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“Oh, that sounds great! I’ll start looking into caterers and stuff. We’ll have to make sure everything is on the up and up in case local journalists come, too—”
Cole put his fingertips on my lips, and I blinked. “Sorry,” he said with a bit of an embarrassed laugh. “I’m not trying to be rude. I just know how you are—your brain will latch onto the first task you can lose yourself in and bury the actual problem. We can come back to all that. Let’s talk about the transition.”
I heaved out a sigh, and he put his hand back on my waist as I said, “Right.” I chewed on my lower lip and traced his collarbone again, making it a little point of focus and fixation while I shared these feelings that were so vulnerable. “I just…don’t want to feel alone or like I’m failing while I go through this whole thing. It’s already a lot to deal with, and if I feel like I’m messing it up while I feel like I’m sick as a dog, it’s going to be such a miserable process.”
He nodded and brushed his hand over my back. “One of the things I talked about with Ashton downstairs is how ass-backward our pack dynamics feel to him sometimes,” he said. “I think there’s a lot of unnecessary pressure we’ve been putting on ourselves. Expectations no one actually has for us.”
“That’s what Rosie was saying the other night when she stayed over. She said we were expecting too much from ourselves. But that was only one person, and I didn’t know if that really reflected the truth of things.”
“According to Ashton, the whole thing is supposed to be a give-and-take, for better or worse,” Cole said. “We support them, they support us. We betray them, they betray us. That kind of thing.”
“Yeah, that’s what Rosie was saying, too,” I said. “That it was good we were going out of our way to run things in a pretty egalitarian way, but we were also forgetting to take advantage of the support provided to us through the pack. But I also know you’re feeling a lot of guilt about the people having to rehabilitate, and I don’t want you to feel resentful of me for taking your attention away from pack members who might really need you.”
“Marley,” he said, cupping my face in his hand. “I would never, ever feel resentful about being a good husband to you. It’s one of my most treasured jobs in life, only second to being a father. You could never, ever, ever need me too much.”
“Are you sure about that?” I asked. “What if I need you almost constantly during that time?”
“Then we have an infrastructure and leadership hierarchy that supports that. And I’ll have an excuse to spend time with you while you’re going through one of the most important changes in your life,” he said. “Baby, don’t you know it’s an honor for me to fill that role in your life?”
My heart squeezed in my chest. “Really?”
“Of course it is,” he said. “You have been so supportive to me and my family, to the pack, since everything happened at the canneries. You kept people safe while I couldn’t. You’ve organized almost every major support system for the people who needed it in the pack. You’ve managed to keep your head on straight, and mine, too, while I dealt with the nightmares and flashbacks…even now as I still deal with some of the lingering fears and pains. It will feel nice to be able to return the favor, finally.”
“It’s not a favor,” I countered. “I’m your wife and your mate. I’m supposed to do those things, you know?”
“Exactly,” he said. “Just like I’m meant to do them as your husband. So, if your fears are about wearing me too thin, you can let those worries go. Because I want to help. I want you to lean on me and let me support you the way I did with Travis.”
I nodded, my jaw working a little.
“That’s not the only fear,” he said perceptively.
It wasn’t a question; he said it with unwavering certainty. Even after only being together a little over half a year, Cole could still read me better than anyone else could. Some may say it was because we declared ourselves mates or because he’d claimed me, but I knew it went beyond that. He just understood me like no one else could.
And knowing that, it was easier to share the thing that frightened me most about the whole thing. I knew now, or was reminded, that I could tell him everything, even contradictory information, and have him understand it without trying to play a game of gotcha with me.
“I know that this is dumb,” I said. “I know I’ve been fighting you tooth and nail on this the whole time we’ve discussed me becoming a shifter. But I’m really scared that the first injection will come with such a huge complication that there’s nothing the doctors can do, and I’ll die before we even really get to start our lives together.”
Cole became very still and very serious. Not in the way someone might when they were frustrated, but in the way someone did when they were deep in thought.
I looked up at him to see his eyes hooded and his expression a little sad. “I will do everything in my power to stop that from happening,” he said. “And…to be honest…I already have a back-up plan for it.”
“You do?” I asked, surprised.
“I…I honestly wasn’t going to tell you about it. But I knew I couldn’t live without you, and I knew in order for me to be the most supportive partner I could be in this, I would need to have my own failsafe in my back pocket if anything went wrong.”
My brow furrowed, and he sighed, sitting up from where he held me. He turned on the bedside light and opened his nightstand. He pulled out of the drawer a small vial filled with black liquid, and he handed it to me.
I sat up and turned the vial around until I found the label, feeling my stomach churn with nausea as I realized what it was.
“Why do you have this?” I asked him.
“Farrah gave it to me. Well, she gave me a few of them,” he said. “Some asshole at the cannery hit the kill switch on most of their files before we could get to them, so we don’t really know what’s in it or anything. I sent a lot of the vials off to various chemical testing facilities, but I kept this one…just in case the gene therapy goes really, really badly.”
I was still staring down at the vial and the label on it printed in blocky capital letters:
LC ANTI-SERUM
BATCH 79
