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“It doesn’t matter if Sterling’s dead.” My value was in my ability to have his offspring. I was otherwise just another warm body. And I wasnothaving a bastard pup. That was out of the question.
“It is not necessary for him to be alive to sire biological offspring,” Marcella said.
“What?”
Marcella trotted on down the lane with that little bit dangling behind her. “Also of potential interest to you is your father’s critical work to save us from extinction. Your brother damaged or destroyed it, including, we believe, large portions of the Archives themselves. You are needed to help reconstruct the data and fill in what might be missing.”
I hadn’t committed everything to memory. Yes, I was familiar with the data and the process and the research, but I didn’t have a damn spreadsheet in my head, or a USB stick shoved under my furry tail. AmberHowl had Chronicler MaryAnne. Just tell her to get to work.
Sounded more to me like AmberHowl and GranitePaw were in cahoots playing a game ofgood cop, bad cop.
I tried to drag myself up my pillows. “Alansilveredme. Silver is war, silver is death. You put Sterling and I on that chase because you were too gutless to do it yourself. Couldn’t get dirty, couldn’t risk the prestige, the confrontation, so you sentus. You even ‘lost’ our mating paperwork to keep as leverage. Fuck you.You’rethe Elder Pack.Youget bloody.”
“Wedidn’t expect you to get to Alaska!”she snapped. Then she smoothed her hair and composed herself, but gave me a harsh side-eye, aggravated I’d shaken the outburst from her. “We didn’t think you knew enough or had enough resources.”
“AndwhenSterling wins in July, you seriously expect me to believe you’ll stand before the Council and admit you passed me off as another wolf’s mate and lied to everyone?”
Marcella’s dark eyes turned even darker as her scent bristled with indignation. “If Sterling prevails, we will makeeveryeffort to reunite you, validate your mating, and take responsibility. Even if it costs my pack dearly in the process. I can’tpromisewe will do so, but you wouldn’t trust that promise anyway. I have no intention of standing before Gaia as a hypocrite, forcing you to remain in a fake mating simply for the comfort of my pack. That’s how we ended up in this situation.”
It was the best assurance I would reasonably get. Even cobwebbed and glassed like I was, my brain still defaulted to political chess mode. Like it was convinced I could somehow still win, or at least calculate all the innumerable ways I could get screwed.
Well, it hadn’t calculatedthis. I’d gotten the math wrong on everything.Werewolf Witness Protectionhad not even made the long list of potential outcomes. “This still sounds like a con to gain control of the Mortcombe fortune.”
“That fortune is nothing we want. It’s so vast it attracts all the wrong sort of attention from both species. As you’ve found out.”
I could file that under things I believed without question. “I want to see Sterling.”
“It is best if you do not talk about him, think about him, or dwell on him. Focus on your own survival.”
My heart throbbed worse than the half-healed hole in my side. My last words to him couldn’t be some lame jokes about leftovers and a turducken.
Marcella stood. “You will stay here another week. We aren’t going to expect Searle to nursemaid you. Take the time to pick a new name and prepare yourself to meet your new mate.”
Presentation
For the second time in six months, I was getting presented to another male. Except this time I knew how it was going to end: Searle was my mate. Demetrius was flexing his “Alpha wisdom” and “experience” that oh, yes, Searle and I were mates.
Sarah, the mate of the more senior of the two First Betas, Henri—who I had met the first time I’d come to AmberHowl in the fall—came to take me from the subterranean medical clinic a short walk from the main house into the house itself for my presentation. I guess when you’re a geotechnical engineer like Demetrius, building thingsintohillsides was a natural inclination. Wondered if they also buried the bodies so effectively, too.
Sarah was about ten years older than I was, give or take, pretty and prompt and very professional. I was just recovered enough to be clawing at the walls, but I’d been ignored aside from the doctors who had come in to look after me. They made it clear they had no information for me, except that Sterling had been injured in Clare, had recovered, and was “fine.” Beyond that, they had no answers. I had a television, but no phone, no tablet, no laptop, no wedding rings, and just in case I felt like going for a very, very long run: no shoes or panties.
My brain was thoroughly rotted from daytime television. The wound on my side was hideous, a half-healed nest of stitch-scars and twisted skin from where something very large had mistaken me for a sandwich. The muscles had gotten torn, the skin mangled, nerves and blood vessels rended. The bite had gone deep enough to knick my spleen, liver, stomach, left kidney, and diaphragm.
But between war-form survival regeneration and my shift back to wolf-form, much of the organ damage had partially healed. The AmberHowl doctors had pumped me full of blood, stuffed my organs back into my belly, and sewn me up. Now the injury was pastdon’t breathe, you might tear somethingand more intothat’s going to hurt for a while. Andyou’re going to feel like shit for a few more months.
Apparently, healing from massive blood loss and physical trauma was draining, even once they put all the blood back in you and the scabs fell off.
It had left me plenty of time to pick a new name. I had been Winter, my mother had been Autumn, my aunt was Spring.
I chose Summer.
Just bringing Gaia’s Wheel all the way around.
Sarah filled me in on the finer points of the Summer Scam. The cover story being (as Marcella had stated) Searle had been on some kind of mission or outing (the details were lost on me and didn’t matter, nor were they necessary for me to know, and in fact, menotknowing was best for the farce, considering I wasn’t supposed to know the details of how I’d gotten to AmberHowl. ) and had run across me, a lone wolf, badly injured at the target location (or whatever), and he’d feltsomething, and brought me back. One thing led to another, bam, boom, we were clearly mates. Although it was a “weak” bond, and Demetrius had “counseled” Searle on the matter.
The usual bullshit lines that had condemned our species to a genetic cliff we were about to fall off of. Anyone who knew better was complicit, while everyone else believed it was true.
Except Ihada mate. He’d sent me into this and given both of us to this...fate...and my heart broke over, and over, and over. It broke in a thousand ways until all that was left were little pieces too small to identify. My soul hurt and every time I woke up, I had to remind myself it was true, and it had all happened. It hurt like the days around my mother’s death. It hurt like the dayafter, when the world had dared to continue on, beautiful sunlight and chirping birds and a soft breeze.
