The Lone Wolf's Rejected Mate (Five Packs #3)(42)

I hook the chain to the metal loop in the collar and padlock the other end to the ring in a twelve-foot steel post I buried ten feet deep. After what I did to her, I slept chained for years until I was sure I wasn’t going to shift in the middle of the night.

“Yeah, that’s the idea,” Killian says, lifting himself up onto the high branch of a black walnut tree. He sits there bare-assed, swinging his legs like a pup. He’s expecting a good show.

“Your wolf knows we’re just sparring, right?” the kid asks me as he squares up.

“Not at all.” My wolf wants to kill everyone. He has no concept of “sparring.”

The kid grins like I made a joke. When I don’t blink, it fades into a look of dawning horror. He flicks a glance up at Killian in the tree. “Why do I have to do this, Alpha?”

“Because you’ve got the yips. That’s why you can’t win a reconciliation match. You know the best thing to do for the yips?”

The kid shakes his head as he gets into his fighting stance.

“You scare ’em away. Like hiccups.” Killian gives me the nod.

I focus on the tight hold I keep on the wolf every second of every minute of every hour of every day, and like Atlas when he handed over the world, I exhale in profound relief as I release the reins. Always ready, the mad wolf inside me launches himself into the world. He bursts through my bones and muscle in an explosion of blood and fur.

The second before I recede entirely, Killian calls down from his branch, smug, eyes sparkling, “Can you smell Mari on the kid? I can. I can smell her all over him.”

My roar is submerged in my wolf’s.

The kid’s scream hovers in the air as his wolf takes his skin and immediately turns tail.

My wolf is quicker. He slams into the smaller wolf’s side, sending him cartwheeling across the clearing. The end of the chain jerks my wolf short, so he leaps and snarls, snapping at the air. The kid’s wolf wisely stays outside the radius of the chain, whining, head bowed. A bared neck does nothing to appease my wolf. To him, it’s an instigation.

She bared her neck that night. Not intentionally. I’d touched one of her curls, and I guess I’d tugged her head to the side. My wolf saw the pale skin, the pulse flickering under her ear, and he wanted to rip out her throat. He threw the image into my mind, rendered in perfect detail complete with the scent of copper and the sound of blood gushing from a gaping wound.

My wolf rages at the evening sky, fighting to get free, to kill the defenseless wolf trembling yards from us, lowering his chest to the ground in a hopeless bid to appease it.

“Come on! Get back in there.” Killian chucks a black walnut at the kid’s wolf. “He’s chained up for fuck’s sake.”

The kid’s wolf scoots backward in the dirt.

My wolf lunges for him, choking himself off with the collar. The force of each leap causes the chain to swing him backward through the air. He slams into the ground and bounds back onto his feet, over and over, because my wolf is unrelenting. He’s a curse.

If the kid’s wolf comes within range, he doesn’t have a chance in hell. I reach out to see if there’s a possibility of taking our skin back, but there’s no handhold, no crack. My wolf won’t be satisfied until he bathes in blood.

There’s nothing I can do but wait for an opening.

Killian leaps down from the tree. “Come on. Where are your balls?” He nudges the kid’s rump with his foot. The kid’s wolf flattens himself even closer to the ground.

Killian sighs and a wicked grin breaks across his face. He strides to the exact point in space where the chain jerks my wolf back and stares unblinking into his slavering, snapping fangs.

He ignores my wolf’s mad howls, speaking low and clear. “I bet you hate that this kid gets to hang out with your mate every day, talking with her, laughing with her. Smelling her. I bet it fucking kills you. And I bet this wolf here doesn’t care about anything but ripping the kid’s throat out. And you know what else I bet?”

Killian’s smirk widens and his eyes gleam. “I bet if you killed this kid, little Mari would cry. So I bet when I set you free—I bet that you’re not gonna kill him. What do you think?”

I roar, but it’s nothing against my wolf’s raging howls.

“Let’s find out, shall we?” Killian winks and feints left in human form. My wolf lunges. Killian flipshifts and darts past him, shifting again, and with a shout, rips the post from the ground and hoists it like a javelin across the clearing. My wolf is flung through the air behind it, dragged by the collar, and slams into the ground, tangled in the chain.

Killian bounds for his tree and scrambles back up to perch on his branch.

As my wolf struggles to free himself from the snarled chain, I fight him, haul back on the reins, but there are no reins, not when he’s wearing our skin. There’s only his will versus mine, and he’s subject to no constraint, no compunction, no qualms.

He wants to hack the small, quivering male wolf huddled in terror across the yard into pieces. He wants to tear down the world. Break everything breakable. Rip the civilized veil off the world until it’s as blood-soaked and chaotic as it really is, underneath.

Mari will cry.

It isn’t a plea. I’m not trying to reason with him. I gave up on that decades ago. It’s a passing thought. Nothing more.