by D. Brumbley
Zara opened up the connection between the two of them so that he could hear the thoughts of the people around him clearly. While she wouldn’t have been able to do it as well on her own, he had a connection to all of them as their Alpha that allowed for her to hear deeper into their souls. He could hear their worries for their families, he could hear their loyalties and love, he could hear about their love for others around them, their desires for a better life. He could also hear their sympathies for him, their desire for him to find happiness and a mate, since he was their Alpha. It was hard for a pack to be happy when they were led by someone who felt alone. What are they concerned about, Alpha? You tell me.
Nick was humbled by the thoughts that he could hear around him, and he looked at each one of them as he passed for a long moment, greeted by some, only bowed to by others. They should be more worried about themselves than they are about me. It’s my job to take care of them, not the other way around.
That’s the thing about a good pack, though. She looked around, drinking in the sight of the people that legitimately cared for each other, people that depended on the kindness of their neighbors to survive. Everyone looks out for everyone.
That’s what I’m trying to build. A good pack. But we need friends before that can happen. He sighed. But that’s not until next week. When the fun begins and everyone starts arriving.
Zara reached out and touched the side of his shoulder lightly once, for only a moment, before she dropped her arm back to her side. We’ll get it worked out. You’ll see.
The Council members…Nick hadn’t asked her very much just yet about her former masters, but that was because he still wasn’t sure about her, and he didn’t want her to see too many of his reactions to what he learned. Are they often tired? Or weighed down? What are they like when they’re not sitting on their thrones with others kneeling before them?
It’s often like they live two lives. She looked over at him, watching his face. Zara wasn’t sure why he was asking, though there was no reason for her not to answer him. Sure, having such responsibility is tiring, but that’s why they have a mate that isn’t a Council member. So that they can go home and live some kind of normal life. Play with puppies. Forget the weight of their responsibilities until the next day. Some of them like to act high and mighty all the time, but most of them just want to forget for a while.
I think I can imagine which ones are which. He sighed as they got away from the large campground and headed into the recently-cleared space that had been hedged in by trees a few weeks before. It was cleared land for them to continue expanding on, and there were Ironborn working to clear still more land around the edges, the steel fence expanding behind them with every downed tree. I wonder what that would be like. To forget. I don’t think I could ever do that.
You don’t ever want to just do something that makes you happy?
He was confused by the question, then nodded back to the grounds they’d just passed. If we can get through this, and establish the kind of order that we want, then that will make thousands of people happy. Like I said, that’s my job now, to care for them and their happiness.
She looked around and then back at the compound before she looked back at him. “You know, I’ve been watching people for a long time now.” It was the closest she’d come to saying her age, which was something she liked to avoid mentioning. It was just another reason for people to avoid her, and that was the last thing a Heartborn ever wanted. “Something I have learned is that no matter how hard you work, no matter how hard you try, you can’t make anyone happy. They have to decide that for themselves.” She looked at some of the guards that paced and watched the two of them as they walked. “No one is going to want to stay here and be a part of something if they have to live up to that. No one is going to want to stay in a place where the most powerful wolf sacrifices all of his own enjoyment for a smooth-running pack. Happiness begets happiness.”
“I’m not begetting anything anytime soon.” He almost laughed. Almost. Nothing was quite that funny at the moment. “On the other side of all this, I’ll be able to worry about things like finding a mate and starting a family. I know that’s something every Alpha needs. But I can’t just put someone else in the middle of all of this right now.”
“If they can’t handle this, the heat of it all, then they wouldn’t be worthy to be yours.”
“Heat does nothing but make us stronger.” His lips parted in a dangerous kind of smile. “Something you wouldn’t know much about just yet, I imagine. Having never worked for an Ironborn member of the Council.”
She nodded, since what he said was true. She didn’t know much about them yet, but day by day, that was changing. “I’m here. I’m learning.”
He looked over at her, with his thoughts restrained, but only barely, and looked her up and down with a look that she didn’t need to be a mind-reader to understand, though he looked away quickly afterwards. “I see that.”
VI
Nick was in the middle of a meeting with his guards when there was a knock on the little house he used for meetings. Normally Zara wouldn’t interrupt him or come anywhere near his meetings because she didn’t want people to think that she was being used to influence things, but it was urgent.
He got up from where he was sitting with some of the captains of the Iron Guard and excused himself. When some of them grumbled about him leaving at a Heartborn’s bark, he glared them down before they could continue and whisper too loudly.
He stepped out into the hall with her before he spoke or even looked her in her purple eyes. “What is it?”
“It’s your father.” A single tear ran down her cheek. Even though Zara hadn’t even known his parents and she knew he was the one that had basically ripped his father from power, death was painful for her. Especially when she felt a mated pair being ripped apart. It was why she hated war so much. “He’s dead.”
She could feel a mixture of emotions run through him as the news hit him on several levels at once. There was grief, but there was also a kind of relief mixed with it. He knew he had horribly crippled and weakened his father in the fight between them, and his father’s existence for the last month had been one of almost constant pain. “How is my mother?”
Just the memory of the pain and grief that his mother was going through enticed another tear to slip down Zara’s face. “I don’t know if she’s going to make it.”
He nodded and put a hand on her shoulder, since he could feel just how affected she was by it. “I’ll see her. Keep your distance.” He stepped back into the room where his Guardsmen were still waiting for him, but didn’t go back to his place at the head of them. “My father is dead. Instruct your people concerning the funeral services tomorrow.”
Zara sniffled and wiped at her face as the guards walked out and past her to do as they had been commanded. She waited patiently for him as she looked down at the ground, still thinking about the moment she had felt the connection between his parents shatter. For a Heartborn close by, it was always a horrible experience, but not as bad as the experience for the surviving mate.
He left after all the guards were gone, and stayed with her for a moment before making any move to go to his mother’s house. “Are you alright?”
She nodded slowly but she still refused to look at him. “It’s so painful.”
“They were mated for a long time. The bond between them was always deep.” He couldn’t remember a time that his mother and father had ever been on opposing sides of anything. They were like two halves of the same person, even if that person, in hindsight, was ruthless and cold.
“As soon as he was gone…it was like your mother’s whole body broke down. She can barely grieve because she’s so cracked without him.” Mated wolves were connected at their souls, their essence. Rarely did one survive long without their other half, especially if they were old wolves.
“You can leave if you want to.” He said with a hand on her shoulder. “If distance would help.”
Zara seriously considered it, but she shook her head. They weren’t even her parents. He shouldn’t be helping her. “I’ll be fine. He’s your father. I should be trying to help you.”
“I’m the one who killed him. There is no helping me.” Nick replied flatly, despite any emotion he felt.
She looked up at him and, since there was no one around to see, she reached out and touched his face for a moment, but only a moment. “He raised you to take his place with a fight. He never intended to give it to you.” She had been close enough to hear his mother’s thoughts as her mate died, their son having taken a place they had assumed he would be too distracted being a Council member to take for himself.
“I suppose not.” He held her hand against his face, wanting to lighten the wound she felt vicariously through his mother. “Are you sure you’re alright?”
Zara looked into his eyes, her own still filled with tears as she nodded again. “Somehow I always forget how powerful a mating bond is. Or maybe it’s not that I forget, maybe it’s because it feels worse every time I have to feel someone else lose the other half of their soul.”
“What does it feel like to witness one being formed, though?”
Just thinking about it brought a smile back to her lips, although it was a weak one in the moment. He could feel through her touch just briefly how intoxicating the pleasure was to witness a mating. It was the joining of two wolves in a way that was so much a part of their power and intimacy that it could only be broken by death, and then, one death typically destroyed the other wolf simply by how deeply woven the two ended up being. “It is incredible.”
“I can imagine.” He smiled just as weakly and started walking with her. “Are Heartborn able to? I’ve often wondered how that would even be possible.”
Zara didn’t touch him again as she walked by his side, but she did walk a little closer to him than usual. “Yes. We can. It’s complicated, though. We always have to go first during the process of the mating, and we have to be separated from everyone at least three days prior. Locked in a room. Alone. Thick walls, no outside contact. The payoff, I’ve seen, is that the sex is incredible afterwards.”
He almost stumbled at her frankness over the subject, but then he realized he shouldn’t have been shocked. “I…would imagine.”
“So many people are terrified of us.” Her tone was filled with genuine sadness. “But we’re the ones that love completely. The ones who live to make people happy, the ones who want people to get along, to feel connected. Somehow we’re the enemy, and I’ve never understood that.”
“You invade people’s minds and steal their thoughts, often without their permission.” He looked over at her with a slightly apologetic look on his face, although he was also being frank. “People aren’t generally open to that kind of thing.”
She sighed and looked away from him. “Sometimes it’s hard to survive. We steal thoughts as easily as Ironborn steal gold. It’s not right, but it’s how we survive. I can’t change it.” She said softly, although she was not apologetic.
“I didn’t say you could. But you live off of others. Not everyone wants to play host to…someone like that.” He had almost said ‘a parasite,’ but he stopped at the last moment.
“I know.” She acknowledged as she stopped outside the building where his parents lived ever since he had become the Alpha and took over their previous home. “I’m sorry for the invasion.”
He stopped with her, and spoke to her silently, since there was a crowd gathering around the house. The crowd of wolves knelt and paid their respects to their old Alpha, and Nick made no move to stop them. You live on the connections between people. I hated and loved my father, both by extremes sometimes. He was on the edge of tears, but he wouldn’t allow himself to shed them. Live on that for now. Maybe that will blunt the edge of what my mother is feeling for you.
And who is going to help you?
I’m the one who killed him. He reminded, as though that explained everything sufficiently, and then stepped inside the house.
Inside the house, his mother’s grief was tangible in every piece of metal that was a part of the house. Even the floor Nick walked on screamed out for the missing power that once belonged to his father. They believed that souls went out into the metal that they once claimed, but that didn’t make it any easier for his mother, even believing her mate’s soul was around her. His mother was crumpled on the floor next to the bed where his father’s body laid still, sobbing into her arm.
Nick stepped up near his mother slowly, but kept his distance, since he had no idea how she would react to him at the moment. He knew she was sensible enough to know that what he had done was necessary for the survival of the pack, but that didn’t mean she would exactly thank him for it. “I’m sorry, Mother.”
His mother looked up at the sound of his voice, and she winced in pain as she stared at him. “He meant everything to me. How could you do this to us?”
He drew in a breath and sighed as he looked back at her. “He would have destroyed all of us. No one would have survived. I wasn’t thinking of you. I was thinking of the pack. As you always taught me to do.”
She whimpered as she laid there on the floor, since her whole body screamed out for a presence that was no longer with her. Even when they had been apart, her mate’s power had always been a part of her and hers a part of him. Now she felt like parts of her body had been hacked away, and she could barely think without feeling the loss.
The older the wolves and the longer they had been together, the worse it was. Some wolves could handle it. Others went insane. Most didn’t make it. She pulled off a corner of the bed that his father’s body was laid out on, and the metal responded to her as though she was grabbing a piece of clay. She molded the metal into a knife and held it out to Nick. “Kill me.” She begged.
He took the knife from her and stayed nearby, kneeling as he spoke silently to Zara, knowing she would be listening to him outside the house. Send in Lea and William. Lea had become the leader of his personal guard, and William was one of the older members of the Guard, well into his third century and one of the strongest and most respected wolves in the pack.
It wasn’t long before Lea came in, and when she did, it wasn’t easy for her to hide the shock she felt at seeing her Alpha holding a knife over his own mother. “We were told to come, Alpha.”
“You were asked to come to witness.” He looked over at William and nodded respectfully to him. He had been one of the longest-serving of his father’s fighters, but he had followed along when Nick had become Alpha with the same loyalty.
As the two of them stood on either side of the door, Nick went down on one knee in front of his mother to look her in the eye. “I’ll send you to join him, Mother, if that’s really what you want.”
She was still sobbing as she reached out and gently pulled him closer, to kiss him on his forehead. “We have always been so proud of you, Nickel. I love you so much. You know that, right?”
“I know, Mother. Almost everything I’ve ever done has been to make you proud. And I’ll keep doing so, for the rest of my life.” He put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed it once, then nodded to the bed where his father’s broken body was lying in a semblance of sleep, since he had died almost peacefully in the dark of the morning.
His mother got up slowly and then went over to the bed where she laid down next to his father. With broken motions, her hands shaking not in fear, but in weakness, she pulled herself close to rest her head against his chest, exposing her back entirely to her son. “Don’t forget us.” She said softly.
“I won’t. Nor will any who ever followed you.” He stepped up to the side of the bed, giving her a last moment to hold his father, even in death.
He gripped the knife that she had given him, then leaned forward and laid a hand on his mother’s shoulder, moving her hair out of the way of her back. Without another word or breath, he plunged the knife directly through her back into the heart that had been broken by
his father’s death. He didn’t have to twist the knife. Instead, he twisted the steel into unseen barbs that spiraled through her chest, making her death as quick and painless as possible.
His mother gasped at the twisted pleasure and pain of the blade in her body, and she gripped tightly to her mate for one last heartbeat before her body went still, the blood pouring from the wound down onto the metal bed that they shared in death.
Lea couldn’t help but shed a few tears at the sight, but she nodded toward Nick in respect at what he had done for his mother. It was her desire, and her son had given her mercy. “It takes a strong wolf to do what you have done.”
He removed the knife from his mother’s back and threw it aside, leaving it on the floor still coated in blood. “Taking claim from my father was the hardest thing I had ever done.” He finally turned back to face them, grief written on his face, though it was still set in as calm a mask of iron as he could manage. “This was harder.”
“What would you like us to do?” Lea spoke softly in the room of death, but she was ever ready for a command from or to provide support toward her Alpha.
Nick couldn’t answer for a moment as he gathered his thoughts and tried hard to keep himself from shedding tears. “I would ask the two of you to help seal the foundation of this home as a monument to them. Every sworn follower of this pack will pay their respects between now and the rising moon of the Fulness tomorrow night. By the time night falls tomorrow, I want their memorial to be completed on this spot, never to be moved.”
“As you wish, Alpha.” Lea spoke as they both nodded and paid their respects briefly before it was just Nick left inside.
Zara continued to stand outside the door, but she was crying harder after the second death she had felt within. Are you okay?
No. He didn’t leave the room. He couldn’t. As soon as Lea and William had left, he fell into a chair near the door, leaning his head on one hand. No, I’m not.
She hesitated on going inside, since she didn’t want to make it worse for him or for anyone else simply because she was not Ironborn, but she ended up going inside anyway. Zara walked up to him and then placed a hand on his shoulder. I’m so sorry for your loss. She then placed her other hand on his arm. I’m so sorry.
