That was eight hours from now. I had better have been back. "Of course I will. See you soon. I'll have my phone." I kissed him again. And then, just because he still looked so pathetic, I kissed him another time. Then I pulled myself from the bed, forcing myself to leave him.
"Miss you!" he called out as I left his room.
"Miss you too." It was sappy, and so new it was ridiculous, but it also felt so right to be like that with him. "I'll be home soon," I promised. And then, as I was locking up the house, I realized what I'd said. I'd called it my home. And it was. Vallen had given me a place of comfort and security, one where I could be myself, where I had the freedom to be just as I was.
Ronald pulled up in a basic black sedan. No frills, just the essentials. I liked that about him. There was nothing flashy about him. He wore jeans and a tshirt. He didn't have to dress up. He didn't have to try to impress anyone. He simply existed and the alphas, even my father, had done whatever he'd asked. It was a skill I wanted to master.
"You look quite a bit different than the last time I saw you, though, to be fair, that was probably fifteen years ago," he said as I got into the passenger seat.
"And I was wearing dresses then too."
Ronald chuckled. "Yes, you were." He started driving and I sat back, content to look out the window at the forest around our house. Not Vallen's anymore. Not since it was my home now too. Not since I was practically begging whoever would listen to me to let me be carrying his child right then. I rubbed my stomach as I thought about them, some little bundle of life right there inside of me. At least I hoped they were.
"Are you hungry?"
I gave Ronald my attention. "I am. Yeah. Thanks for coming to get me. Where are we going?"
"There's a new BBQ place on this side of town. One of those brave humans who decided to try to open a restaurant in one of the old predominantly vampire areas. Lots of your kind of people there."
He was teasing me, maybe even trying to get a reaction out of me, but he wasn't going to succeed. "I'm still a werewolf," I promised him.
"But now you're also a vampire."
Yes, I was.
"When did you meet Vallen?"
The question surprised me, but I didn't bother lying to him. I didn't think there would be any point in it, and besides, his question was harmless. "The day of my maturation."
Ronald pursed his lips. I was surprised by his quickly darkening expression. "Please tell your husband that I don't appreciate being lied to. He told me that you two were deeply in love." Then he sighed, and drummed his fingers over the steering wheel as he kept driving. "Though, I guess it is better that way. If you'd been any younger, you wouldn't have been able to consent to a relationship, and his claim over you would have been contested for all kinds of reasons, and I would have had to side with your father."
I hated how it sounded. How it was my father or Vallen having a claim over me. But that was how it was. I had a uterus, at least for now. But not forever. As soon as it was safe for me to go into surgery, I would be there. And I knew that Vallen would care for our child while I was in surgery and recovering after that.
"I am a man now," I reminded him.
He pulled into a spot in front of a small Italian restaurant. "Does your father think so?"
I shook my head.
"Then you'll have to make him, if you have any hope of actually working with the packs and making them think you're anything other than a silly little girl in pants who abandoned her pack to go screw a vampire."
I pursed my lips and glared at the dashboard. But I said nothing. I needed his help so I wouldn't start an argument with him. He got out of the car while I was still trying to calm myself down.
"Come on, Caroline, you can pout later," he said.
My lips curled back from my teeth seemingly on their own. "That's not my name."
He was back in the car a heartbeat later, and then he had his hand on my knee. I pushed him off, but he brought his hand right back to where it had been.
"Fight back," he urged me.
That's when I looked at him. "What?"
"You've got twenty-one years of conditioning teaching you not to speak up, not to fight, not to stand up to me or any other male member of any pack. But you're not a girl, you're a man, and if you want alphas to see that, and to respect you, you're going to have to start acting like it. Now, try it again. You abandoned your pack to go screw a vampire. Didn't you?"
I blinked at him, my brain catching up a lot slower than it should have. He was trying to help me. He was just being a jerk about it. But maybe that was the way I needed. He was being a lot nicer about it than my dad was being at least. I dreaded the day that I'd be seeing him again. "I didn't leave my pack to be with Vallen."
"But Caroline--"
"Tad," I corrected him instantly. My tone was sharper than it should have been, but my voice was strong. I didn't let anyone call me that name. Not anymore. I'd had to put up with it from my dad while I lived in the pack, but that wasn't the case anymore. Not any of it. I took a deep breath, and let it out incredibly slowly. "My name is Tad, and you will call me that."
"Or what?" he pushed me.
Or I'd let Vallen come in and tear his throat out is what I wanted to say. But that wasn't very mature of me at all. "Or..." I didn't have a good threat.
Ronald nodded. "You're getting there. Just keep practicing. I'm sure it'll be hard, but you need to be able to stand there and not lose it and not shut down when the alphas are calling you by more than just a name you no longer use. They don't have a reason to respect you. Not yet at least. Give them one. Find a real threat, one that you can back up with actual actions, and then use it. Threaten to put sanctions on them. Find their weaknesses. What's a pack's weakest point? What would really hurt them? Come on, you know this. You grew up with werewolves. You are a werewolf. What would break a pack that would make an alpha shut up and listen to you? Even your father?"
It felt wrong about how to destroy a pack like this. They'd been my family for twenty-one years. I couldn't do that to them. But, Ronald was right. I needed a way to make the alphas respect me and simply walking in and expecting it wasn't enough because they never would. They had no reason to. As long as they saw me as a woman, and not a threat, they would have no reason to listen to me, because none of them thought a woman was worth listening to, but there was one thing a woman could do for them, one way that a pack could be broken. "The women. If I took them. If I turned them against their long held ideas, then the packs would crumble."
Ronald raised his eyebrows at me. "Be more specific. Come on. You know this."
I didn't know what he wanted from me. Wasn't that enough? I took a breath and tried again. "The mothers? I could take them."
"There you go. I knew you'd get there eventually. Not all of them will come with you. Some actually enjoy their lives. But you know how the packs see them. They should be revered, after all, they raised us all. But they are also the thrown away used up women that are only in the pack to raise children until they die."
I hated how he talked about them like they were nothing. They weren't. "Don't say that about them. Those women are the only reason the younger women have the time to go back and make new children for the pack. I've been through the pain. It sucks, but it's not unbearable. It can be survived. If a woman had to raise her own kids then she could. The mothers make life easier and the pack wouldn't grow as fast."
He reached for my shoulder but I pushed his hand away. I froze as soon as I'd done it though. In the pack I'd had to accept whatever touch an alpha wanted to give me. A hug, a kiss-- whatever. Touching my shoulder wouldn't have even raised an eyebrow. But here I was, telling him that he couldn't touch me like that. Telling him I wasn't a woman. I met his gaze and found him smiling at me. He tried to touch me again but I pushed his hand away faster this time. He went for my knee against and I grabbed his wrist and squeezed until he yanked his hand back in pain.
"You're getting better. Keep practicing
. I'm serious. Don't take this job that the vampires are offering you and don't even meet with any of the alphas until this becomes second nature. Until you don't look away. Until you make them drop their gazes first. You're an alpha, even if you don't have a pack of your own. You're strong enough to do this, you just have to get there on your own."
His confidence was infective. I believed in myself and what I was doing because of Ronald's words.
"Though, I do wish you would have come to me and not the vampire. I could have gotten you out of your pack just fine. You could have even been Tad when it was just us at home."
I heard what he was saying, and also what he wasn't. I wanted to scream at him that being myself in private wasn't the point, but I wanted to be diplomatic. I had to be. "Thank you, I'm flattered," I began, picking my words carefully between my gritted teeth. "But I'm not playing dress up. This is who I am, and with Vallen I have the freedom to be myself no matter where I am."
"I see." He pursed his lips and tilted his head to the side. "So it wasn't just that you wanted to see what vampires were like."
"Vampires had nothing to do with it, other than the fact that they are willing to be more accepting of who a person is than werewolves ever could be. Take you for example, I thought you understood, but you just see me as a girl playing dress up sometimes, don't you?"
Calling him out on it felt good. I saw through him. He wanted to help me, sure, but there was more to it than that. Maybe he expected me to get tired of being in the vampire world and come back to a pack, and maybe he hoped that his kindness now would get him a chance with me in the future. Only, none of that was going to be happening.
"I don't, but I think that you're being wasted on a vampire. If you're lucky you'll have one child with him. You can be a man in a werewolf's house while still providing for the future of our kind."
He was a piece of work, but then again, he was just spitting out what every male werewolf before him had ever thought. "I'm not having any more children after I give birth to our one."
"That's your choice, but I urge you to consider what a good werewolf match would bring you in the future--"
He wasn't understanding me so I knew I'd have to make things clearer for him. "No, Ronald. Listen to me. After our child is born I am going to go to a human doctor and he is going to cut out my uterus, my ovaries, my tubes, and everything else that makes me internally a woman. He will cut off my breasts. He will--"
"You're going to let some human butcher you."
He sounded pissed. But he wasn't nearly as mad as I was in that moment. "No, I'm going to let him make me more of who I am. I'm not a man when it's convenient, or when I'm at home, or when I don't feel like wearing a skirt. I've always been a man. I'll always be a man. I'm not wasted on a vampire and I'm not wasted by not popping out kids randomly for the rest of my fertile life. I will have this one child, that both Vallen and I want, and that's it."
We were supposed to have lunch, but I was pretty much done with him. I opened the door and started to get out of the car. "Ronald, thank you for your time, and your encouragement, but I don't think we should have lunch today."
"Why not?"
A woman would have lied and come up with an excuse but I wasn't a woman and I didn't need to lie to him. "Because you're not someone that I want to spend anymore time with today. Goodbye."
I had my phone in my hands as I got out of his car. Then I was walking along the sidewalk. As a wolf I would have taken shelter in the woods to avoid all of this. But as a vampire I could walk along the streets. And so I did, right into the Blood Bar. I knew Ronald would never go there. He was mad. I'd seen it on his face. But werewolves were not welcome in such a heavily travelled vampire business.
"Sir, are you lost?" the girl at the counter asked me.
I instantly loved her for recognizing me as a man. "No, I'm Vallen's husband. You're welcome to call the council if you need their confirmation."
She nodded and took a step back. "I'm sorry. I didn't know to expect you. Of course you're welcome here. Can I get you anything? We have..." She frowned and started looking under the counter. Then she turned her attention back to me. "I could get you some cookies and juice from the human area if you want."
Actually, I was hungry, and the Blood Bar was quiet with just two vampires off in a corner drinking together while they typed on their laptops. They looked like they were my age so maybe they were in college and doing some homework. "Thank you, cookies and juice would be great."
"I'll be right back." She looked glad to be able to give the werewolf in her midst something.
I found a seat at the other corner of the bar and called Vallen. It was dark out so he was probably up.
"Hey, how are things going with Ronald?"
I didn't really know where to begin. "I'm at the Blood Bar actually. Would you like to come join me for a drink?"
"I'm on my way right now. Are you safe? He didn't hurt you, did he?"
I sighed and crossed my legs. "I'm fine. He was just... He's a werewolf, exactly like I should have expected him to be. Nicer than most alphas for sure, but not anything less than how he was raised." I wish he had been different though. It would have been nice to have an ally in all of this that was from that part of my life. "Why did you treat me like a man right away?"
"Because you told me that you were."
He made it sound so perfectly simple. "You didn't argue though. Well, about who I was, yes, but not about that."
"You don't argue with me either. I say I'm a man, and therefore I am. You say that you are and therefore you are. Why would I argue with you about what gender you are? No one would know that better than you so I would have no leg to stand on in that argument. I'm about five minutes out."
The girl came back with my cookies and juice. "Thank you," I told her.
"You're welcome. Will your husband be joining us?"
She said it so easily. It was another thing I appreciated about the vampires. They had no problems with sexuality or, it seemed, gender. They accepted people for who they were. Maybe it was something that came with centuries of being alive.
"Yes, he'll be here soon."
She perked up a bit at that. "Great. I'll pour him a glass of someone new."
"Thank you."
She walked away and I gave my attention back to Vallen. "I'm sorry."
"Don't be. I'm pulling onto the street now. I'll be there in a minute."
And there he was, walking through the tinted door and right over to me, where he leaned down and kissed my cheek. "Hey."
I put my phone away and, as soon as he'd pulled up a chair, I leaned against him. I needed him.
"Tell me what happened with Ronald. If he hurt you in any way, the council will not stand for it."
I smiled and took his hand. I just wanted his peace right then, his strength. His self assured way of getting things done and taking care of me. "He didn't hurt me. Just pissed me off. A lot. He was right about some things though. The alphas won't respect me if I don't start acting like one of them."
"And how are you supposed to do that?"
I really wish I knew. "I'll figure it out."
The girl was back with a clear bottle full of dark red blood for Vallen. I'd only been in his world for a few days, but seeing him drink blood didn't bother me anymore. "Hello, Vallen. This one is eighteen and he just got a scholarship. He wants to study dance."
"Thank you."
She stood there, seeming like she wanted more attention from him, but Vallen was back to looking at me. I leaned against him, and sipped my juice while he drank his blood. I was starting to feel better, even if I had no idea how I was going to win over the alphas. I wanted things to be simple, like they were with Vallen. I adored him, I cared about him, and I couldn't wait to have a child with him. I slipped my hand into his free one and then I looked up, and found the two vampires who had been on their computers now watching us. I thought they might say something, or do something, to show us that they didn't appr
ove of a werewolf being with a vampire. Or maybe they didn't approve of me.
But then one of them smiled. The other waved. And seconds later, they were back to their computers, typing quietly away, as they occasionally talked to each other in voices too low for me to hear.
"How much time do you have before you go to work?" I asked Vallen.
"A few hours. Do you want to order some real dinner? We could go somewhere before I have to leave."
I liked his idea, but I had a better one. "How about take out at home while we watch some TV?"
"Sure." He kissed my cheek and then we were leaving, my hand tucked in his.
Chapter Thirteen
Vallen
I hated having to go to work while Tad laid there on the couch, looking so relaxed and tempting. I wanted to be back beside him, his feet in my lap while he ate pizza, not driving to work to deal with people.
Ainsley was there with a bottle of warmed blood and a stack of reminders for me when I came through the door.
"You smell like tomato sauce," he said, sniffing me as I sat down.
"Tad got pizza." I opened the file and immediately dismissed most of it as not being important until late on in the night when I'd had a chance to settle into work more.
"Yum. I remember pizza. All that cheese..."
Sometimes I really forgot just how young he was.
"Your first meeting is in an hour. Then you'll have a two hour break until the next one comes in."
"Thanks."
I thought that would have been the end of our evening pleasantries but he hesitated at the door. "How's Tad doing with all of this?"
I wasn't sure what the Ainsley was really referring to, it wasn't as if anything had changed within the past day after all. "He's fine. He seems to be settling in nicely. We are both hopeful for a child soon."
Ansley gave me a graceful smile. "I hope you two are happy together. I know a lot of vampires think you're crazy right now for taking in a werewolf but I think it's a good thing for you both."
I hadn't realized that anyone thought that about me, but it didn't really matter either. I've never been much for vampire gossip. The council approved of us and our marriage so there was nothing else for anyone to say. Tad was a vampire, and my husband, and that was the end of it.
Defying His Fate Page 10
