pushed forward, assuming Rick would move, but he didn’t. Cam let himself fall back against the door. Since the cell was actually just a room with a heavy, locked door, there were no bathroom facilities.
“I left you a bowl of clean water and a washrag so you could clean all that dried blood out of your hair and off your face. You seem to have used it.” Cam unfolded his arms and reached up to flick aside a strand of Rick’s relatively clean hair.
Rick’s mouth curved, giving Cam a view of his sharp eyeteeth. “An unsatisfied heat brings on a fever and causes us to release scent meant to attract a strong mate. If you were one of my people, my scent would encourage your submission.”
Cam snorted softly. “That irresistible, are you?”
“I’m one of Traesikeille’s strongest alphas. There are many people who’ll envy your status as my mate.”
“You’ve been having a rough week, then, huh? Almost getting killed by such a small group of humans, getting captured. Getting locked up. I would’ve thought a strong alpha could handle a few humans with old guns.”
Rick’s claws screaked against the metal of the door. One of Cam’s cochlear implants overcompensated and a dull roar filled his left ear. His nerves tingled and his skin prickled.
“I’ve allowed this,” Rick said, “for reasons of my own. You’ll understand soon enough.”
The warning chilled Cam. He believed Rick, even though he had no reason to.
And then, between one blink and the next, the world went dark around him as the signals from his eye implant stopped. A piercing pain hollowed out his ear.
The whole world tilted and spilled right out from under him.
Chapter 18
Cam woke up to a bright light in his face. He flinched and squinted, and Tom’s russet beard came into focus, so close Cam could see the individual strands of red and gold mixed in with the brown.
“Whoa,” Cam said, mouth dry and voice cracking. “Little close there, buddy.”
Tom backed away, lowering his hand, but he didn’t take his keen hazel eyes off Cam. “You have no idea of the trouble you’ve caused us these last three hours.”
Cam pushed himself up on his elbow. One glance over Tom’s shoulder told him he was in the medical room, on the cot tucked up against the wall—only the cot was no longer against the wall, but had been pulled out into the center of the narrow room and Tom was sitting on one of the stools next to the counter opposite.
Tom twisted his arm around and dropped something onto the counter behind him. The clink drew Cam’s eye. Black casing, small, rounded. He made the connection. Tom has been looking into Cam’s eyes with one of the small cameras that had been made for just that task.
“What’s going on?” Cam asked, pushing himself fully upright.
“I’m . . . not sure.” Tom wiped his palm along the top of his thigh and studied Cam.
Cam recognized concern when he saw it. His back twinged when he moved, but he pushed himself around on the cot anyway until he was sitting on the edge. “That doesn’t sound good.”
Tom didn’t do anything but watch silently.
Cam rubbed the back of his neck and eyed Tom, wary of Tom’s unusually sober behavior. “You’ve got something to say, go ahead and say it.”
“First . . .” Tom’s cheek had a tic that usually only showed up when they were facing a mission that had almost no chance of success.
“Don’t get tight mouthed on me now.”
“Fuck,” Tom said, with feeling. He smacked his hand on his thigh and surged to his feet. “I always get stuck with the shit work. Look, Ava had to shoot your wolf. She couldn’t get to you and—”
“What the fuck?” Cam said. He hopped off the side of the cot, feet hitting the cold floor with a heavy thud. He almost instantly lost his balance and had to grab for the side of the cot. If Tom’s hands hadn’t grabbed him, he would have sprawled out on the cold floor on his ass.
And the floor was most defin
itely cold. Startled, he glanced down. Someone had removed his boots and socks.
Tom’s hands gripped Cam tight. Tom eased Cam backward to the edge of the cot.
Cam sat and then knocked away Tom’s hold. He gave Tom a steady, hard look.
“You tell me what the hell’s going on, and you do it now.”
Tom inhaled deeply and nodded. “This is all your fault anyway. You had to shut off the surveillance in the cell. Your wolf had started to bang on the door and roar like he was about to take the thing apart with his bare hands. No one even knew you were in there. Turned out you’d passed out or something, maybe had a seizure. We didn’t know. Your wolf wasn’t being very cooperative. Ava got scared when she realized there was no way she was getting in, so she shot him.”
Cam clenched his fists against the cot.
“He’s not dead,” Tom hurried on. “But it wasn’t exactly a single shot either. You know how little use that would’ve been. He went into a rage when she tried to come in and take you, and she panicked.”
Cam made himself take a deep breath and start counting his heartbeats. One . . . two . . . three, four . . . each thud seemed closer, faster than the last.
Fuck that. He bit off a curse.
He started to push himself to his feet again, but Tom shoved him back down onto the cot with determined force.
“You do that and I’ll let you fall this time, maybe break that crooked nose of yours again.”
Cam scowled at Tom. “There’s not a damn thing wrong with my nose.”
“Tell that to your face.”
Cam scowled at Tom and reached up and rubbed the bridge of his nose. The car accident he’d had when he was young and stupid had left behind a few reminders. Cam couldn’t say he wasn’t grateful. The sight of his nose in the mirror had kept him from making a few other big mistakes over the years, if only because of the memories of how damn sure he’d been he could make it through that curve.
Measured recklessness had its place in almost every mission he’d been involved in over the last five years. Blind overconfidence didn’t.
“He’s healing. I swear. It’s just . . .”
Cam finished for Tom. “Without access to repression drugs, the healing is causing him to overreact to the scent of humans.”
“Something like that.”
“That’s exactly what’s going on.”
“He’s strong. Dangerous. He’s destroyed the cell’s cameras. He clawed them right out of the wall.”
“He needs to fuck.”
Tom coughed, then turned his head and stared at the screen lying flat on the counter behind him. “Yeah. Probably.”
“He won’t want to fuck anyone but me right now, but he won’t be able to resist the pull of any human scent if someone gets too close.”
“No one else is going near that room. You can’t go back in there either. Not until I know what’s going on with you.”
“I won’t leave him in there suffering.”
Tom closed his eyes for a second and turned back to Cam. “Also . . .”
Just the tone of Tom’s voice was enough to tighten Cam’s stomach.
“Mig’s starting to have some trouble. I don’t want to take a chance that you’ll be locked up with that wolf if—” Tom smacked his thigh, as if he couldn’t bring himself to say more.
“Don’t you fucking tell me he’s not cured.”
The look on Tom’s face told Cam he wasn’t going to hear what he wanted to hear.
Cam’s voice shook. “He was fine just a few hours ago. Absolutely fucking fantastic, he said.”
“He’s just a kid. I’m not telling him—”
Cam lurched forward, grabbing Tom’s collar. “Then you should have told me, as soon as you suspected something was—”
“Cam!” Ava’s voice whipped through the air. She knocked aside one of the two empty stools blocking her path into the narrow room and was on them in seconds. She grabbed Cam’s fisted hands in her own. “It’s not Tom’s fault for not saying anything. We just realized it a few hours ago. When we went looking for you, you’d already locked yourself in with the wolf.”
Cam unclenched his hands and let go. “He was fine.”
“He was. It’s a complication. That’s all.” She swallowed and gave him a careful look. “You need to take him in. Lane gave us the location of the wolves’ den when he sent us the data from Jones. I know it’s asking a lot, it’ll screw up all your plans, but—”
“Fine,” Cam bit out. “Of course. I’ll take him in. Protect him until we get there and they’ll figure out what’s wrong and fix it. They won’t let a kid die just because . . .”
“They don’t even have to know about Rick.”
It took a few seconds for him to separate the two Ricks and realize what she meant, why her voice had a tremor in it.
Her brother had killed their children. So many young wolves . . . Why should they help save one of Rick’s sons?
Because . . . because Henry would have.
Cam clutched that thought close and tried again to stand up. He needed to talk to Rick about this. If he went into the den claiming to be Rick’s mate—and Lane had made it clear that there were people there who knew Cam as Lujan, leader of one of the northeastern renegade groups—the wolves would see him as an enemy. Rick had seen him as an enemy. Frankly, Rick might still think of him as an enemy in some respects. He hadn’t given Rick much reason not to.
Rick had mated him anyway.
Cam really didn’t understand why, still. But if he was heading off to the wolves’ den, he needed some way to prove he had a claim on them as Rick’s mate, so they would take care of Mig.
“No. No, no, no,” Ava said. “You’re going to have to wait. Let Tom figure this out. As soon as your wolf’s healed, he can take you and Mig there.”
“No,” Cam snapped. “He can’t. In the shape he’s in, without drugs, he can’t get anywhere near Mig. Even he knows that. I’ll have to go without him.”
Ava’s brow started to furrow.
“He caught Luis’s scent in the woods yesterday,” Cam said. “It’s why he wanted Luis gone. There’s no way to know if Mig’s crossed too far into puberty to be safe from the wolves right now. I won’t risk it.”
Rick had known the danger though, and his quiet words had been a warning to Cam. Cam had thought Ava would have understood too, but her dawning horror told him she hadn’t.
Until now.
“But he’ll have you there,” she said. “Why wouldn’t that be enough?”
“Can’t take that chance. If we got separated, or—shit, it doesn’t even matter. We don’t have any of the drugs. Can’t get them for days, if then. Lane might could get us some, but we’ve used him too much lately. He seemed to think the Jones thing would put an end to what he could do for us. There’s no fucking way I’m taking Mig anywhere with a wolf that doesn’t have access to the heat repression drugs.”
“For God’s sake, Cam, you can’t walk right into their den without one of them beside you. That’s just as dangerous. And to both of you, not just Mig.”
“I said no.”
Ava seemed to recognize that Cam wasn’t going to give, and she bit off a sharp, ugly curse.
Cam pressed his hand into the thin mattress, letting his weight shift. His stomach had started to churn and the room to spin, but he wasn’t ready to end the conversation until he’s settled things with Ava.
“You’re the one who mentioned this first,” he told her.
Her brown eyes glinted with a cold light. “I thought you’d be smart enough to take the wolf with you. I almost regret even bringing it up, knowing what you’re going to do.”
Almost. Meaning she knew as well as he did that for Mig’s sake, they didn’t have a choice.
“I can buy my way in with information about what happened at the recycling plant with Trevor. He was one of theirs, Rick made that clear. If I can convince them I’m Rick’s mate, everything’ll be fine.”
Ma
ybe.
But he kept that to himself and continued, “If not, I have Rick himself to bargain with. We have him, and I’m betting they’ll want him back. He’ll record a statement for me to take along, and if he won’t, I’ll take some of the video of him in the cell.”
“If, if, if,” Ava said. She dug her hands into the underside of her braid at the back of her neck and stared hard at Cam. “If you go in trying to bargain for that wolf’s freedom, they’ll think you’re nothing but a criminal.”
Cam smiled a humorless smile. “I am a criminal, sweetheart. You know as well as I do, if James finds out I’m this far into the protectorate, he’ll have to cut me loose. And I’ll let it happen, because I knew the risk when I started this. I won’t fuck over the only other people who really care about stopping the renegade groups just to keep myself from a little trouble.”
“A little trouble. You dumb shit, Cam. Take the wolf with you. You didn’t see the way he tried to keep the rest of us away from you when you collapsed. You can keep his attention on—”
“I’m not stopping in the middle of the woods somewhere when Rick’s heat comes on him again—and it will—so we can fuck. Not while I’ve got Mig with me. It’s not just once and done, Ava. They can fuck for hours.” He stared pointedly at her. “You watched.”
Ava’s chest rose with a deep breath. “Jesus. I’m not going to win this one, am I?”
“We’ll go alone, we’ll take the utility truck, and we’ll make good time.”
“Five years is a long time to wait for something and then let it be snatched right out of your hands.”
“I can do this for Mig and still make things work out in my favor. Trust me.”
“Jesus, Cam. If you screw this up, Luis might not ever forgive you. He worships you for what you did for him and Mig. He won’t understand if you get yourself killed.”
“If things go sideways, he’ll understand I did it for him and his brother.”
“He’s a kid. He won’t understand.”
“Give him more credit than that. I think you’re the one who has a problem with this.”