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“He’s keeping us apart!” I cried, tears falling freely now. “He admitted he ordered you away while we were…”
“While you were…”
Flint’s eyebrows raised as if daring me to fill in the blank, and a ghost of a smile lit his expression.
“Enjoying yourselves.” He stated it as fact, not a question.
“I didn’t want him to bite me!”
“Because you’re afraid you can’t be with me?”
“That, and… other reasons.”
But as I stared up into Flint’s dark gaze, I couldn’t remember what those reasons were at the moment. All I knew was that I wanted this amazing man right in front of me, and now I couldn’t have him. What we’d shared was over now.
“Freya… you’re different. We don’t know what that means yet, but I promise I’ll be by your side as we figure it out.”
“What?”
“You’re half-wolf, half-witch. And your wolf… differs from most.” He traced the mark on my collarbone with his knuckle. “When witches claim their mates, they often have a cluster or a line of multiple bonded marks on their bodies. Showing the world their relationships are unbreakable.”
“A cluster? Of multiple marks?”
Flint nodded. “Polyamory is common among witches. Pair bonding is much less so.”
Hope rose within me, but I stifled it as best I could. My entire life, hope had misled me, repeatedly leading me to despair.
Seeming to sense I needed a moment to think about this, Flint let go of me. I drifted toward the shower in a daze, and he kept me company while I rinsed off.
Flint was basically telling me this changed nothing, and hope — my longtime nemesis — tried to rise within me. I squashed it down as best I could. Maybe if we’d discussed it all beforehand… But this felt too much like all the other times I’d hoped for a better future, only to have it ripped away from me by circumstance. Still…
“My mother had three mates,” I remembered, considering what it meant.
“She did,” Flint acknowledged. “And I believe you will have multiple mates as well.”
He ran his fingertips over Gage’s mark, making me shiver with remembered pleasure. Then Flint toweled me off.
“But how, when Gage’s wolf already marked me as his? He’s the pack alpha, Flint. Why would he share his mate?”
Flint being so calm was helping me calm down, too. I took a deep breath, trying to let go of the despair that had been near suffocating me for the last ten minutes. My emotions were all over the place, I knew that. I’d been through a lot in the past three weeks, even if — or maybe because — I’d been unconscious for two of them. Surely my body chemistry was all over the place. And then Gage had bitten me out of nowhere.
I may have come to the worst possible conclusion, but I still didn’t think I’d overreacted about the bite. I had every right to be pissed that he’d marked my body and claimed me without my consent.
“We’ll figure it out,” Flint assured me as I dressed in the clothes he’d brought me.
“Where did these clothes come from?” I asked. “Frost Fang?”
“What’s theirs is yours,” he said with a satisfied grin.
I frowned. “Because they think I’m mated to their new pack alpha?”
“Because the Howling Echo pack now rules Frost Fang.” I’d never seen such a malicious glint to Flint’s eyes. “We outrank everyone, by Gage’s decree. That includes you, too.”
I scoffed as the shirt settled around my shoulders and I pulled my hair free behind it. “Everyone will sense I’m no alpha.”
When I came back into the bedroom, I noticed a tray of food arranged on the dresser at the bedside.
“Though I could get used to this,” I admitted.
