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She couldn’t tune out his words as his snores filled the cabin. She shuffled into the kitchen as she pondered everything.
He had talked about duty and fate. He had told her how it was her responsibility to the pack to help defend it. He even asked her why she wouldn’t want to help strengthen his pack with him.
He knew nothing about her.
“I have faith in us. Maybe you don’t. That’s fine. But there’s a sadistic asshole trying to claw power back however he can. AndI know that he’d tear the pack apart and kill everybody I love to get it.”
Something about his words sent chills down her spine.
She wasn’t stupid. She knew how pack politics worked. As she washed her hands for the thirty-seventh time, thinking about the deep betrayal she’d felt from her previous pack pained her to even hear his words.
But he wasn’t like the others. It’s hard to back up words with fatal wounds that threaten to take you under. But he hadn’t spoken like anybody she’d ever known.
The words from her prior pack were all vague promises of prosperity. The pack members were door-to-door salesmen, just trying to wear her down into staying.
“Iris, if they came in here right now, I’d rip them apart regardless of the pain,”Derek had said. “These are temporary injuries. Don’t think they make me weak.”
He spoke with such ferocity that she believed every word.
As she returned to the living room, again watching him sleep and deliberating over his unconscious body, there was something so intimidating about his presence. At any moment, he could wake up and make hell for anybody who dared trespass against him.
She was glad he was on her side.
“That’s just the mating bond talking,” she said to herself.
And she couldn’t back it up. In all her life, she’d never seen a fated pair in person. It was just a figment of myth she’d heard. A bedtime story in the deepest recesses of her imagination.
“These are chemicals in my brain telling me what to think,” Iris whispered. “I can’t buy anything he has to say to me.”
But still, she wasn’t convinced. There was one argument that stood out to her.
“And you barely know me,”Derek had said, still not abandoning hope in his foolhardy mission to persuade her.“Yet, still, when I was dying on your doorstep, you dropped everything to help me.”
Derek turned over in his sleep, and she saw him wince slightly.
She realized that standing over him and watching him sleep was a bit creepy.
It shouldn’t be creepy though,she thought.He’s your fated mate!
Her mind was in utter chaos after she returned to the kitchen, rinsed the dishes, and put them away, still thoroughly unprepared for guests. She remembered finding him bleeding on her doorstep. It was a testament to his strength that he hadn’t simply perished then and there.
And then, as she scrubbed a hard bit of residue off a dinner plate before putting it away in the cabinet, she thought about all the other pack members and how they wouldn’t be as strong as he was.
Ava.
The thought froze her in place, the dishwater running over the sink and dripping onto the kitchen tile floor. She thought of the jealous, former Alpha Cyrus and how her friend might be at risk.
Oh yes, she knew who Cyrus was and how he ran his former pack. That was the main reason she had never joined them. Ava refused to leave, though, no matter how rosy Iris made the outside world look. All Iris could do was be there for her friend whenever a shoulder was needed to cry on.
After turning the sink off and dropping a few dishtowels on the floor, feeling embarrassed that she’d gotten so lost in her thoughts, she took her cell phone out of her pocket and dialed.
“Please pick up,” she whispered as the dial tone sounded a third time.
At that, she realized she was where Derek could overhear the conversation. She opened the door to her bedroom, shutting it quickly behind her just as Ava answered.
“So when am I going to see you again?”
Iris lay on her bed, phone pressed against your ear.
