Werewolf Wedding(40)

I can’t fall into that, not again. I’ve been there once. It took a long time to claw my way back out. I can’t, not again, not with her in it this time. Before it was just wolf business, just pack bullshit. With my mate on the line, I won’t do it again. I have to be a leader. I have to keep myself in check.

Something rushed past him in the darkness, whipping Jake’s fur with the tailwind it created. Shortly, two other unseen things rushed past. He caught a scent, but it couldn’t be – not with his brother howling in the distance.

The next rush wasn’t of something going past, it was of something ramming straight into his ribs.

White hot pain shot through Jake’s body as he collapsed to the side. He skidded a few feet through the leaves before he managed to catch the leaves beneath himself with his claws and flip back to his feet. He shook his head to clear the cobwebs.

Six eyes, four of them pale yellow and one of them dark, stormy blue, glared back at him.

Dane was taller than Jake by a few inches, and broader across the chest. They shared the same silvery-gray fur, but the look in Dane’s eyes was wild as he looked back and forth in the darkness. His two goons were dirty looking, their eyes squinty and close together.

“I won,” Dane hissed. His voice was rough and sand papery. The sound stung Jake’s ears an instant before Dane’s heft slammed into his side again. “I can’t believe throwing my voice fooled you.”

Jake, dazed and with a swimming head, fell to his back, his shoulders pinned hard to the soft, spongy ground below. Something dug into his side, which he realized was the mouth of one of Dane’s idiotic looking goons.

“Takes three of you to hold me down,” Jake hissed. “I guess you can call that winning.”

“I call whatever gets me to come out on top ‘winning’, brother. Maybe you should start to think the same way.”

Jake shook his body, trying to free himself from the weight of the wolves on top of him. “No!” he shouted. “That’s not what this is about, Dane. This is about the pack, it’s about what’s right!”

Dane snorted right into Jake’s face. “What’s right is what the strongest decides is right. How have you stayed alive this long in this world and not figured that out? How is it that the pack is willing to trust someone as limp and weak and pitiful as you with their safety?”

Jake snapped his jaws at his brother’s face when he drew nearer, but Dane was just out of reach.

“See?” Dane said, in a drawling, taunting tone. “Even you, even the stoic, peaceful Jake resorts to violence when he thinks it’ll work. I’m just wasting my time. It doesn’t matter anyway. I have her, Jake. I have your precious little Delilah. And she’s mine.”

Rage coursed through Jake’s body. He went tight with a spasm, and shook so violently he managed to shrug off Dane’s two goons, and get out from under his brother. “What do you mean?” he hissed, though all Dane had done was confirm his fears, he still couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

“You heard me,” Dane answered, growling. “And it’s too late for you. I already claimed her. She accepted.”

Jake snapped again, but Dane pulled away, a grin curling his lupine lips as he danced away. “That’s what you do, brother, you lose. It’s your nature. Losers, you know, they always lose.”





-14-


“Not quite the way I imagined meeting the family.”





-Delilah


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“What have you done?”

There was an old woman talking to Dane, who I didn’t recognize. And really, she wasn’t that old, I just have a tilted perspective. Actually, all of my perspectives were tilted then. I could hardly keep my feet under myself for more than a few minutes. Every so often my equilibrium would go all squiggly and I would have to brace myself against something. Eating was difficult, and riding in a car wasn’t very fun.

When thoughts did come, they were confused and weird and usually about Jake. I missed him so badly I can’t even explain it. I’ve missed plenty of people – my grandma when I was a kid and left her house after staying the weekend or my parents when I went off to college – but this was different. This was intensely physical, like it wasn’t just my heart and my mind that missed him, but my entire body ached for him.

I wasn’t entirely sure what he was giving me, but whatever it was kept me in a daze.

I shook my head, to clear the cobwebs. Dane was laughing at the woman who I’d come to realize was his stepmother. I hated the way he was mocking her with every word he spoke almost as much as I hated what he’d done to me. Every word out of his mouth just dripped with venom and bile and hate, which didn’t make much sense because this woman was really friendly, and had made enchiladas.

“Dane!” she snapped. “Don’t you understand what you’re doing? You trapped that woman! That’s not a mate, that’s a slave!”

“Eh,” he shrugged, smiling as I involuntarily fed him a tortilla chip. “Ten of one, dozen of another.”

She cocked her head slightly, apparently just as confused as I was. “Don’t you mean—?”

“Shut up,” Dane snapped at me. “No one asked you to talk. Get more guacamole on the next one.”