Up close, it’s sometimes hard to remember why I go to such lengths to steer clear of these people. And it would be so easy to simply drift into the familiar, the expected, here. It would feel good. It would be celebrated.
And then,I remind myself sharply,you’ll look around one day and realize that you’ve made a whole life that has nothing to do with you.
Mates of kings have status, but they’re still just mates.
Wolf packs are about the males. That’s the way it’s always been. That’s the way everyone thinks it always will be. Females are good for sex, breeding, and raising the young. They are known for tempests in teapots and other such “dramas” that the males can dismiss. Condescendingly, of course.
I learned a lot of words and phrases for this kind of environment when I was in college, but I quickly discovered that no one here wants to listen to a lecture from the one female around who doesn’t have to follow the rules.
Yet,my uncle Ezra said one summer, his gaze hard on me.You don’t have to follow rulesyet, girl, because Ty gives you too much leeway. That won’t last.
I pretend I can’t remember how satisfied he looked, in advance, that a comeuppance was en route. Better to promote family harmony than the alternative, which I sometimes think might explode out of me like a comet when I least expect it.
My mother lives on spite, but sometimes I think I’m made of rage. At least we have that much in common.
Johanna Hemming rises from where she sits, the widowed mate of a celebrated high-ranking lieutenant who died in a skirmish before I was born, everything about her elegant and chilly though most wolves run hot. Even the hair that cascades down her back, inky black and straight, seems like a rebuke of my many excesses and betrayals. Not to mention my waves and curls.
She kisses each of my cheeks in turn, but I’m close enough to her that I can see how cold her gaze is. The kisses are for show. They’re for the rest of the pack, not me.
“I hope you plan to stop embarrassing us tonight,” she says as she pulls away. She sits down on the smooth, flat stone behind her and nods to the stone beside it, but it’s not an invitation. It’s an order.
And she’s doing it to humiliate me. Because she and I and every other wolf in the Rogue Valley know that she doesn’t hold rank over me, whether she’s my mother or not.
This is the bloody, beating heart of all our problems.
If she could control me, she would have, and long ago. But I was Ty’s, not hers, and that’s always meant that only he can tell me what to do. Johanna has never liked the fact that, as far as she can tell from my lack of a crown, he indulges me endlessly.
Little does she know what prices he exacts for his patience.
There are some things even notoriously free and open and casually sexual wolves don’t share.
I remind myself that in college, I didn’t just learn how to beat humans at their own game. I also learned that the way to do that best was to remain calm above all things, and not to sweat the small stuff.
So I sit. I let her head be higher than mine, because I know it makes her feel important.
What I also know is that it makes me look like the bigger person for allowing this to happen. It makes me look like I can’t be bothered to engage in power struggles, suggesting I have better things to worry about—and also that I’m not the least bit concerned about my status.
This makes me seem even more powerful, and I know it.
My degree was in political science and business, but it might as well have been in strategy.
“I’m sorry that you feel embarrassed,” I murmur once Johanna has finished pretendingnotto look around to see who might be witnessing her little power play. When my aunt offers me a beer, I take it. The night all around us is cold and littered with stars, but here on the hill, it’s hot. I can feel the sweat on my skin, and when I prop the beer bottle on my thigh, I can see the ring of condensation it makes against the faded denim of my jeans.
“The moon is nearly high,” my mother says, as if that isn’t something we can all feel like moon-shaped timepieces inside of us, ticking away.
Johanna is an imperious woman. In her skin, she terrifies the humans. In her fur, they mostly die of heart attacks before she gets around to biting them. Male wolves still sniff around her, looking for a way in—but though she’ll run, she rarely lets them catch her. She hasn’tchanged her form yet so I let my gaze move over her tattoos, full sleeves on her bared arms and that raven on her throat. I can’t see them tonight, but I know that they’re all over her back and legs, too.
I have my own tattoos, incantations and wild magic pressed into the skin we only wear some of the time. Before the Reveal, humans interpreted this as threatening, no matter how many tattoos they sported themselves.
These days, they can tell who we are by the way our eyes look in the light sometimes, like gold. And all of our usually wild hair. And ... the way we are.
Reckless by their standards. Outlaws then, monsters now. I guess it shows.
I sneak a look across the fire toward Ty. He’s big and brawny, all of that dirty-blond hair that’s always a little bit messy, and that beard, and when he moves he has a swagger that tells everyone and everything in a ten-mile radius that he’s the alpha. He doesn’t have to say a word. He just is.
Smart people have always given him a very wide berth, but me? I’m either running to him or away from him, but there’s never that much space.
He catches me looking and, for a moment, there’s a pulse of that blistering heat between us. I feel it curl all around me like he’s pinning me to a bed again from across the top of this hill.
