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Chapter Eighteen
Maxim
We grab cheeseburgers in a small town off the highway and then drive south on a country road and backtrack west for twenty minutes, hoping to throw any pursuers off our path.
By the time we reach an even smaller town with nothing but a gas station, an ancient post office, and a tiny motel that advertises “free cable” on a flickering sign, the sun has set and I’m wishing we’d ordered extra burgers—even though they would have been cold by now.
As we carry our few belongings into our clean, but faded room, my stomach snarls like a cat trapped in a corner.
Willow turns to me with a half-smile and an arched brow. “Guess your first solid food in a couple days went down okay, then?”
I shake my head, still struggling to come to terms with the fact that my torture probably lasted no more than twenty-four hours total. Thank the stars Willow got me out when she did, or I seriously doubt my sanity would have survived even a week with Gray. “I feel like I could eat the station wagon,” I reply, “stained upholstery and all.”
She sets the duffel bag the women at the halfway house gave us on the small table by the windows and unzips the top. “Then I guess it’s a good thing I grabbed a few things at the gas station when we stopped to brush our teeth, huh?” She pulls out a bag of crinkle-cut potato chips, a couple of browning bananas, a tin of mixed nuts, and a package of those pink, plastic-looking snack cakes I haven’t had since I was a kid.
Immediately, I want to kiss her.
But that isn’t anything new, I’ve wanted to kiss her since the moment I woke up to find her standing over my torture bed and even more so since we bought toothbrushes at the gas station, and I was allowed to scrub the taste of fear and pain from my mouth.
But I don’t know if Willow is open to that at this point.
So, instead, I say, “You are the smartest and best woman I’ve ever met.”
She laughs. “That’s quite a compliment, considering some of the women on your team.” Her smile fades as she sits down in one of the table’s chairs.
I settle into the other and reach for the bag of potato chips.
“Speaking of the women on your team,” she adds. “Do you think Cam’s gotten to Hermione?”
I shake my head. “I don’t think so.” I pause, then amend, “At least he hadn’t before I was taken. At our council meeting, she seemed as confused by the other packs’ lack of response as the rest of us. She has family in Boston and even they were icing her out.” I devour a giant handful of chips and swallow before adding, “That should have set off alarm bells that this was something more than just shifting alliances. I should have realized there was something supernatural going on.”
Willow opens the tin of nuts. “Don’t be too hard on yourself. Everything’s clearer in hindsight. Like with Kelley. I should have guessed what she was up to the second I saw you strapped to that table, but it took a while to connect the dots.”
My jaw clenches. “I had a horrible thought, actually. About that.” My stomach cramps, but I don’t stop eating. My body is working hard to heal all the damage it sustained, and it demands food—now—no matter what my emotions have to say about it. “You don’t think they can use Diana for the ritual, do you? To become their queen?”
Willow’s face pales, but after a moment she shakes her head. “No, I don’t think so. I don’t think just any old mate locked in a basement would do. I think it has to be one of the brothers from the prophecy. And Bane’s already mated to Kelley, and Diana is his sister. Even if Kelley managed to get Bane locked up in the pit, she’d never be able to force Diana to marry him or work the ritual. From what I overheard, it sounds like they need the sacred items I took, as well as the sword, to make that happen and conception is probably involved so…”
I keep eating, even as my throat squeezes tight. “Like the story Maggie told us, about the queen who fed on her unborn baby and her tortured mate for two hundred years.”
“Yes.” Willow shivers. “I’m pretty sure we’d already be living in that reality if Kelley were able to conceive. She said it was because I would make a better queen than she would, but…”
“And you would have,” I say, correcting myself as I catch Willow’s gaze across our junk food feast. “You will. If we can’t find another way, then we will take control and rule, Willow. And we’ll do a damned good job of it.”
Her brow furrows, and her gaze falls to the table. “But I…” She picks at the top of the package of snack cakes. “I don’t think we’re pregnant, Maxim. As soon as I left the tower, I went to a pharmacy and bought the morning after pill. And I took it.”
“Good,” I say stiffly, hating the reminder of that dark night, when I crossed lines that I never should have crossed. “That wasn’t my decision to make for you. It was yours and… Again, I’m so sorry. If I could go back and undo it, I would. It is…the greatest regret of my life.”
She’s quiet for a moment before she says. “And I wish I’d told you the truth about Pax before you found out the way you did. He did try to rape me, that was the truth, but I managed to fight him off and get away. I lied about it because it seemed like the only way to convince you to let me stay in the tower where I had a shot at safety.”
I sigh. “You were right. It was. After the poisoning, I was so afraid of someone hurting my father, or someone else under my protection, that I was becoming just like them.”
“Like who?” she asks.
I push the bag of chips away and swipe the back of my hand across my salt-stung lips. “All those men I had such disdain for when I first started attending Alpha meetings with Dad to negotiate territory and alliances. They were such smug, narrow-minded bullies. They never seemed to listen when anyone else talked. Their own voice was the only one they cared about. They thought they fucking knew it all, just because they’d scared their subordinates into silence.”
Willow pulls out one of the pink cakes, sets it on the plastic the treat came in, and slides it in front of me. “I know you feel like shit right now, but it really is okay. We all have learning curves in life. What matters is that you see where you were going wrong and correct course.”
I swallow hard, fighting tears for who knows what time today.
