“Yougetting overyour mate.”
“Yes.”
Trevor closed his eyes and ground his palms against them. “It’s like you don’t remember who you’re talking to.”
Of course he remembered. Trevor had been through an awful nine years of fading, his wolf gifts weakened over time, because he tried for Kelsey’s sake to…well, to get over his mate. But Malachi wasn’t Trevor.
When he dropped his hands to his sides, Trevor’s eyes burned like butane flames. “Will you listen to me? Not just hear me out but consider what I tell you?”
“Of course.”
“You don’t smell reactive, Mal. You smell bonded.”
That was impossible. His gaze traveled reflexively to his cabin.
“Yeah,” Trevor said. “And I’ve got some very recent wolf reactions for comparison. Aaron and Ezra both had a change-in-progress sort of scent. You don’t. You smell like the bonding’s already happened, like your wolf heart is knit to her. That uniquely heavy alpha-musk is all blended with citrus and ginger. And it’s the strongest quality of essence I’ve ever smelled.”
Malachi stood still and stared at his cabin as though he could glimpse her through the walls.
“Don’t you even want her?”
He snarled, the sound harsher than he’d intended.
Trevor gave a quiet bark of laughter. “Okay, good. So let me confirm, okay? What I’m smelling on you is powerful, and…I think you need her.”
“I don’t need a mate. William didn’t, and he was a good alpha, a strong alpha.”
“William wasn’t seventeen percent.”
A warning rumbled deep in Malachi’s chest. He couldn’t say why. His genetic makeup was known to all the pack; his eye color, six-foot-seven frame, and immense physical strength were easy giveaways, and anyway he’d lived here since he was eleven years old and William recognized him as the next alpha. Maybe he simply didn’t want Trevor to have a valid point.
“My genetics are irrelevant to the topic.”
“I would’ve said so too before I came up your driveway today.”
“If all you’re saying were true…” Malachi began walking toward his cabin. This discussion didn’t need to continue. “It would be in the lore.”
“Right,” Trevor said. “Because nothing has ever been left out of the lore. You could’ve just looked upfadingany time, gotten all the information you needed to help me years ago.”
“Fading is mentioned in the lore,” Malachi growled.
“Now that you’ve added to it in your esteemed role as lore-keeper. Before that it was mentioned in the vaguest way possible, sans any details that would have applied to me and Kels. So why couldn’t there be detail missing about top-class alphas too?”
A thunderstorm was building in Malachi’s chest. He felt no anger toward Trevor. Yet he did feel the driving need, like a painful pinching in his wolf heart, to keep the weight of his questions and feelings to himself. He had felt this way as long as he could remember. From a tiny pup he had known it wasn’t right to place burdens on others, not when one was born with the strength to carry them himself.
Not that Trevor saw it as a burden. His scent spoke only of concern and resolve. But the pinching sensation in Malachi’s heart remained.
“I’m telling you,” he said. “As alpha, as a man, as a wolf. If fate had already knit us together, I would know.”
“So…” Trevor stepped out in front of him and crossed his arms. The glint in his eyes became a tease. “You would know…from experience? You’veknownso many times in the past, so many women who didn’t quite work out—?”
The thunderstorm burst. Malachi’s wolf voice tore from his chest.Would never be unfaithful to April, would never—“I am her wolf,” he roared. “April’s wolf. Only April’s.”
At Malachi’s first roar, Trevor’s arms dropped to his sides; he bowed his head and stood motionless, the instinctive deferential response of a wolf before his alpha.
Quietly, letting himself hear his own words this time, Malachi said, “I’m April’s wolf.”
Trevor kept his head down as he nodded, but relief layered into his scent.
