The Lone Wolf's Rejected Mate (Five Packs #3)(82)

Lucan and Fallon’s vehicles are parked down by the shack, but they’ve made themselves scarce.

It’s peaceful out here, but it’s also lonely, being able to see camp, but too far to make out packmates walking about their business or scent them on the wind.

Again, my heart hurts, thinking about all the years Darragh spent out here alone. I shift so my leg presses against his. His thigh tenses, but he doesn’t move.

After a few more minutes of quiet, he exhales, and like I’ve drawn a confession from him, he says, “I needed to build something where you’d be safe from the wolf. He can’t get up the ladder.”

The ache in my heart stings a little worse. “You meant for me to move up here?”

He growls low in his throat and stares straight ahead. “I didn’t know how to talk to you, so I just kept on making it bigger.”

I twist my neck. The crooked levels rise into the branches like something out of a picture book. The words “you could have talked to me” come to my lips, but for some reason, I bite them back.

He could have come by the cabin. He could have ripped his trauma open for me to see, so I’d understand, so I’d forgive him. So that maybe, I’d never look at him without pity in my eyes again.

The male who’d exiled himself to protect the pack, but who never left, who ranged the foothills protecting us despite everything—he could have sat eighteen-year-old me down and explained to the girl knee-deep in daydreams and her own unresolved grief that sometimes we cannot be other than what we are, even when it breaks our hearts.

That the past has claws. That it casts a long shadow. That its shackles feel unbreakable.

Would he have been able to make me understand?

I don’t know.

I don’t really know how I’m getting it now. It didn’t come over me all at once. There was no epiphany. But when I try to track it back, I think about how he never quite disappeared. I remember a hundred packages wrapped in white butcher paper with my name printed in careful block letters.

At first, I threw them in the trash. Then, I tossed them in the fridge with the rest, called it guilt, counted it for nothing.

I never questioned.

Because I knew about the past, didn’t I? I learned from my mother about its claws, its inescapable shadow. How impossible it is to carry your own pain and the pain of the person who hurt you at the same time.

But I understand now.

I wind my arm over Darragh’s and twine my fingers in his. Through the bond, I feel his tension seep away.

He couldn’t talk to me, and I couldn’t listen. A fated pair.

He coughs. “I was going to dig a tiger pit. With stakes, you know? But then I thought that wouldn’t be good. If there were pups. They could fall.” Darragh’s head bows as he considers the ground beneath our swinging feet.

“Pups?” Something quickens in my stomach, and it’s gone so fast, and I’m still so shaken from the past forty-eight hours that I’m not sure whether it’s excitement or terror.

He grunts and rises to his feet, offering me a hand. I take it. He helps me up and guides me through an arched hobbit door to a room with glowing wood floors and what looks like a homemade rocking chair, also polished to a shine.

“I thought this could be the living room,” he says. I rock the chair. It doesn’t squeak at all.

He leads me through a back door, up a pair of floating stairs to a platform with no walls, only a peaked roof and a carved railing. His battered trunk sits in a corner with a few crates and his rolled up sleeping bag.

“This is where I’ve been sleeping.” He doesn’t let us linger in this room, hurrying me on up a flight of circular stairs to a large room with a high ceiling. There are fairy lights wound around exposed wood beams, and with dusk beginning to fall, they make the space cozy and warm.

“There’s electricity?” I scan the floorboards, and yes, there are outlets.

“I had help with that.” He says it grudgingly, like he’d rather not admit it. “An outfit out of Moon Lake. When I finish the bath house and summer kitchen, they’re going to hook them up with plumbing, too.”

“There’s a bath house and a summer kitchen?”

“There will be.” Darragh shoves his hands in his pockets. “I’ve still got work to do.”

Darragh hangs back by the door, and I wander around, exploring. There’s a big brass four poster bed with no mattress and a dark oak bureau with a beautiful antique mirror. The silver backing has worn off in a way that would have sent eighteen-year-old romantic me into raptures.

On the far side of the bed, there is a stack of boxes. The instant I see them, my eyes prickle, my heart lifting like a balloon. They’re mine.

I sink down on the floor, cross-legged, and take the lid off the top box, already knowing what I’ll see.

It’s like a time capsule, everything as neat as I packed it. The embroidered wall hangings I traded a human woman for at the farmers’ market, one with every species of North American butterfly, the other with every variety of wild mushroom. The dried flower crown that Annie made me for my sixteenth birthday. My teacup and glass perfume bottle collections.

A hot tear overflows my lashes as my hands hover over my old treasures. It doesn’t feel like stuff I had a few years ago. They feel like artifacts from a lost civilization, the me before I got older and wiser, the me that knew things I can’t remember now, but wish with all my heart I could.