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But it wasn’t. Not really.
“I never got off on adoration or bowing. To me, every shapeshifter who bowed his head was one more person I could’ve brought with me to fight the loups who killed my family. I had a mental count in my head: how many people would be enough? At first, Mahon and his bears were enough, but soon I needed more. I needed the clans. Then I needed a specialized fighting force, so I made the renders. It still wasn’t enough, so I established a security department that would give me advance warnings when a threat was coming, and I put the smartest, the most paranoid, the most meticulous man I knew in charge of it. I hoarded fighters the way some people hoard gold. And I did it without realizing it. I didn’t gain this clarity until I left.”
I shook my head. “How could you? If you had taken a second to try and get some clarity, Barabas would have put another piece of paper in front of you to sign. I remember days when we didn’t have time to breathe. There was always another administrative issue, or conflict to adjudicate, or threat to the Pack we needed to kill. No matter what happened, it came back to us. We had to take care of it, and you had done it by yourself for years.”
“It was a contract,” Curran said. “The Pack would give their lives to protect me, but I had to protect them in turn. It hit me somewhere in my early twenties—I was responsible for every shapeshifter under my command. Every single one.”
“That’s too much to carry for one person.” I thought so at the time, and I still stood by that.
“It is. And the worst part of it, I knew the Pack was broken. I started seeing cracks even before we met. We were turning more and more xenophobic. Rules and laws adopted on trial basis became set in stone. The rigid structure that was meant to provide stability made it difficult to expand and evolve. We fell into a pattern: the clan alphas bickered in constant competition, and I played the dealmaker and roared when they got out of hand. Every attempt at reform was met with resistance. When they attacked you while I was injured, it was the last straw. They broke the contract. I decided I was no longer bound by it.”
“But you stayed.”
“I did.” He looked at the woods. “By that point I had been the Beast Lord longer than I hadn’t. I didn’t know how to exit. I didn’t know what I would do if we left the Pack.”
“You don’t like uncertainty.”
“I don’t. What clued you in?”
“The morning after we spent our first night together, you asked me how long I would need to pack, because all my commitments and responsibilities were now over, and I was coming to the Keep with you. And when I said no, you told me we were done.”
“You weren’t safe. Your aunt proved my point for me that same day.”
“‘I want you with me,’” I quoted in my Beast Lord voice. “‘It’s not a request.’”
“I was dumber and more arrogant back then.” He reached for me and pulled me close to him, my back to his chest, and wrapped his arms around me. “I’m older and wiser now. I’ve learned how people interact outside of the Pack. How relationships work. I still want you with me.”
And he would have all of me. He was my world.
He hugged me tighter. “I love you the way you are. If you choose to change, I will love you still.”
The cold, hard knot inside my chest melted.
“You didn’t make me leave the Pack,” he said. “You didn’t make me move to Wilmington. I was the one who suggested it in the first place.”
“If you want to build a new Pack, I will help you,” I promised.
He squeezed me tighter to him. “I thought that to fix the Pack, I’d have to turn it over to someone else. I couldn’t do it because there was too much history. People expected me to act a certain way because I had done it for so long, and they wouldn’t have accepted a radical change. I thought Jim would make the reforms, and he has. Just not the kinds of reforms I would’ve expected. But it’s his Pack now and I’m good with that.”
I tried to turn to look at him, but he was holding me too tight, and pushing against those arms was like trying to move a building.
“I will start over. But I want more than just another Pack.”
“What do you want?” I asked.
He kissed my temple. “A new kind of place. Where we can be ourselves. Where our kid won’t be raised as a prince. He will never be a boy king, because a boy king has no need to grow up. We will give him a kind of place where he earns everything he achieves, and he won’t have to give up his human friends to do it.”
