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He scratched his chin. “Yeah. I haven’t read it. I could have. It’s only that it’s hard to know how I even feel about her these days.”

“These days?” I said. “What changed recently that made you feel differently about her?”

“I don’t know. She died.” He glared at me.

I glared back at him. “This is what you wanted to talk to me about?”

“No.” He looked away.

Then, we walked in silence.

Maybe I had things I wanted to say to him. I turned to look at him. “You’re a fucking asshole.”

He glanced at me, his light green eyes dancing. A little smile quirked his lips. “Yeah. I guess so.”

“You guess so? You married my best friend. You got her pregnant. And there was this point where you were with both of us, and then you picked her and told me to get over it.”

“I was in a difficult position, Leo,” he growled. “You have to give me that.”

“Are you going to say that you never chose me, that I was forced on you, and that you wished you’d had some time to sow your wild oats or something—”

“No,” he said. “That wasn’t the difficult position. The difficult position was that I had a responsibility to her, that I had been an asshole to her, and that I was in love with you.”

“How were you an asshole to her?” I was aghast.

“Well, I forced myself on her and forced my bite on her—”

“Oh, that’s ridiculous. You said she begged. Are you taking that back now, because—”

“She begged, but she was in heat, and I don’t think she was entirely in her right mind—”

“What?” Now, I was yelling.

“And it was different with her and me,” he said, and he was getting quieter as I was getting louder. “With you and me, we were always in sync. My alpha was what your omega wanted, needed. Just instinctively, we fit together. When I was with her, there was none of that, and she whipped me into a frenzy. It was brutal for her.”

I was speechless. “So, now you raped her.”

He shrugged. “Fuck if I know. Maybe everything my whole life has been nothing but things I’m not entirely capable of consenting to, and you as well. This alpha-omega stuff, this scent-match stuff, this wolf stuff, it’s force. It’s against our will.”

“It is not. I did not want you against my will.”

“We never had a chance to have a will,” he said. “To have a preference, real desire—”

“Oh, that’s bullshit,” I said. “Desire isn’t like that. It’s not a choice. For anyone, wolf or not.”

He considered that.

I stopped walking.

He kept going for a few steps, and then he stopped, too. He turned back to look at me, and we surveyed each other, and I thought about all the times I’d looked into those light green eyes of his, all the times that mouth of his had been on mine or on various bare parts of my body.

My breath hitched.

His body language shifted, and I knew that just that—just thinking those unbidden thoughts—had changed my scent and he’d caught it. It had affected him.

I had forgotten about that. I used to be used to it. I’d do my best to keep my thoughts clean enough that I wouldn’t trigger him. Trigger us both.

Was he right? Had all of that just been forced on us?