A Pack of Vows and Tears

by Olivia Wildenstein

  Lucas’s gaze slid up to her face. “My father died before I started noticing anatomical differences between girls and boys.”

  Sarah surely knew that Lucas had lost his parents—unlike me, she’d had a thorough werewolf and pack education. When a breathy gasp stumbled out of her mouth, I frowned.

  “Forgot about that,” she said, a tad more gently.

  “Was a long time ago.” Lucas removed his cap, dragged his fingers through his black hair, then screwed the hat back on. “Look who’s staring now?” Lucas said, one corner of his mouth tilting up.

  Sarah spun back toward me.

  Lucas flexed his arm. “Want to cop a feel?”

  “Seriously?” She wrinkled her nose, seizing the laminated menu, which I was pretty certain she knew by heart. “I’d rather pet a rattlesnake than your bicep.”

  “You like snakes, huh?”

  “Leave her alone, Lucas,” I warned.

  He flashed me a cocky grin before raising his eyes to the TV broadcasting a tennis game.

  A waitress with thick bangs, a perky smile, and an even perkier voice arrived to take our order. While I asked for a BLT and water, Sarah and Lucas ordered cheeseburgers and Cokes. I wondered if Miss Perky had been the girl Lucas had alluded to the day August had helped fix stuff up in the inn, the one who’d be really glad that he’d stayed in town. I was tempted to ask, but feared it would make me sound jealous instead of what I truly was: curious.

  As though thinking of August activated the link, my stomach tightened. I rubbed it while Lucas and Sarah bickered about the music she’d played at The Den last Saturday, and the waitress returned with a pitcher. As she poured water into my glass, the door of Tracy’s opened.

  The water overflowed from my glass, spilling onto the table and dribbling onto my lap. I backed away from the table so fast my chair legs scraped against the worn wooden slats. She righted the pitcher, then apologizing profusely, she grabbed a handful of paper napkins from the dispenser on the table to clean up the mess.

  “It’s okay,” I said, following her line of sight, which had returned to the entrance of the place.

  To Cole and August.

  August was absentmindedly rubbing his abdomen. When he spotted me behind the blushing waitress, his hand froze and then lowered, fingers balling into a fist.

  Yep, it sucked.

  For both of us.

  Cole elbowed August and pointed to our table. From August’s reluctant strides, I sensed he wanted to go anywhere but near me.

  “Hey, Ness.” Cole smiled, then nodded at Sarah and Lucas before greeting the waitress by her first name: Kelly.

  Kelly barely registered his greeting, her entire focus on August. “I thought you’d left.”

  He scratched the back of his neck. “I’ve had to delay my departure.” His face was all tensed up, which I imagined had more to do with our bothersome link than with Kelly’s attention.

  “Heard you and Sienna broke up.” She said this very softly, so softly that if I’d been human, I would probably have missed it.

  August’s fingers stilled, and his eyebrows drew together. His expression, coupled with the relentless throbbing in my navel, screamed of discomfort.

  I caught Sarah sniffing the air. A frown ghosted over her face. Could she smell our link? I remembered Liam saying that August had smelled like me or me like him . . . or something along those lines, but I assumed the smell had faded.

  Thankfully, Sarah shattered the awkward silence. “Don’t any of you have jobs?”

  The three boys glanced at each other.

  “Ness is my job,” Lucas said, which made August swing the full force of his gaze from Kelly to the shaggy-haired shifter.

  “And we’re taking a break. Weather’s way too brutal,” Cole said.

  Unlike my jeans that were sticking to my skin, neither his nor August’s clothes were drenched, so they must’ve changed before coming in here. Or maybe their bodies heated at a higher temperature than mine and had already made the moisture evaporate.

  Cole gestured to the pool tables in the back. “Want to join us for a game of cutthroat?”

  “Thought you’d never ask.” Lucas all but bounded out of his seat.

  “Ness?” Cole didn’t say Sarah’s name, but he looked at her, which surely meant he was extending the invitation to my friend.

  I shook my head. “I want to catch up with Sarah.”

  “We still have so much to catch up on,” she added.

  Once the boys were out of earshot and the waitress had scampered away, Sarah hissed, “Why does August Watt smell like you?”

  I winced. “Do we really smell alike?” I whispered.

  “Unless August and you have been swapping body lotions, then yeah. Usually dudes smell like”—she waved a hand toward the seat Lucas had just vacated—“the inside of a locker room.”

  “Is it really obvious?”

  “To a person who knows you and your smell, yeah.”

  I wrinkled my nose at her wording. I figured she didn’t mean it derogatively.

  “Did you guys imprint on each other?”

  I bit my lower lip.

  “Shit.” Her chair creaked as she leaned forward. “So you and Liam are already over, huh?”

  “No. Why would you jump to that conclusion?”

  She pressed slightly away from the table. “Babe, you do understand the purpose of mating links, right?”

  “I understand their purpose, but I have no plans on dumping my boyfriend to jump into another man’s bed.”

  “It’s sort of unavoidable. Your body must’ve shut out all other males. My brother and Margaux are mates. He tried to resist her at first. He had a girlfriend. It lasted all of a week. You can’t resist mating links. You just can’t. It would be like trying to starve yourself and expecting to survive.”

  My skin prickled with annoyance. “There are lots of mates who don’t end up together.”

  “Really? Name one pair?”

  “I don’t know names. I just heard about this from Frank McNamara. He mentioned someone in our pack had a mate but didn’t end up with her.”

  Sarah tutted. “Well, I’ve never heard of mates who didn’t end up together. It’s biological or chemical or whatever. Plus, it’s a good thing. It doesn’t happen to everyone. I sort of wished it would happen to me.” She thankfully lowered her voice to add, “Apparently, the sex is explosive.” She waggled her eyebrows.

  I shushed her with a forbidding look. “Besides, he’s leaving soon,” I added under my breath. “Distance will suppress the link.”

  “Why would he leave?” She glanced over at the pool table. “Is Liam making him so he can have his dirty way with you?”

  Heat snaked up my neck.

  She leaned in, her long, kinky blonde curls draping over her shoulders. “Oh my gosh, that’s it, isn’t it? That’s real fucked up, Ness. No one should ever come between mates.”

  “I don’t want a mate all right!” I unfortunately said this so loudly that even the rain pounding against the windowed façade couldn’t camouflage my words.

  Sure enough, the boys had stopped playing to cop a look, as well as two of the men slugging down beers at the sticky bar. Not that they knew what I was talking about, but August knew, and from the shadows that fell over his strong brow, I could tell my comment had made an impact.

  I didn’t think he was hurt that I didn’t want to be with him, after all, he considered me like his sister . . . people didn’t want to get with their sisters because that was all shades of unnatural and wrong, but he probably hadn’t appreciated me voicing my disgust quite this brashly. I slid the elastic out of my hair to busy my suddenly shaky hands and to curtain off my face.

  “Didn’t mean to piss you off,” Sarah apologized.

  I rested my elbows on the table and cupped my forehead with my palms. “It’s not you, Sarah. It’s this whole stupid situation.”

  She sighed just as Kelly brought over our food. She deposited the plates a li
ttle heavily, gaze trained toward the boys.

  “The other burger goes over there.” Sarah pointed to Lucas.

  They’d all gone back to playing. Including August. He had his back to me, as though to avoid facing me. More than ever, I hated our link because suddenly I feared it might erase our years of shared history and render us both bitter strangers.

  I felt Sarah eyeing me. Whatever she was thinking, she kept it to herself.

  Between greasy, ketchup-laden bites, she said, “I’m going to be an aunt soon. My brother and Margaux are expecting.”

  I blinked at her.

  “Twins. They’re having twins. A girl and a boy.” She took a big bite of her burger.

  “The wedding was last week. She didn’t even look pregnant.”

  “She was. Just not showing yet. It’s early though—like six weeks or something—so they’re not really telling people yet.”

  “Six weeks! And she already knows the gender?”

  Sarah cocked up one of her dark eyebrows. “We don’t need ultrasounds to know these things.” She wiped her fingers on her checkered paper napkin before tapping her nose with her index.

  “We can smell the gender of the baby?”

  “No. We can smell pregnancies. The gender’s purely maternal instinct. She could be wrong, but shifter mamas are rarely wrong.”

  So if my mom had been a werewolf, she would’ve known I was a girl before I came into this world. My parents had never done an ultrasound, so convinced I would be a boy. Why would a baby born to the Boulder pack be anything else? I wondered what would have happened if someone had found out I was the wrong gender before being born. Then I stopped wondering because it was an answer I never wanted to find out.

  “Did you ever date someone in your pack?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Back in high school, I went out with this dude called Channing. Then I picked guys who weren’t in the pack, mostly kids from UCB.” She swallowed a long gulp of her soda. “My mom will probably force me to marry a wolf, so I’m getting my fix of human boys. They’re less conceited than pack boys.”

  “UCB? Do you attend UCB?”

  “Starting year two in a couple weeks. Why? Are you considering enrolling?”

  “Apparently I can.”

  “What do you mean, you can?”

  “Liam told me the pack sets money aside to cover tuition.”

  Her eyes lit up. “So you’re applying?”

  I nodded.

  She squealed, which made everyone look our way again. “Oh my God, that’s so exciting! I’ll finally have a friend.”

  “Oh, come on. You don’t have any friends there?”

  “Hun, I’m opinionated. Most people don’t like opinionated girls. Most people like them submissive and pleasant. Mom’s always on my case about being more pleasant.” She smirked. “You’re, like, my first friend.”

  I peeled a strip of bacon off my mayo-soaked bread roll. “Does that mean I get full access to your closet?”

  She tossed her head back and laughed, but then shot me a nice-try look.

  I grinned. Even though it was thundering outside, and I was nervous as hell about what was happening within my pack, I felt momentarily happy. “You’re my first girl-friend too.”

  She raised her glass and held it up, waiting for me to clink it with hers. “To firsts.”

  I tipped my glass into hers just as Lucas slid his empty plate onto the table and reached out between us to grab a handful of napkins.

  “Didn’t strike me as a virgin, Sarah,” he said.

  “If you’re trying to get under my fur, Mason, it’s not working.”

  He leveled his eyes on her chest, then raised them slowly. “I’m sorry, but I don’t do Pines.”

  Her grin faltered. “That wasn’t me propositioning you, you prick.”

  Cocking one side of his mouth up, he filched a fry from the plastic basket next to her plate, his forearm brushing against her chest. She jerked backward. His eyes flashed with undisguised amusement that heightened when Sarah glared at him.

  She relocated her basket, shoving it to the farthest most edge of the table. “Hands off my fries.”

  “Possessive, aren’t we?” Lucas wiped his fingers slowly on his wadded-up napkin, as though buying himself more time. “You deejaying tomorrow night, blondie?”

  “Like every Thursday night.” Her skin tone had returned to normal, but her earlier glee was gone. “Don’t forget your earplugs. Or better yet, don’t come at all.” She turned back toward me. “Will you go, Ness?”

  I was about to say maybe when the front door of Tracy’s flapped open, dragging in the scent of summer rain and male perspiration. My heart stuttered when I laid eyes on Liam. His dark hair was slicked back, and his body was wound so tightly it looked like he was about to pounce on someone.

  Pissed.

  He looked pissed.

  All the more terrifying was that he looked pissed at me.

  17

  I stood up so fast my knees bumped into the table, sending bolts of pain through my shins. The last time Liam had looked at me with so much scorn was when I’d come out of Julian Matz’s maze brandishing the Boulder relic.

  Aside from the low drone of the sports commentator and the unrelenting rain niggling the windows, the bar had become eerily quiet. When a cue stick hit a resin ball, I jumped.

  For a long moment, Liam didn’t move. Neither did Matt who flanked him.

  Lucas’s thick eyebrows dipped as he watched his Alpha, the slant deepening when Liam stalked over to me, boots pounding the worn flooring.

  “You ratted us out?” Lucas asked, voice low. So very low.

  Sarah, who’d spun around in her chair, whirled toward me.

  Combined with Liam’s lethal gaze, Lucas’s accusation chilled the blood racing through my veins. “Wh-what?”

  He ran!

  Liam’s voice resonated so shrilly inside my skull that I gripped my forehead, digging my fingertips into my temples. “Wh-who?” I stammered.

  Your cousin! Rainwater mixed with sweat dripped from his matted hair into the collar of his black V-neck.

  “Why are you screaming at me?”

  “Because it’s your fault,” Liam growled.

  Matt folded his arms in front of his huge chest. “Everest left Aidan a voicemail telling him what a prick he was to have sold him out.”

  I sensed two large bodies coming up behind me. I could smell August. I assumed the other one was Cole. Were they cornering me?

  I squared my shoulders, trying to inject bravado into my posture. Bravado I wasn’t feeling. “What does Everest’s voicemail have to do with me?” I asked, voice faltering.

  “He said you texted him that we were coming,” Matt said.

  I reeled, but then I grabbed my phone, unlocked it, and shoved it in front of Liam’s face. “Check it. Check my messages. I never sent Everest a thing.”

  He stared at the bobbing phone.

  “Check. It. Liam!”

  He grabbed it, fingers moving deftly over the screen. I waited. Waited for him to see that he had it all wrong. But then . . . then his eyes blazed, and my heart stopped.

  He snorted, the sound so ungentle. “Your message is right there, Ness.” He flipped my phone around and leveled it in front of my face. “Right . . . fucking . . . there.”

  My gaze raced over the bright screen, soaked up the black letters: Liam is coming for you. Aidan told him where you were hiding. Run!

  The words smeared together. “I didn’t—” I looked over my phone at Liam. “I didn’t write that. Someone—I didn’t—” Tears rolled down my cheeks.

  Nostrils flaring, he shook his head and thrust the phone into my numb fingers. “Don’t lie to me, Ness.” His labored breaths punched my throbbing forehead.

  “I’m not lying.”

  “Hey, could you guys take this outside?” Kelly asked, darting wary glances at her customers.

  Is that why you were with me? To get insider information? His words wer
e ringed with a mixture of bitterness and dejection.

  “No.” Each one of my breaths snagged in my throat. “No! Someone hacked my phone and sent him that message.” I wheeled around toward Cole. “That’s easy to do, right?”

  “It is,” Cole said, but his narrowed eyes told me that, like the others, he believed I was trying to cover up my tracks by pinning it on a hacker.

  “If I’d sent him a message, you really think I would’ve kept a trace of it on my phone? You really think I would’ve shown it to you? How dumb do you all think I am exactly?” I croaked, looking at Liam, then at Matt, then at Lucas. I didn’t bother turning around to check if Cole and August, too, were glaring. I sensed the weight of their stares on my back.

  “You didn’t raise your hand yesterday,” Lucas said.

  Wariness spread over Matt’s face like ink.

  “So that automatically makes me a traitor?” My voice shook with tremors. My entire body shook with tremors. “Liam?” I didn’t care what the others thought. As long as he—

  He lowered his gaze to the floor. “You’ve backstabbed the pack before, Ness.”

  Overwhelmed by anger and disappointment, I pursed my lips and backed up but collided into a body. Hands set on my shoulders, tried to pin me in place. I brushed them off as though they were cobwebs, then grabbed my bag, dug out my wallet, and tossed a bill on the table to cover my half-eaten lunch.

  “For the record, I’m glad Everest got away,” I spat out as I elbowed my way past Liam and Matt.

  “Ness!” Sarah called, but I didn’t stop.

  I dove into the crashing rain, slamming the door of Tracy’s behind me, and sprinted across streets without looking for cars. Humorlessly, I felt like if a car hit me, I’d inflict more damage to it than it would to me.

  You’ve backstabbed the pack before.

  Liam’s words played on a loop inside my head.

  Like cement, disgust poured through me, drying between my ribs until their cage became a solid wall. My eyesight sharpened. My wolf was coming out. I raced faster down the drab streets, zigzagging through bobbing umbrellas and shoving past hooded passersby. I didn’t apologize. I couldn’t apologize. My teeth had extended into fangs. I was shifting, and I was still in the middle of town.