Woodland had closed themselves off after the death of this alpha prime. He vaguely remembered hearing about an orphaned Scion, but the pack had largely kept to themselves. Over time, the stories had softened to the occasional whisper around a campfire.
He left the cabin and took the steps from the deck to the ground in one stride. Trinity had picked up Jax, and the boy lay his head against her shoulder, his eyelids drooping. The sight clutched at Matthias’s heart, squeezing it to the point of pain. He halted, just for a moment, then continued.
“We need to talk,” he said, his tone sharper than he’d intended. She looked at him with resignation, and nodded. A sadness cloaked his she-wolf, something he didn’t like to see, and wanted to dispel, but that could only happen if she opened up to him. He suspected there was much more to the story than she’d first told, and he couldn’t help the curiosity, the compelling fascination he had for this one woman. He wanted—no, he needed to know more about her. He believed, though, that he could know her for a thousand years and still be surprised by her.
Jax blinked and sat up, yawning. Matthias turned to the guardians who followed him. “Go join the camp. Take Jax with you. Don’t let him out of your sight.”
Warwick nodded, stepping forward, his arms raised. Jax went to him without argument, nestling into the warrior’s shoulder. Warwick withstood the temptation for two seconds before dipping his head to rest his chin on the boy’s hair. He gave a little nod to Matthias, and Matthias relaxed. Warwick wouldn’t let any harm come to the boy. Not ever again.
The three guardians trudged off into the encroaching night, and Matthias turned to face Trinity. She looked tired. Morose.
He tilted his head to the side. “What is this place, Trin?”
She shifted, hugging herself tightly round her waist. “It used to be the vacation lodge for the alpha prime and his family.” She cleared her throat. “The former alpha prime.”
“Your father.’
She flinched, then spied the frame in his hand, and nodded. She held her hand out, and he gave her the frame. Her lips curled as she traced the faces of her parents.
“What happened, Trinity?”
She shook her head, and he could see the tears shimmering in her eyes. “There’s nothing much to tell. They died. End of story.”
He could almost feel her pain, and regretted prodding her, but this was like a still-bleeding cut for his she-wolf, and he couldn’t stand her heartache. He didn’t know how, but he wanted to help her. Needed to help her.
“Tell me about it.”
She laughed, a harsh sound unfamiliar to her throat. “Sure. Let’s open up old wounds. I’ll tell you about my family’s pathetic story, and you can tell me what happened to your wife. We’ll toast marshmallows. It’ll be fun.”
He took her hand and led her to sit on the steps of the cabin. For a moment she resisted, but he clasped her hand with both of his, as though pleading with her. She reluctantly sank to sit beside him.
For a while they looked at the vista. Trees gave the little cabin a sense of intimacy, of seclusion, but through the trees there was a stretch of dark, and then the glitter of a thousand stars reflected by the river. They sat there for a while, and despite the words unsaid, Matthias found some contentment sitting next to Trinity in the silence and beauty of the night.
“I forgot how beautiful this place can be,” Trinity whispered after a while.
“Did you come here often?” He was curious about his she-wolf, about her childhood, her family—what formed the brave, frustratingly loyal woman who sat next to him tonight.
She nodded, and her braid slid over her shoulder. “Every chance we could. After my mother died, not so much, but we still got up here occasionally.” She gazed out into the darkness, and he could sense the unease in her. “Dad loved this place.”
“Is he buried near here?”
She shook her head, raising her legs to the next step so she could rest her chin against her knees. “No. He was burned. He has no grave.”
Matthias’s eyebrows rose. It was unusual for a lycan to be cremated. Most preferred to become part of the earth, to help provide nourishment for future generations. “What about your mother?”
Trinity shook her head, and rose to her feet. “Buried in a cave-in. Her body was never recovered. She’s part of the mountain now.”
He watched as she jammed her hands into the back pockets of her jeans. It drew his eye to her butt, the long line of her slender legs, and he felt the draw of her yet again. He shook his head. It was unlike anything he’d felt before, this compulsion to make sure his she-wolf was safe, protected. Happy.
At the moment, she most definitely wasn’t happy, and that made his heart ache as much as hers. He realized, though, that he couldn’t very well expect her to share if he didn’t show that he was prepared to meet her halfway.
“My wife and son died five years ago,” he said quietly into the night. It had been so long since he’d talked about them, his voice felt a little rusty on the subject.
Trinity turned to him. “Your son? Oh, Matthias, I’m so sorry.”
He smiled sadly. “I was out doing a border run one night.” He stood, too, nervous energy coursing through him as memories resurfaced. “A coven of witches visited. One of my pack had fed on one of their witches.” He grimaced. The woman had died a grisly death. “Tore her up pretty bad before he killed her.” He cleared his throat. It was still difficult to speak of, all these years later, but for some reason, the pain didn’t feel quite so raw as when he’d told Jared the same story three years earlier.
He walked a short distance, and Trinity fell into step with him. They left the dark shadows of the cabin, and the painful memories, and strolled through the stand of trees in the direction of the river.
“What happened?” Trinity asked quietly.
“They killed my pack.”
She halted, but he kept walking.
“Wait, they what?” she ran to take her place at his side.
“They killed my pack. Every single one of them that they could find. They cast a spell—it killed them from the inside out, attacking our beast first.” He still occasionally had nightmares about that night, but admittedly they were becoming less frequent. He remembered waking up in the woods, naked, sensing that something was wrong. He remembered the sheer panic when he couldn’t shift, the sensation of his wolf’s claws shredding him from the inside out, frustrated at not being let loose. He’d run. He’d run so damn hard and fast, but he’d still been too late. He’d found the bodies of his family, his wife and young son dead in their sleep, his parents, killed just outside their cave. His brothers were all murdered, too, although it looked like they’d at least managed to put up a fight, and had been slain instead of dying from the inside. All of them gone in one night.
“The Marshlands Massacre,” she whispered in shock. “I remember hearing about it. All of the wolf tribes were in shock.” She drew in a ragged breath.
“You lost everyone you loved,” Trinity said in a whisper, and he turned to look at her. In the light of the waxing gibbous moon, her eyes looked like dark, luminous pools, and he could see she was trying to hold back the tears. She was so sensitive, this one. So empathetic, so caring. He could see a deep recognition, though, a complex understanding. She wasn’t merely uttering platitudes. She understood, her eyes sharing his loss, his pain.
“My father killed himself,” she told him, her voice full of the sorrow she wasn’t permitted to speak of any other time. “Reid Caldwell-Woodland killed himself.”
His eyes widened at her confession, and she almost wished she could un-utter the words. She couldn’t remember ever saying them before.
He cupped her chin, his gaze sad yet tender. Maybe it was the tenderness that gave her the courage to continue. She blinked. But she wouldn’t cry. No. She’d wasted
enough tears on that sad chapter of her life.
She turned her head, and immediately missed the warmth of his touch, but it was that touch, the gentleness, that could be her undoing. She wasn’t used to touch. Even now she struggled to stand upright and not hurl herself into his arms, have their bodies touch from neck to knee.
“My father loved my mother so much,” she began, “When she died, he pined for her.” For several months, he’d sat in relative silence, occasionally giving Trinity a distant smile when she tried to draw his attention. She remembered she used to climb up onto his lap and chatter away for hours, then would be called away by one of the elders. She didn’t think her presence even registered with him. “He was grieving so much, he kind of lost himself for a while.”
She cleared her throat, trying to get rid of the sandpaper that felt like it had lodged there. “I was nearly six when he finally started to take notice of things. His guardians had kept the pack going, had tried to step in to help pick up the slack.” She eyed him. “Ten months, Matthias. For ten months my father pretty much forgot he had a daughter, a daughter who loved him, and who’d just lost her mother.”
She shook her head when he stepped toward her. “No, I get it. The heart wants what the heart wants, right? You can’t control mates—they’re a law of nature. Even when he ‘returned,’” she said, using her fingers to parenthesize the air, “he put all his energy into governing his pack.” She’d shared a cave with a man who largely ignored her. Whatever energy he had, he devoted to running the pack. When he came home it was to sit in silence and stare at the stone wall.
“I tried to be so good for him, to make him proud,” she whispered. “I tried to talk with him, to accompany him. That didn’t seem to work. Then I tried to give him some space, some time to heal. That didn’t work, either—although, toward the end, I thought maybe there was some life, there. It was so gradual, like a fog lifting. He’d started to smile again. He let me sit in on some of the leadership meetings.” In increments, he’d warmed. There were times where she’d almost thought he was trying to make up for lost time. And then there were the darker times, when he slid back into that black hole of grief. She thought he was getting better, though, She remembered coming home from exploring the caves, and he’d waited for her. They’d played cards. “There was one night... I remember thinking, hurray, he’s back. He’s really back. We chatted. He could see me, like really see me, and he was talking to me.” Her smile stuttered. “Then a few weeks later he came up here for a break. Said he had some serious thinking to do about the pack.”
“Trinity...” Matthias said, reaching for her. He grasped her hand. The contact was like a hijack to her brain, flipping her from sadness to an awareness of her senses. The feel of his skin, rougher than her own, against her hand, his clean, heavenly male scent, the silvery play of light and shadow as it danced across the muscles on his chest. Her heart rate kicked up a gear, a steady, regular throb that echoed through her body. She tried to focus on the conversation—tried to use the customary pain of her father’s death to quell the awakening.
“He was supposed to be here only for two days. After four, Rafe came up and found him floating in the pool. He’d jumped from the ledge halfway up the waterfall.”
Matthias made a rough sound in his throat, a rumble that she could almost feel, trembling through her system. Oh, God. Not now. “There’s no chance he fell?” Matthias asked softly. Hopefully.
She shook her head. “Rafe also found a note. It was apparently pretty clear.” She’d never read it, though. Rafe believed it would be too painful, and possibly send her into her own spiral. She sighed. “For a werewolf to take his own life, that’s serious. When an alpha prime does it, it’s like he’s abandoned his pack. He betrayed them. He left them—willingly.” She winced. “The pack was hurt by that.”
“Is that when they closed access to Woodland?”
She nodded. “A suicide by an alpha prime would make the pack look weak. My father’s death was covered up, and Rafe successfully fought for the Primary.”
“What happened to you?”
She sucked in a breath, caught his scent and held it for a moment, letting the mossy, pine and sexy male musk coil up inside her, then exhaled. Concentrate, damn it. That mysterious warmth from earlier was spiraling from her core outward, and she refused to surrender to the heat Matthias had mentioned earlier.
“You have to realize, Matthias, my pack were grieving. Their alpha prime had discarded them. I had been living with them. They didn’t know if maybe there were some mental health issues in the bloodline, if suicide ran in the family. They were battling shame. And if I didn’t succumb to whatever melancholy had struck my father, how could I share living quarters with him and not notice his decline? And if I did notice, why did I not alert anyone?” Her teeth gnawed at her lip. “When you lose someone like that, you go over everything in your head—what did I miss? How could I have missed it? How could I not know how my father was feeling, or what he was planning?” She lived with the guilt every single day. If she did manage to push it from her mind, even for a little while, the accusatory glances and cold shoulders of her family quickly reminded her.
“My God, is that what they’ve been telling you?” he breathed, incredulous. “They would put the suicide of a grown man at the feet of his fourteen-year-old daughter?”
“They were afraid, Matthias.”
“How can you forgive them for their neglect? You lost both your parents, and they shunned you. No wonder you didn’t know about imprinting. Nobody guided you into adulthood. They deserve to die for that, for the pain they caused you. What did your new alpha prime do for you?”
“He allowed me to stay,” she whispered, trying to make him understand. “But it wasn’t all bad. There’s one pack mate, Dalton. He still talks to me—possibly to his detriment. Rafe won’t let him promote to a first-tier guardian on account of his relationship with me.” She tucked a strand of hair behind her hear. “So you see, some have still made the effort. Matthias, they are my family, and they were hurting. They still are.”
Matthias put his hands on his hips, his mouth a harsh slash as he tried to control his rage. His green eyes showed shreds of gold as anger flared inside him. Anger for her. “What they did was cruel, Trinity. Woodland’s barbaric behavior has to stop, surely you can see that? Assassinating alpha primes, neglecting their young—as a lycan, it pains me to see a pack behave this way.”
“They don’t need war,” she said, anger rising in her, along with that delicious heat. How could she possibly feel this outrage, this fury, and yet, this attraction, this desire? “Can’t you see? They are wounded, Matthias. When their alpha prime killed himself, it was as though he broke the pack. He betrayed their trust. He left them vulnerable. He made them feel unworthy. I know how that feels—can you imagine what it’s like on a pack scale? He left them weak. For thirteen years, we’ve been hiding that from the world.” No matter how much they fought, or how much territory they gained, nothing quite got rid of that shame, that toxic belief that they hadn’t been valued by their alpha prime. For an individual, it was demoralizing. On a pack level, that effect was amplified, and it took so much longer to heal.
“So...killing another pack’s alpha prime is what? Overcompensation? Acting out?”
She pressed her fingers to her forehead. “No, it’s self-preservation.”
Matthias turned away for a moment, his broad shoulders tense in the moonlight. “You still defend them.” He shook his head, and for the first time she recognized disappointment in his tone, and it nearly crushed her.
“What about your pack, Matthias?” she argued.
“Alpine have done nothing to deserve this from Woodland,” he snapped.
“I didn’t mean Alpine. A member of your pack mistreated a witch. Did you cast that pack mate out? Did you hate him for it? Or did you forgive him?”
&nb
sp; Matthias whirled around, and she saw the rage flare in his eyes. “Do not dare to compare Woodland to my pack,” he said fiercely.
“Why? It doesn’t sound like they were perfect,” she snapped.
He stepped toward her. “Leave my family out of this,” he said succinctly.
“I’m just trying to point out that my loyalty to my family is not weird, it’s not born from desperation. I love them, and I forgive them, and I have hope for them.”
Matthias strode up to her, his anger and exasperation so evident, with his fisted hands, the muscles in his neck and arms flexing as he gathered control around him. He stood there, his chest rising and falling with his breaths, then he sighed roughly, pulling her to him, his arms wrapping around her.
“You’re too damn good for them,” he said in a low voice, and kissed her.
Chapter 14
All the emotion, all the turmoil, all that bundled up energy Matthias had whenever he was around Trinity exploded, sucking away his restraint. He nipped at her lips, growling softly. Her hands rose to his chest and he sighed in pleasure at her touch.
She melted into him, her mouth opening beneath his. His tongue swept in to play with hers, sliding and sucking. He cradled her head, frustrated that he couldn’t run his hands through her locks. He traced the end of her braid and tugged at the elastic, removing it from her hair.
He moaned in satisfaction as he threaded his fingers through her curls, gently destroying the braid. Trinity arched her back, breathlessly kissing him back. He loved the feel of her body against his. He covered her hands, encouraging her to touch him, stroke him.
She responded, caressing his chest, cupping his pectoral muscles. He gritted his teeth. Her touch on his skin was arousing, every stroke of her fingertips ratcheting up the tension, testing his control. He started to tug at her shirt, drawing away from her lips to pull the garment up over her head.
“I’m so going to need some new clothes,” she panted as he dropped her shirt to the ground.
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