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3
Beau
Heart crashing like a wrecking ball, I lead the little she-wolf across the crumbling parking lot. I stay two steps ahead of her, because if she was at my side, if I was able to see her at all right now, there’s no way I’d be able to do this.
But I prick up my ears, listen for every step of those delicate feet as she keeps pace behind me.
Every bone, every nerve in my body is singing.
Take her back home. She’s yours. My wolf’s big dumb heart pulses beneath my ribcage like a drumbeat. Its fur burns my skin and my jaws ache for release. It wants out, demands to take possession of me.
But the threat of darkness prickles and sickens me. I can’t go back to that place of rejection and madness.
Savannah is not mine.
There is no mine for a wolf like me.
I’ve been down that road before.
I had a pack once. An intended mate. She was in the pack next door—our friendly neighbors.
We grew up together, Kellie and I. In and out of each other’s homes. We were each other’s first everything: first slow dance, first kiss. Both of our packs expected us to end up together. To cement the bond between the two families. I would become Alpha of my pack and she would be queen.
As I was growing up, I was bursting with impatience. All I could think of was that day when we’d come of age and I’d make her mine. Give her my mark, and move into the roles that were waiting for us. I never even entertained the thought that there could be anyone else for either of us.
Then she chose another.
A wolf from a hostile pack, a lifelong enemy of mine.
I couldn’t blame her. Her wolf had made the choice, driven by the fates that had been mysteriously silent all of our short lives.
But it tore me apart. It was an agony I’d lacked the imagination to anticipate. I blamed my pack—all those people who’d spoken so confidently of our union, and had never hinted to my dumb, naïve self that it might not be in my stars.
I went feral. I fought almost everyone; scared the hell out of everyone else, and just about destroyed my own pack in my rage and grief.
Then my wolf burst out of me and refused to go back in. After it attacked Kellie’s new mate in a bloody battle, there was no going back.
I had to leave.
I lost two years trapped in my wolf form. I used the last of my strength to force the beast into a vast wilderness and keep it there, and it ran wild among the trees, savage and desperate.
Little by little, I began to gain some control over it. To feel my human self rising to the surface again. Until one day, I caught it off-guard, exhausted and half-asleep, and I ripped out of it, and became a man again.
I shaped up. I snuck back to my pack and took some inheritance I was owed, and I went about setting myself up in the human world. My one requirement: I couldn’t stay in one place for long. I needed to be on the road, to keep my wolf active and distracted, so it wouldn’t go getting any ideas about hunting down a mate again.
I learned that humans value shifters for their superior senses and strength, and I carved out a career as a bounty hunter-slash-investigator.
And so, I’ve lived like this for these years. A lone wolf with alpha blood running in my veins, in my little motorhome, with my bike and my trailer, keeping the madness away.
The one thing I know is, now I’ve gotten myself back, broken away from the madness, there’s no way I’m going to give it up again.
Not even for purest soul, whose heart seems to beat in time with my own. Matched with the prettiest cherry lips and the curviest little body. Because it’s a package sweet enough to drive my wolf to destruction again.
Once you’ve stared into the abyss, there’s no way you’ll return to it by choice.
When we reach the crosswalk,I wait for Savannah to catch up. It’s rush hour—which doesn’t mean a lot in this little town, but my protective instinct has gone into overdrive. This is one last thing I can do for her.
She stops at my side and looks at me expectantly. It’s adorable the way she tilts her chin up to see me, because she’s so much shorter than me.
