4
“I’ll have Billie clean it up once everyone leaves,” said David.
“You’ll have her butcher the thing too, right?”
David frowned. “I thought you and Colt were taking care of that and delivering the cuts.”
Arching her lean body above the counter to search a cupboard for wine glasses, Catrina balked over her shoulder at her father. “I’ll be busy. Won’t I, Gav?” She winked at me.
For a split-second, I reconsidered my obligation to feed my pack. The way Catrina’s leggings and tight camisole accentuated the curves in her body made me want to redirect my anger into a more gratifying activity. “Cat can pick up your shipment,” I suggested from behind my glass of water.
“Hm,” David hummed.
Catrina’s saucy expression withered. “What shipment?”
“Just a little something to supplement the territory patrols,” said David.
“Well, sure. I can do that instead. I just thought Gavin would be staying the night.”
“He’s busy.” David’s pointed chagrin reminded me of his expectations for me.
My life had been easier before I was the Alpha of Grandbay. Before I had all these responsibilities and was constantly busy trying to take care of my packmates and protect them from the threats lurking around Gunnison National Forest. Gone were the days when I could blow off my work and fuck Catrina all night. She didn’t seem to understand that I couldn’t just drop everything to hang out with her; or maybe she did, and just wanted me to neglect my pack.
Catrina poured two glasses of red and handed one to me. “At least stay for some wine,” she said, trying to look unbothered.
I didn’t take the glass. “I should get going.”
Her eyelashes hung heavily above her eyes, giving me the same look she’d sometimes give me on nights when we were alone. “I can feel the heat in your blood. You’re still worked up. Relax a little.”
“Worked up about what?” asked David.
I didn’t like how sultry she acted in front of her father. It put me in a strange position, and made me feel exposed. I really didn’t like that she’d brought up the hunt again.
“The others trying to steal his kill. Gavin proved himself once again to be an unyielding force of nature while we took down that elk. He even made Colt bleed,” said Catrina, sipping from her wine and still trying to push the other glass into my hands.
“Did he now?” David’s brows rose.
I took the glass and set it sharply down on the counter; the glass cracked and wine spilled over the edge. My eyes hardened on Catrina.
She only smiled over the edge of her glass. “I think he’s even tougher than you, Alpha.”
“Good. That’s what a pack needs: an indomitable show of force. That’s the only way they’ll listen to you,” said David, unfazed by my aggression.
Neither of them understood that I hadn’t wanted to let my violence get the better of me.
“Who needs to be marked anyway,” Catrina dismissed.
That tipped me over the edge.
“I have to go,” I said for the third time that evening. Without waiting for their response, I pushed past Catrina and went for the porch door.
She scoffed. “Gav!”
“Let him go, Cat,” David said behind me. “He’ll be back.”
I had no choice. Catrina was my girlfriend of five years, and Dalesbloom and Grandbay were more closely allied with each other than with the wolves of Eastpeak. There was no avoiding my neighbor when our affairs were so closely intertwined. Especially when I was destined to become the next Alpha of Dalesbloom once David stepped down. Everything our two packs had done together for the past couple of years was to prepare for the day they would ultimately merge as one. Sometimes I thought I’d prefer having the weight lifted off my shoulders by sharing the role of Alpha with Catrina. Still, she reminded me time and time again why I held off on merging our packs for so long.
I couldn’t control my wolf because I wasn’t marked by my fated mate. Worse yet, I didn’t even have one. The only way my bloodthirsty beast could be tamed and I could gain control of my anger was through the mark of my fated mate, and in all my twenty-one years alive, I’d never received the Moondream that revealed her to me. Catrina knew that—she depended on it in order to keep me in her grip, and because uniting our two packs was the wisest choice for everyone, I couldn’t deny her.
Only once I stepped outside did I feel some of the tension alleviate. My muscles relaxed in the cool summer evening, the fallen sun little more than an orange glow on the western horizon behind the gentle slopes of the mountains. Shadows settled comfortably across my skin and I was finally at ease in the silence. Though I could feel Catrina and David watching me through the kitchen windows, I didn’t care anymore. I had no obligation to stay tonight or collect David’s illegal handguns. I shed my jeans and left them on the porch, then underwent the metamorphosis of my human body into wolf. With a series of sickening, wet crunches and a crackling of bones, I took on a more predatory structure. My skin was hot and cold and hot again until the weight of fur gave me a sense of freedom that being human never could. A massive wolf stood in my place, subtle timbers and black ticking turning dark in the oncoming night. My senses sharpened, and familiar feral impulses reigned over my body.
I took off in long bounds across the backyard and into the trees behind the manor. Once I was finally out of sight of the Dalesbloom Alpha and his daughter, I was able to breathe. The moonlight guided me through the trees and back toward the town of Grandbay, where my own pack was waiting for me to feed them yet.
For twenty minutes, I slipped through the mountain valleys as nothing more than a wild animal to the world. The forest lit up in ways it never would have if I were human. Hundreds of scents were carried on the wind, each one an individual strand of information: a doe and two fawns thirty yards away, a raccoon scavenging at the base of a tree twenty-two yards away, the same carcass of a badger I had smelled rotting away over the past few days. Warm seed smell of songbirds and their twiggy nests. Dry grass smell of burrowing rabbits. The sounds were just as bright, small animals rustling under foliage and frogs croaking by the water’s edge. The entire forest opened itself up to me, and for a moment, I lost myself in the wilderness, forgetting that I ever had a home to go back to. Until the musky scent of humans triggered curiosity in my animal brain.
Against my better judgment, my paws turned toward the smell. I dropped my nose to the grass and followed, pouring through the shadows like liquid, until the breeze revealed more scents. Smoke and wieners cooking. The trail brought me to a bright spot burning between the trees—a campfire. I hadn’t eaten recently, but the hunt churned my stomach and imparted on me a hunger that was hard to ignore, especially with the aftertaste of blood still in my teeth.
I wasn’t thinking. It was hard to with all my senses firing, but I wanted that meat.