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Chapter 14
Lucien
“Whom did you lose?” Meira’s tender words touch me more than she might ever imagine. Meira stands there, pulling her mauve torn dress around her body and clutching the sheen fabric at her chest.
She stares at me, waiting for my soppy story. We all have one in this godforsaken world. They call us survivors, but that’s not what we are. We’re the unlucky ones who get to see what it’s like living in a rundown world that wants us dead.
“It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it. I shouldn’t have said anything.” I lick my lips and start picking up the loose buttons out of the greenery around us. I ripped her dress, so it’s the least I can do.
“I lost my mother,” she starts, her voice shaky. “I was fourteen when they attacked the settlement. Only I survived, so I know how it feels to be left behind.”
When I stand and turn to her, she’s right next to me, her eyes heartfelt and glinting in the sunlight. “My mama was all I had left in the world,” she says. “And I was forced to live alone in the woods, every day finding a way to survive.”
My throat tightens and my mouth goes dry.
“How are you still so nice and put together after all of that?” I ask. “I still have nightmares of the things I’ve seen. I still try to tell myself that things might be back to normal one day. That’s how I try to survive, by lying to myself. Now you tell me that’s not fucked up.” I glance up to the sky, blinking hard. Cataline, my soulmate I’d lost to the infected, has stopped visiting my dreams, but the ache of being ripped in half has never left me. It reminds me that nothing is forever. That getting too close is a disaster waiting to happen. Maybe I was reckless and desperate, maybe too much time has passed to remember the ache I escaped so long ago.
I glance down at her hand on mine, at the thin healed scar from my inner wrist to my elbow.
Meira reaches out and her gentle finger finds my forearm. It comes with a surge of adrenaline, of pheromones, of the raw, primal instinct that drives shifters.
I have my suspicions that she has no clue how deeply imbedded a mating is. How her life will revolve around her mate’s, and even being too far from them will be painful.
“You can talk to me,” she murmurs.
I slide my hand into hers, our fingers intertwined, and draw her into a walk. “That goes both ways, my little wolf. Now, how about we go get you washed up and then eat, because I could eat a horse. Then we can talk late into the night. How does that sound?”
She tosses me a cute sneer, like she doesn’t believe we’re going to talk all night, but maybe this is my chance to be open with my past. To get her to talk more about her sickness, as I suspect that might have something to do with why her wolf remains stuck.
“Well, is that ayesto my offer?” I ask, ignoring the part in my head that’s telling me I ought to speak to Dušan sooner rather than later.
But when Meira pauses to look at me while standing under a fern tree and the wind rips open her dress, revealing her delicious naked body, my heart hammers in my chest.
I quickly grasp the material and pull it back over her perfect curved body and she holds it in place with her small hands.
“What would happen if everyone in this pack found a way to become immune to the undead?”
Her question takes me off guard.
“Like, you know… imagine everyone living freely with no fear of the infected,” she says.
My thoughts go straight to the X-Clan, who have technologies that not only help Omegas mate with X-Clan Wolves, but ensure immunity against the infected. “Have you heard stories about the X-Clan?”
She shakes her head. “I’m thinking how many more lives could be saved. How going into the woods to hunt shouldn’t be fraught with danger.” She shrugs. “I don’t know. I’m just thinking out loud. Stupid thoughts, really.” I detect a hint of annoyance in her voice.
“You have a beautiful heart, Meira. And you want to know my honest thoughts?”
She nods eagerly, looking at me expectantly.
“If such an elixir existed, the battle over control of it would end in bloodshed.”
She stiffens and her smile dissolves as she realizes how easily such power could lead wolves to war.
Shadows crowd under her eyes as she glances down and nods her head. “I’d like to think wolves are better than that, wouldn’t you?”
The vicious fights I’ve seen between shifters for the single position of Alpha of a pack, the backstabbing in the hierarchy, the pain so many cause to get ahead is not indicative of a society who’d work in harmony. Under a strict rulership like Dušan’s, it’s possible, but it makes our fortress a target for every pack out there. We’d need a place that makes us untouchable.
“Maybe, and I really hope you’re correct,” I answer. “First, we need to find this cure, right? Let’s head inside.” We stroll through the woods within the settlement grounds, Meira staying especially quiet. I have so many things to ask her about her past, about things she likes, and we have time to get to know each other now.
