He wondered what her story was. Had her pack been so bad that any young woman would have wanted to leave it? If Meg was as revolted by him as she seemed to be, why had she agreed to mate with him and come so far for the sake of a fight she might not even win? What did she hope to get out of this, if she wasn’t doing it for Reeve’s sake? What was she willing to risk dying for?
He didn’t know, and he wished he did. If they could have talked to her, maybe they could have convinced her that this wasn’t worth it. Surely she didn’t have to fight alongside her mate if she didn’t want to.
She was obviously a lot more reasonable and empathetic than Reeve. But they might never get a chance to know more than that.
He had a hunch—a tiny one—that she was a little bit like him. She wanted a home. If that was true, then she’d just heard a whole crowd of people say that winning this fight wouldn’t give her what she needed. Would that matter?
Maybe. Or maybe he was wrong about the whole thing.
In any case, she was a wild card. Case just had to hope that she wasn’t secretly the greatest fighter the world had ever known.
Reeve was stripping his shirt off—purely, as far as Case could tell, for dramatic impact.
“Should I takemyshirt off?” Case asked Lydia in an undertone.
Her lips twitched. “No, we’ll just have the moral high ground of knowing you’re better-built than he is.”
“Are you ready?” Reeve called over. His voice was vibrating with impatience and, to Case’s disgust, an obvious bloodlust. He sounded almost turned on by the prospect of doing his best to rip them to shreds.
Case did his best to tune him out completely for right now. The fight would force him to focus on Reeve, but the fight hadn’t started yet.
“Give us a minute,” he said sharply. “You came here knowing you were about to challenge us. Lydia was hanging up the dress she was going to wear to her grandmother’s funeral. We need a second to adjust.”
“A second’s all you’ll get,” Reeve said, with the return of the sneer.
Meg looked away from him in disgust—but still stood her ground, her shoulders loose and attention sharp, her body clearly ready to shift.
A second probablywasall they would get. They couldn’t postpone this forever. Reeve and Meg wouldn’t put up with too much of a delay, and the pack deserved to not have an agonizingwait. But Case was going to take this chance to let the whole world narrow down to Lydia for what little time he knew he had left.
He ran his hands through her hair and kissed her full on the mouth, tuning out any sense of awkwardness from Reeve watching them. If he was wolf-whistling or hooting and hollering, Case didn’t want to hear it. All he wanted to know or think about right now was Lydia, and she kissed him back like she felt the same way.
“I love you so much,” she whispered. “You made my life so much better, Case, and if we get through this, I know it’ll keep getting better. You were right about the pack. They’re pretty great, aren’t they?”
“They are. And I love you too. You’re my home.”
“But a home you can take with you,” she said, with a sparkle in her eyes that he’d never gotten to see before. He hoped he’d get to see it again. “Where are you going to take me, Case? Where are we going to go first, after this is over?”
It was a beautiful question, and then what was even more beautiful to him—because it was even moreLydia—her practicality reasserted itself for a second over her fledgling romanticism:
“Well, we should probably go see your parents first so we can tell them you’re married and a werewolf, and I really do want to meet them. But after that.”
“After that,” Case agreed. He loved her so much he ached with it. He wasn’t worried about the fight or the future or anything else; all he could think about was his brave, practical, adventurous, gorgeous mate. “Well, I’ve got a couple places that are at the top of my list. You can pick whichever one sounds best for your first big outing.”
“I think I’ll like anywhere we go, as long as it’s together. But I’ll think about it.” She kissed him one more time. “Are you ready?”
“I think I’ll be ready for any fight we’ve got, as long as we go in together,” Case said. “To paraphrase somebody pretty great.”
He wanted to say again that he loved her, but there would never be a good time to stop saying it. They would have to win this challenge so he could keep saying it for years and years to come.
It was time for them to fight for their pack and their future.
He squeezed Lydia’s hand one more time and then, like Meg, fell into a relaxed, ready-to-shift pose.
“We’re ready,” Lydia said, lifting her chin. She lowered her voice and added to Case, “It’s going to happen f—”
Fast, Case completed as Reeve turned into a dark, wolf-shaped blur hurling itself in his direction.
He let his wolf take over, and he flowed into that shape, the ground coming up on him almost as fast as Reeve.
