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What lay behind the vampire's eyes? They were so flat, someone without Rand's senses would have thought there was nothing beneath. But he sensed more to Cai than that. Which just pissed Rand off worse.
"I'm not going to give you any more of my story. I really can't. You can use my dick for a distraction, but not my family. I get that you think it's in the past and done with, who the hell cares, the wolf's story a fun diversion between hard-ons, but it's not like that for me."
For him it was two seconds ago, right now, all of it flashing through his head two, three, ten times a day. Except when he shifted. God, he wanted to shift. He was starting to feel wrong in his skin.
"Stay with me," Cai said quietly, a command but also something else. He rose and stepped back into Rand's personal space. When he caressed Rand's jaw with his knuckles, Rand clasped his wrist, but he didn't push away. Just increased the pressure. A warning.
"Why? Except for wanting to screw me as a human, why do you care?"
The vampire's gaze revealed something that surprised Rand, especially when he reversed their grips so he was holding Rand's forearm, bringing his wrist up to eye level between them. When Rand tried to wrest away, the vampire set his feet, meeting him with equal strength.
"This bugs me," the vampire said shortly.
The direction of his glance, the tightening of his grip just below it, told Rand what he meant. The vertical scar on his right wrist, remnants of a razor-sharp cut that had opened the vein, matching the one on his left.
"Well, don't let it." It took a hard yank, but Rand pulled his wrist away and stepped back. The churning emotions surged up out of the clogged drain, ready to drown everything. "That's my business, and it's done here. I didn't need you to save me, hunt for me or take care of me, but you did, all for a good fuck. Well, payment delivered. I'm done."
The vampire's jaw hardened and Rand tensed, ready for the fight he was sure was about to erupt. Instead, Cai's expression shuttered again, and he stepped back. "Fine. Take off, wolf."
As Cai spoke, Rand was already letting the shift have him, reaching for it as eagerly as a meth addict. The comparison didn't please him, but he couldn't think of an analogy to replace it. That was fine. Only his human part worried about that kind of thing. His wolf didn't do metaphors, analogies or self-analysis of any kind.
He plunged into the forest at a run, leaving the vampire behind, his addictive touch and toxic personality. But eventually the burn in his side and hitch in his gait, evidence of the healing still needed, forced him to slow. He kept moving forward, wanting to put as much distance as he could between him and the vampire. Rand tried to keep aware of game, but a search for food he didn't really need couldn't prevent the rest of the story from unfolding in his mind. Images that neither wolf nor human could escape brought him to a halt, and he stood, quivering, his mind caught up in what could never be left behind, no matter how fast he ran.
He, Dylef, Sheba and her pups had settled on a rural piece of land in the foothills of Tennessee. Rand didn't have a lot of funds, but Sheba and Dylef did, so they'd purchased a big rambling farm house with plenty of rooms. They were close enough to a town that Sylvan's pups, when they were old enough, would be able to attend the local school, learn about human society, develop human friends. Even preferring woods and wild spaces, most shifters knew familiarity and comfort with human society was critical to blend and have more resources to protect them.
Rand had never developed that comfort, though he was familiar enough. Dylef loved the human world, with its movie theaters, cocktail theme bars and art museums. Rand teased him about it, but Dylef had talked him into a few trips to indulge his interest. Rand hadn't found it as odious as he expected, but he still mostly did it because making Dylef happy made Rand happy.
To pull his weight financially, Rand did highway roadside mowing through a contractor. Dylef was a forest ranger with the National Park Service. He never failed to stir Rand's libido when he donned the park uniform. One night, Dylef had called him a badge bunny, joking that if he'd chosen to be a cop, Rand never would let him out of bed. In response, Rand had fucked him within an inch of his life.
Yeah, sometimes that give-and-take resulted in an outright taking. Dylef had been surprised at the roughness, but his response had said he wanted more of that from his alpha wolf. Way more. Rand wondered if they might have eventually ended up at one of those toy stores Cai had flustered him by mentioning.
They'd settled into that life for several years, and it was a nice life. Dylef and he had a wing of the house with a lockout door that was never locked, except when he and Dylef needed privacy. They didn't want Sylvan's young to stumble on them, since they were becoming way too curious about such things. Then one day, Sheba came to have a heart-to-heart talk with him.
"You were meant to be a pack leader, Rand. What happened that day with Grey..."
Sheba had dark eyes and shiny ebony hair. She was tall and slender, and her wolf was likewise light-bodied, long-legged and sleek, her fur a dark brown. When she and Sylvan had hunted with the pack, she'd been the fleetest, the one most likely to get in front of a deer, dart in and clamp down on the nose to help bring the meal down.
She was gentle with her pups, and a loving and firm matriarch to their family, small and unorthodox as it was. But Rand would never forget the brutal savagery she'd showed when they fought Grey. She had the heart of a warrior. She and Sylvan had been life mates. Rand had no doubt she'd shed a waterfall of tears for him, but except for right after they'd gotten away, she shared them with no one. She was the strongest female he'd ever met.
"You were meant to be a pack leader," he told her in amused response, but it was true. She could have been, if not for the simple fact that alpha male wolves were physically stronger than alpha females. No matter how much their human sides embraced tolerance and diversity, wolves were guided by practical animal instinct toward black and white decisions.
"You jumped into the fight the moment Grey...the moment he didn't accept Sylvan's capitulation. Same as I did." A shadow moved behind her gaze. "If you hadn't responded so quickly, the full pack might not have gotten involved, and we might have lost...more."
She removed her light wrapper against the evening's chill. He sat on the bed, so she surprised him by kneeling on the floor, tilting her head up toward him in a submissive gesture. "I know you haven't pursued a pack because you are too honest, and you don't want to put a female into the position of being your mate, when you couldn't love her as you believe you should."
Rand's brow furrowed and he took her hand, resting on his knee. "Come sit with me, Sheba. What's this about?"
She shook her head, remaining on her knees. "I'm petitioning you as my pack leader, Rand, because that's how I see you, and how I defer to you." A light smile touched her lips. "You may not recognize it when I'm scolding you about wiping your feet before you come into the house, but there it is. We're not mated, but you're the alpha now, to me and to Dylef. I won't love another again like I loved my Sylvan."
Her fingers closed into a fist on his thigh, her face becoming resolute. "I will be your mate. You, Dylef, my pups, and whomever we conceive together, will be our pack. Your pack. We need to form a strong family here, one that someone like Grey will never be able to threaten again."
He and Dylef had talked it over, and yeah, it made sense. He loved her and Dylef, as well as Sylvan's children. Yet he hadn't understood how much, or how such a love could etch grief on one's face and heart in permanent grooves.
After she'd lost Sylvan and they left Colorado, those lines had appeared on Sheba's face. Like a painting that had been redone over the original, so subtly that only someone who understood it would notice. But when they did, when they recognized it because they'd been there themselves, there was nothing subtle about it.
Rand broke back into a run, no matter the burning in his side or the pain in his leg. Maybe it would help. But the memories kept coming.
She'd become pregnant almost imme
diately, and Dylef had teased him about his virility. He'd offered Dylef the honors before it happened, but Dylef had only rolled his eyes. "You're the alpha," Dylef said dryly. "That's truth and instinct. I lay a paw on that female and she will rip off my dick with her teeth." He'd sobered then, nudging Rand. "It's you. You're our leader."
As Rand looked back at himself through that lens, he saw how young they'd all been. How fucking stupid. But none of them wanted to be at anyone's mercy again, and it had seemed like the smartest way to do it. They had time. Right? Wrong.
His children had been born the spring after she had that discussion with him. Four pups. It had been a remarkable blessing, her carrying Rand's first litter to term. She'd had three miscarries with Sylvan before it took.
Five years later, Grey found them again.
Through various communications with old pack members over the years, they knew that Grey had tried to pull the Colorado pack back together. He'd succeeded somewhat, through sheer brutality, and built the pack up, but his methods caused ripples of reaction from other packs. To most wolves, a pack was about family. To Grey, it was about conquest. Dylef had once called him Napoleon with fur, with grim humor. Given that a pack's territory was usually large, his ability to run afoul of trouble with other packs exceeded all expectations. When the area packs banded together and gave him the choice of execution or exile, he chose exile.
What they didn't know was that, in his frustration, Grey decided that all his problems had started with Sheba's snub and Dylef and Rand's defiance. With nothing to hold them in Colorado, he and his betas had started tracking them down.
Rand had underestimated Grey's hatred, how it fueled his willingness to travel all the way across the country to express it. While he already knew that Grey followed no protocols but his own, this time he broke almost every rule, using resources no honorable wolf would to resolve a dispute.
The only rule he didn't break, the one that allowed Rand to take him out, came far too late.
Rand couldn't outrun it. He skidded to a halt, swung his head and hit it against a tree trunk, hard enough to knock himself insensible. He didn't want to see it again, couldn't. The pups. God. His young. Sheba's. Dylef.
