Chapter 157

Helen’s POV

Permit me? My insides bristled at that statement. As if this house and my decision to take my own space were somehow his gifts. Then again, Randy pointed out how both of us were at a disadvantage in our social interactions. Maybe he didn’t even realize how bossy that sounded. Besides, even if he wanted to take credit for the idea, in the end, he wasn’t going to interfere with me living alone.

“We’re going to give this little experiment of yours a chance to work,” Justin continued. “And in the meantime, I have an experiment of my own. If I agree to let you stay here, will you agree to try my experiment?”

I nibbled at my lip nervously. “Can I hear the experiment first?”

He huffed. “I suppose that’s fair. Fine, in that case, I have a job that I want you to do, and it has nothing to do with staying in the house. You want to help the pixies, correct?”

My breath caught in my throat again from sheer excitement. “Yes,” I said. “More than anything. And everyone else who’s been hurt by the Huntsman. I can’t just sit by while people that look up to me are abused and brutalized and killed.”

He nodded and turned around, finally able to meet my eyes. “And I still firmly believe that you belong nowhere near the Huntsman. But I have a compromise. Clearly, the Huntsman is an adversary that we don’t understand well enough. He’s out of our league. He’s manipulating people using magic.”

My hands flew to my mouth. “Then you believe it’s true? You believe that there’s somebody out there who can manipulate people’s actions by magic?”

He barred his teeth and growled at me, then finally relaxed as if Justin were fighting some sort of internal battle. He opened his mouth soundlessly several times before looking at Russo, who gave him a silent nod. And then he turned back to me.

“I believe that you were manipulated,” he said slowly, but he held up a hand before I could cry out. “It doesn’t change the fact that I am now skittish of you. It’s hard to look at you without seeing that moment. Which means that I haven’t healed enough for us to be the way that we were.”

He growled and looked around the room. “One more reason why it’s probably good to have you away from me, at least for a little while. As much as I want you near, I think it hurts me too much.”

I nodded, blinking back tears.

“But I think I’m ready to work on forgiving you for that,” he added. “And while I work on forgiving you for hurting me, I ask that you work on forgiving me for hurting you. I lashed out in my pain and my anger, and I took it out on you before searching out the whole truth. And then I was so scared of that truth and of what it represented. But I continued to turn the truth down, even when it grew larger and larger, shoving itself in my face.”

I nodded. “I understand that you need time to heal. I’ve never thought otherwise. All I wanted was this, Justin. I just wanted you to hear the truth because we couldn’t do anything to move forward until that happened.”

Justin tucked his hands behind his back. “I’m not ready to continue having this conversation. I’m having a hard time controlling my lycan as it is. We’ll come back and visit this again some other time. For now, let’s focus on the job.”

I swallowed back any additional comments that I wanted to make or questions that I wanted to ask about that and decided to take whatever good news I could get. We were making a lot of progress in a very short period of time. But here’s the thing about progress, it’s an uphill battle, and it’s easy to roll backward.

I would have to remind myself not to get overexcited because that had burned me in the past. Every time I thought Justin was making this way towards being better, then he would roll backward, and we would start all over again or end up worse off than we had been before. I needed to make sure that this wasn’t another one of those times.

“Then what would you have me do?” I asked him. “I really, honestly don’t want to upset you, but I also honestly do not want to just sit here and wait for someone else to do all the work.”

He looked at Russo again, who again gave him a nod of encouragement. “I think I understand your desire to be useful a little better now,” Justin said. “And I think that’s where the compromise comes in. There might be a way to help you be productive without leaving me worried about your safety. Because no matter how much you want to help, it does not change the fact that you are clearly one of the Huntsman’s targets.”

“You are easy to manipulate to hurt me,” Justin continued, “and in turn, that hurts everyone that we are supposed to be looking after. We can’t be a strong alpha and luna if my luna keeps running headlong into trouble. So what I want you to do is help me help you.”

“How?” I asked.

“You’re going to research the Huntsman. I want you to find out everything you can about him. Figure out what his past is, what his problem with all of magic-kind is, particularly my family. And most importantly, if he has any weaknesses and how we can exploit those to defeat him. While you’re doing that, I will ready the warriors. Once you have information that we can act on, then I will take the warriors out, and we will fight the battle.”

He gave me a stern stare. “At that point, you will need to stay behind and allow us to do our job. We will try our best to kill William and rescue any pixies who happen to be surviving, along with anyone else that they happen to have kept captive on their property. Is this an acceptable compromise for you?”

“Yes,” I said, jumping on the opportunity to be useful for a change. “Yes, it is.”

Justin glared at both Randy and Russo. “I need a word alone with my mate.”

They both bowed their heads to him and stepped out the front door, shutting it behind them. When we were alone, he grabbed my arm and dragged me to the back of the house, to the kitchen. I tried not to be frightened of him, but part of me was still worried that maybe this was when I would pay the price for my independence.

To my shock, when we reach the kitchen, he shut the door yet again and let out a sigh. “I have another job for you, but this one is a secret,” he said. “You can’t tell Randy or Russo what I’m asking you to do now.”

Now I tingled with excitement. He’d never give me a job where I got to work by myself. I always had to have a chaperone.

“What can I do for you, Justin, alpha, mate? Please let me be helpful. That’s all I wanted.”

“Understand that in this job is of the utmost importance. It’s going to require a lot of research, and you may start after you find us the information on the Huntsman. In fact, that would be the ideal time to work on it when both Randy and Russo are gone with me to take down the Huntsman. Our absence will allow you to have time to do the research that I’m going to ask of you next.”

He grinned at me. “But I think it’s research that you will be excited about, and so it’s a job that I want to give you now. So that you have something to look forward to after the dirty work of trying to take down the Huntsman is under control. I want you to try and find a mate for Russo who can be like you, who can carry on my lycan genes by bearing me lycan pups. Find him someone who can carry on the fae genes by baring him fae children.”