“Naomi! What are you doing here?” the yellow-haired she-wolf’s voice asked behind me.
That was all the warning I got before I was suddenly tackled from behind.
But that was all the warning I needed. On instinct, my wolf turned me around, reversing our hold and pushing up so that the maximum impact would reverberate through me as we landed on the ground with her above me.
This explained why my anger and sadness suddenly felt so amplified. I had unknowingly been feeling her emotions, too.
“Naomi!” the yellow-haired she-wolf shrieked somewhere above us. “What are you doing?”
“Are ye crazy, then?” I asked, my voice pitched just as high. “Ye could have hurt yerself. Where’s —”
“Right behind you in a golf cart,”Sea pushed into my head.“Remember that bit about her being fast? Apparently, a wee bit of triple pregnancy hasn’t slowed her down any. We’re still puttering to catch up.”
“She told us she needed to hear your explanation for breaking upwith her before she could move on,”Dublin explained further.“But she jumped out of the cart as soon as she felt you ahead.”
Of course, they’d brought her here. I could already feel the explanation forming over our shared bond: two days of her tearfully insisting she had to hear it from me before Sea finally gave in and brought out the golf cart to catch up with the Wild Wolves pack.
“Did you really think you were going to get away with running away?” she asked with a merciless smile that put mine to shame. “I guess I should have told you what would happen if you ran. I will hunt you down. And then you, Eoin, and Aidan will take turns fucking me. Imagine how devastated your self-righteous ego will be when you beg me to let you go next.”
“Naomi!” the yellow-haired she-wolf shrieked again, her tone even more aghast.
Meanwhile, my cock stood up like a fating stone at the mental picture she’d put in my head.
But…
“They shouldn’t have brought ye here,” I growled between clenched teeth.
“Like I would’ve let them rest until they did,” she growled back.
“Did Sea and Dublin tell ye about the prophecy, then?” I asked. “The part where…”
“Yes, awesome, youleft.” She waved a dismissive hand. “Prophecy fulfilled. Now come back.”
Her logic wasn’t exactly unsound. But…
“That’s… that’s not how it works.”
“Wild, do you know how sick I am of the three of you telling me what I have to do? Listen, I had a life all planned out, and you tookthat away from me because of some ancient prophecy. Then you let me fall in love with you without telling me you’d disappear because of this Cursed King stuff right after our heat moon.”
When she put it that way, even more shame and guilt coursed through me. “Naomi, I’m sorry.”
“No, sorry isn’t good enough!” She glared down at me. “I’m done putting up with your bullhockey — and I’m especially,especiallydone with you deciding how my life’s going to play out.”
“I was only trying to leave without hurting ye any more than I already had,” I began to explain.
But Naomi kept going as if she hadn’t heard my miserable excuse for leaving. “So here’s our new deal. I’m designing one of my own, and it’s your turn to get cursed. By me.”
She bared her teeth at me and let me feel the brunt of her rage over our bond as she declared, “I will not go to Dublin and split myself between the city and the secret kingdom like Eoin and Aidan planned.”
“Naomi, hold on,” I tried to sit up, but she grabbed my wrists and slammed them back into the cushiony stuff the secret kingdom called grass.
“New plan. I’m going to stay here in the secret kingdom and study all this sci-fi-level tech you’ve somehow acquired. You and Aidan are going to stay here with me and Eoin. Aidan can rule his company and kingdom remotely, and you can use his car to catch up with your pack whenever you need to oversee a ritual.”
Her body was warm and solid as she pressed me down, her grip on my wrists firm. The grass beneath me felt cool and soft, a strange contrast to the fire in her eyes as shespoke.
“Your new curse is that you have to live happily ever after with Aidan, Eoin, and me. Your new curse is that you will have to forsake everything you’ve been raised to believe. You ended my life as I knew it, so now I’m ending yours as you knew it. That’s my first freaking proclamation as queen of the Irish Wolves.”
I stared at her. Eyes blazing with tears. Completely dismissive of our ways and the nearly five hundred years of history that preceded her.
