Until now that he was experiencing it anew.
He was only vaguely aware of that separate part of himself, the part that was questioning why here, why now, why this memory.
He glanced around the fresh decorations, trying to make sense of the turmoil shaking him. He’d never spent much time in this place. His father had retreated here during times of peril for the pack, but he’d always returned to their family home. He supposed that was one minor detail Thomas Maverick Sr. hadn’t taken painstaking lengths to prepare him for: that his first task as packmaster of the Grey Wolves would be something as dull as picking out furniture.
Maverick dropped into one of the armchairs he’d chosen. His older consciousness sank into the familiar memory with ease, as if the memory were the present. Doing so was as simple as sinking deeper into the cushions of the armchair. He supposed the pack figured that picking furniture was all he could handle at this point in the wake of grief over his father’s death and the frenzy of expectation and tradition that followed thereafter. He’d been preparing for this moment his whole life, yet now that it was here, it seemed a little anticlimactic.
The entry door to the apartment opened with a loud creak.
He didn’t bother to glance over his shoulder, but suddenly he was speaking. It was his voice, his memory. They were words he’d once said, but he hadn’t recollected them until now. “I never wanted this. The role, the pomp and circumstance. I thought none of it would matter, but now that I’m here, you were right. His legacy, it…” He inhaled a long, slow breath. “It weighs on me.”
A moment of silence followed as he waited for James’s response, but it never came.
“You’ll be more than worthy.” The feminine voice that answered sent an immediate jolt of awareness through his body.
No.
He recalled the memory in full detail now, struggling to change its course and push past it to what the pack needed him to see, beyond this moment that he didn’t want his men or, more importantly, her to see, but he couldn’t.
Maverick stood and faced the door. Instead of James Cavanaugh, then high commander, standing in the doorway, he knew the face he’d find there.
“Sierra.” He breathed her name half as a question, half as recognition. That was the only person this young woman who was standing there could be. She had the same warm, honey eyes, the same golden-blond hair, the same curve of full lips, square jaw, and slightly upturned nose, and yet she was different; everything about her was different. Because this wasn’t a young girl who stood before him. This was a woman, with curves and hips and mouthwatering breasts that made him want to…
Maverick averted his eyes. What in the blazing fuck was wrong with him? Sierra was practically his sister, or at least he’d always thought of her as such…until now. There was nothing even close to sisterly about the thoughts running through his head or the suddenly raging hard-on he sported between his legs. Sweet Jesus, if Colt ever found out he’d even looked twice at her…
“Maverick, are you okay?” she asked. Her voice was different, too, no longer girlish and young but huskier and more…sultry. Fuck, there was no other word for it.
“Don’t you think you should put some…some clothes on?” he managed to sputter out. He sounded like a complete imbecile, which, at the moment, he probably was. He made some sort of awkward gesture to the sports bra and well-fitted workout pants she was wearing before he made the mistake of glancing up at her, just in time to watch her smooth a hand over the dramatic curve of her hip.
“Oh, I just came from the gym.” She shrugged as if he couldn’t tell.
He was well aware of that, considering he was trying hard not to focus on a tantalizing bead of sweat that trailed from her neck down into a crevice of her cleavage. Cleavage that had never been there before…
“Yes, and someone might…see you.”
“See me?” she echoed back. It sounded even more absurd when she repeated it. Shit, if he wasn’t making himself into a complete tool. She frowned. “I didn’t think I looked that bad.”
“You don’t.” He wanted to tell her she looked good, so good he didn’t want any other man, wolf or otherwise, to ever lay eyes on her again. The thought of anyone looking at her and even thinking similar thoughts to the array of scenarios running through his mind caused a feral growl to nearly escape his throat. He shook his head, trying to chase the thoughts away, before he waved a hand in dismissal. “Forget I said anything. I’m just surprised to see you, that’s all. I thought you were—”
“My dad,” she finished for him. A sly smile crossed her lips. “I had to argue my case pretty thoroughly to get him to yield his time to me, but as I told him, he’ll have plenty of time to bend your ear and give you advice now that you’ll be packmaster.”
“And that’s what brought you all the way back home? Giving me advice?”
Sierra was smart, wickedly so, and a fierce fighter to boot. From the time she’d been a young girl first able to give voice to her opinions, she’d made it clear that she wanted nothing more than to be a trailblazer—the first female elite warrior the pack had ever seen. She’d spent her whole life training for it, despite her father’s half-hearted protests, even to the point that for the past few years, she’d been off serving in MAC-V-Alpha, a shifters-only special ops team that, for all intents and purposes, didn’t exist on paper. He’d waited for letters from her and brief visits home with bated breath.
When she left, she’d still been a girl, barely a day over eighteen, but now…he couldn’t imagine what advice this she-wolf, this woman had come to give him.
“I guess you could call it advice.” She paused to consider that before changing the subject. “Did you mean what you said when I came in? That you don’t want to be packmaster?”
He wasn’t certain how to answer that. He was going to be packmaster, whether he wanted to or not. It was his birthright, his duty, his destiny as he’d been told so many times before. It had been since the moment of his birth, and yet…would he have chosen it for himself?
He wasn’t sure.
“I don’t want it to change me,” he confessed. “My mother always said it changed my father, and the way she said it made me think…”
“That she didn’t like the change it brought about in him?”
He nodded.
“For what it’s worth, I think it will only change you as much as you let it.”
“I don’t know that I’ll have much of a choice.” Not when that choice would be between his own selfishness and the lives of those he cared for. From somewhere distant, he was vaguely aware that statement had proved truer than he’d known in that moment.
He swallowed the lump forming in his throat and forced himself to turn away from her, focusing instead on straightening a nearby frame on the wall. A portrait of his father.
Just his father. Alone.
He was vaguely aware that in the true memory, his younger self hadn’t been able to turn away from her, which meant perhaps he could gain control, curb this memory for the better.
Before it revealed too much…
“So what piece of advice brought you all the way home from basic training? Must be a doozy.” He sounded so much younger, even to his own ears. Now, he would’ve grumbled a vague response. He wouldn’t have bothered to ask her or push further.
Because as a young man, he hadn’t known better.
He hadn’t yet learned of all the things he couldn’t have.
Though he was about to.
“Well, I guess I’m breaking tradition again, because it’s not really advice as much as it is a…confession.”
His breath caught. He couldn’t bring himself to breathe.
Older him wanted to keep looking at the portrait, to save her the embarrassment of her brother, all her fellow warriors knowing the secrets between them, but try as he might, he couldn’t stop him
self.
He turned toward her, the hopeful look in her eye and the visible blush on her cheeks more obvious than if she’d said the words outright.
She cared for him…or she once had. At least until…
She inhaled a deep breath. “I wanted to tell you that I—”
The door to the apartment flew open, causing them both to jump as her father came striding into the room. “Time’s up.”
Sierra blinked at him, shaken by the sudden intrusion on what she’d clearly intended to be an intimate moment, before she gathered her wits and glanced down at her watch. “It’s been less than four minutes. You told me I had—”
“Plans have changed.” James’s words were spoken with the calm, steady authority of a soldier who didn’t allow room for questions. Not when the pack was at stake. In retrospect, it was a tone so like what his oldest son would later adopt that it was almost eerie.
“But…” Sierra glanced back toward Maverick as if hoping that he, too, would protest.
His older self would have. He wanted to hear everything she had to say, everything he regretted never hearing when he had the chance, but his younger self had been too intimidated by James’s presence and the weight of the crown soon to be laid upon his head.
Of everything he was supposed to do. Of all he was supposed to be.
James nodded toward the door again, a silent order.
With her indignant huff, Sierra’s hands clenched into fists, her obvious embarrassment clearly driving her from the room as much as her father’s order. As she left, she paused near the doorway, casting a quick glance toward him.
A part of himself, even then, had been vaguely aware that’d be the last time she’d ever look at him that way, as if there was hope for something more between them.
That hopeful look pierced him deeper than any blade that had ever wounded him.
The moment passed as quickly as it came, leaving him with an aching feeling gripping his chest. Sierra left, pulling the door shut behind her. As she did, Maverick felt himself stiffen.
No. If allowing her former feelings to be broadcast to the other elite warriors of the pack hadn’t been bad enough, this would be worse. He fought to go after her, to change the course of the memory and escape the harsh reality of James’s next words, but he couldn’t.
Not without coming back to himself completely. Not without risking everything. The pack. The intel. His own life.
Monster, his current conscious hissed.
“Did something happen?” The grim look on James’s face put him on edge.
“No.” James shook his head. Though the high commander’s tense stance relaxed, the tone of his gaze remained dark. “But I couldn’t allow that conversation with my daughter to continue.”
Maverick shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Sir, I…”
James shook his head, his tone shifting back to stern command. “You no longer address me as ‘sir.’ I may be your senior by more than a few moons, but you are alpha now.”
Maverick swallowed hard. “James, I know I’m older than Sierra, but…”
“It’s not about the age difference, Maverick.”
The use of his name surprised him, even now as it had then. Since the moment his father had passed, James had referred to him as nothing other than Packmaster. He knew it had been meant to reinforce the inevitable changes that followed in the flurry of his father’s death, but the sudden reversion to his given name caught him off guard.
It was a reminder of everything James was and had been to him. His father’s high commander and friend. To Maverick, a role model, a surrogate father that often had replaced his own. His own father had been too consumed by his duty to the pack to play that role to him.
Or too consumed with the power that had corrupted him, Maverick’s awareness whispered.
Maverick struggled to reroute the memory, to mitigate the damage of the words about to come.
James gripped the back of the armchair, his fingers flexing over the fabric of the chair. “You can’t choose Sierra as your mate.”
Maverick sputtered. “I—”
James raised a hand. “Have more respect for me than that. I’ve known a long time that was where the two of you were headed. I may be an old man to you, but she’s my daughter, and I know the way you look at her. But for the sake of the pack, you have to choose another.”
Maverick remained silent, unable to find the words, though inside he was shouting, snarling. With every ounce of his being, he urged the memory away, trying desperately to push beyond his past before the memory progressed too far.
To a place he wasn’t certain he could come back from.
James dropped his hand from the armchair, as if accepting Maverick’s lack of outward protest as a sign of his acceptance. “Your mate will be Rose Everleigh.”
“Rose?” The name felt as wrong on his tongue then as it did now. He’d barely exchanged more than a handful of words with Rose. She was quiet, unassuming, practically demure. There was nothing wrong with her, but she was…
Everything Sierra wasn’t.
James crossed the room, gripping the door handle as if he not only anticipated Maverick’s acceptance of this reality, he expected it. “She’s the cousin of Alexander Caron, the young wolf who will be packmaster of the Yellowknife Pack.”
Their Arctic wolf brethren in the Canadian north.
“Marrying her will cement an alliance with their pack. With the Wild Eight’s power growing every day and the vampires constantly at our heels, it’s in the best interest of all of us that we maintain as many allies as we can get.”
All of us.
The weight of that phrase didn’t escape him.
He had more than his own happiness to think about.
He opened his mouth, but still the memory persisted.
No.
Maverick tore through the veil, fighting his way back to himself. He shifted into human form, abruptly coming up from the water depths with a harsh gasp. The other elite warriors lay in various states across the cave floor, having clearly been jolted from the sudden and premature awakening. From appearance, no more than a few seconds of time had passed, yet in his mind, it had felt like an eternity.
An eternity of fighting, hoping, praying that none of them saw or heard the words that had been about to come.
He slicked his hair back, throwing the water from his nape as he gripped the long strands at the base of his skull. Fuck. The intel. They hadn’t even gotten close, but if he’d held on any longer, they would have known, she would have known, and considering their agreement…
His gaze darted toward where Sierra had stood only moments before. She lay on the cave floor in wolf form, the gold of her wolf eyes swirled white and cloudy.
She was still there, locked in the memory, though the rest of them had always been forced to exit when he had, which meant…
“Sierra,” he breathed.
He didn’t think. He tore through the water, rushing to her side.
Having come to, Wes swore from beside him. “Shit,” he said, looking toward Sierra and clearly realizing that something was wrong.
Terribly wrong.
As Maverick reached her, he gripped her by the scruff. He’d shake her awake as her alpha, as her protector, if that was what it took…
Before he could do so, a harsh grip on his shoulder tore him back.
Blaze growled. “The chip is working. If you pull her out now, then…”
Then they would lose everything.
He snarled at Blaze, snapping his teeth even though he was in human form and refusing to listen. Lethal warrior or not, the action instantly drove Blaze back into his place in the pack hierarchy. In the quivering reflection of the water’s edge, Maverick saw the bright intensity as his own wolf eyes glowed. There was no point in trying to hide it f
rom them now. They all knew.
The message in the single look he gave them all was clearer than the words he’d whispered in a painful, dark memory.
I love her.
Or at least, he once had. Long ago.
He wasn’t certain he was capable of the emotion anymore.
But he felt it then as he once had years ago and maybe always had, even if he couldn’t have her any more now than he could then. He’d be damned if he risked her life for anything. But the risk wasn’t to the pack.
The only risk was his own.
He turned toward Sierra, pulling her into his arms by the scruff of her fur as he dropped to his knees, the words of her father echoing in his head.
Love is something a packmaster can’t afford.
He gripped her hard by her thick gray fur. He knew that now. He’d learned that lesson, perhaps more intimately than any other lesson he’d learned in his life. The moment he’d lost Rose, his one jilted chance at happiness.
My daughter deserves better than a life with a man who will never be able to choose her.
Sierra did deserve better, and so had Rose.
Your life and the life of the pack are inextricably linked.
Which was why though he now held Sierra in his arms, wanting to shake her awake, as his calloused, ranch-worn fingers worked through the coarse hair of her fur, he was unable to do so.
She deserves better than a man who will never be able to put her first.
He’d known that then as he still knew that now.
Monster, his internal critic hissed.
And if you do love her, James’s voice echoed, you’ll remember that.
Throwing back his head, Maverick held Sierra unconscious in his arms as he released a long howl, a haunting, pain-filled sound that rang and echoed off the walls of the cave. He would remember that lesson, now more than ever.
Because if he didn’t, it would be more than her life at stake.
Chapter 13
There was no such thing as mercy when the pack’s she-wolves were on the prowl. In her mind’s eye, Sierra was in the forest, hunting for the insurgent. She was close now. So close she could practically smell him, taste his filthy blood on her tongue. She rounded a tree, sword in hand, but suddenly she wasn’t alone anymore.
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