by Kari Gregg
I shuddered. My hand gripping the telephone receiver shook. “Not shifting is killing you.”
“Yeah, it is.” He chuckled, finally relaxing into his seat. “I love you too, Nox.”
I blinked at him, flabbergasted. Did I love him? I couldn’t. I hated him. Feared him. The attack and everything my brother had cost me had eaten at me like acid for more years than I liked to count. Despite Dio’s support and dumbass Dr. Bennet, it ate at me still. How could I love him? He was a monster.
“This is the same as an execution. No, worse. Executions aren’t cruel.” My pulse quickened, sprinting madly, but that much, at least, made sense. My brother was a dangerous mass murderer, but I wasn’t. I could never approve of or condone his torment. “Denying your beast is prolonged torture—” I gaped at him, recognition suddenly robbing the oxygen from my lungs. “You’re punishing yourself. You want the pain.”
“Death is easy. Living with the damage I’ve done?” One corner of his mouth curved. “A lot more difficult.”
The glint in his eyes wasn’t remorse, exactly. I didn’t think Joth could feel genuine remorse. He lacked necessary empathy, acknowledging the value and worth of others. No, the spark lighting his stare wasn’t guilt or contrition. He wasn’t sorry and never would be.
The gleam was anguish. That, he could still feel. Not for the lives he’d destroyed.
My brother hated himself, perhaps more than I did.
I wasn’t one of the human scientists. I didn’t have their fancy words and precise labels defining everything and everyone, including me no doubt, but I knew my brother was criminally insane. As a man, Joth could manage to be more stable than his animal form, though. He could be reasoned with and exercised a self-interested logic that encouraged him to control his wicked impulses, which made him marginally less lethal.
Pity we were both man and wolf, that one form couldn’t be divorced from the other. “Dr. Bennet says your beast is psychotic. Your animal form poisons the thoughts, feelings, and impulses of your human form, but they’re developing treatment protocols. He swears you’re showing signs of improvement.”
“Not just my wolf is dangerous. I’ve never been able to fool you. The rest of them believe what they want to believe, but not you.” He lifted his hand to tap the window. “If not for this, I’d bathe in your blood.”
“The glass will always separate us.” My grip tightened on the phone, but I refused to cower. “You’ll never hurt me again.”
“No, not physically, but that isn’t the point. Although I like to think I’d regret killing you, I don’t know that I would if I had the chance, and I like you, bro. I liked Mom and Kinessa. Dad too.” He shrugged a stiff shoulder. “Lusting for the painful deaths of the ones you love is a special kind of hell, a prison from which there is no escape. I can’t turn it off. God knows I’ve tried.” His stare swam in oceans of agony. “Somebody has to make it stop.”
“Someone did.” My heart climbed into my throat. “The humans guaranteed you’d never kill again.”
“Nothing dents the desire, though. Wolfsbane patches help, but not for long.” Joth chuckled, a cold bitter sound that brought the hairs at my nape to urgent attention. “I need to die, but I should suffer first. That’s why I killed that little girl. Shifters would’ve ended me, but humans are almost as cruel as I am. Abandoning me to them… is justice.” He smiled, blew out a choppy breath. “I didn’t shift when you dropped your bombshell during your last visit, though. That’s progress. I haven’t fantasized about raping you since Oliver upped my dosage of wolfsbane, either.” His grin chilled the blood in my veins. “That’s something, right?”
Butterflies swarmed in my belly. I trembled. “Maybe you’re getting better.”
He snickered. “There’s no cure for me. I’ll never walk out of prison and I shouldn’t. I’d like to be less dangerous, though. Sometimes, I’m afraid of what I might do. Not always, but occasionally.” Joth smirked. “I’m a mess. No big surprise.”
No. Not a shocker. “So am I.” I licked my lips. “I’m a mess too.”
“Unlike me, you’re fixable. You’re also worth saving. Me? Nah.” He smiled and sat up in his chair. “You aren’t sterile.”
I grimaced, still grappling with the idea my brother had orchestrated his own torturous punishment and with the realization, despite everything, I didn’t want him to hurt. “If I’m fertile, does that mean you’ll allow yourself to suffer less?”
Joth tossed his head back and crowed with laughter. “Smartass.” When his chortling tapered, he wiped his eyes. “Are you pregnant?”
I shoved my hair from my eyes. “Dio is taking the birth control shots.”
He whistled through his teeth. “Unusual for an alpha.”
“Very,” I agreed, “but necessary. I need to be stronger and healthier, before a pregnancy can be considered, and the specialist worries the herbs that would close off my womb could shut down my reproductive system permanently.”
“I’m in no position to tell you how to live your life, brother, but… would that be terrible?” Joth frowned. “You shouldn’t start a family because others expect it or to make your mate happy. Children shouldn’t be an obligation. Do you want kids?”
“I don’t know,” I mumbled, chin lowering.
“What about your career?”
“I don’t know!” Rage exploded from me to poison the air on my side of the visiting room, exactly like the cloying musk of my fury had polluted Dr. Bennet’s office. My faltering control should have alarmed me. Considering what I had to lose, locking my feelings down shouldn’t be hard, but I wrestled with my temper constantly. The scent of my anger, dense and cloying, polluted the visiting room. Despite the precautions humans had taken to isolate me from Joth, my brother must have detected it. He wouldn’t fail to exploit my weakness. He couldn’t help himself and only my iron grip on my wrath kept me safe from my pack. From my mate. They’d hunt me again, and this time, I would break. Dio tracking me, cold-bloodedly set on my death? That betrayal would tip me over the edge.
No, that was a lie. Dio was my mate. He wouldn’t hurt me. I might not trust in much, but I depended on that.
The pack wouldn’t hunt me, either. Not anymore. Never again.
Try, Dr. Bennet had ordered.
Confusion swamped me. And fear.
As bizarre and dysfunctional as our relationship might be, Joth would understand the forces swirling inside me that were tearing me apart. Only he could. My brother alone was capable of comprehending why the possibility of breeding terrified me too.
“The wrongness might be in our blood,” I said.
My heart thumped. The pit fell out of my stomach.
Finally, the truth. My truth. I wouldn’t speak of my worry to the human doctor. I couldn’t say it to Dio, but I’d thought of little else since the fertility specialist had held out the slim hope—the threat—that I might one day carry a child. What if my offspring turned out like my brother? Evil. Dangerous. Not just Joth, either. I’d never been a proper omega, had struggled to fill my role before the attack. In my way, I was as wrong as my brother was, as peculiar and strange. While Dio’s strong blood would supply half the genetics for any child we created, half that DNA would come from me, and my line had been corrupted. The pack had recognized the darkness inside me once, had hunted me. Because I’d buried those raw feelings and my brokenness under a relentless sea of duty, they’d forgotten me, but my control slipped more as my fear of the possibility of giving birth to a monster escalated.
Try.
“Bullshit,” my brother said.
I looked up, meeting his steely gaze with a dazed blink. “What?”
“You heard me.”
Disoriented, I shook my head. “That’s why you gutted me. You didn’t want to risk my passing the bad in you, in us, onto another generation of shifters.”
Joth harrumphed. “I gutted you because shredding your womb would fuck you up.”
“Deep down, your instincts—”
“There is no deep down!” He sprang from his seat, an angry hand chopping through the air on his side of the window. “This is it. All me. My only instinct is to kill. My wolf doesn’t give two shits about the next generation of shifters. I don’t. My beast and I care about the hot slick of blood and the pain we can cause.” He glared at me. “You’ve never shied from what I am. Don’t disappoint me by romanticizing it now. You’re no coward.”
“Not a coward?” My muscles tensed. “I ran away, Joth.”
“They were hunting you,” he roared into the telephone. When the window in the door behind him slid open, he glared over his shoulder. “I’m fine. Not gonna shift this time.” He turned to focus eyes glittering with his cold ire on me. “I’m just arguing with my moron brother. Families do that.”
I shivered.
The door’s window slid shut.
“Tell them you won’t breed for him if that isn’t what you want, but don’t you dare lay this on me.” He squared his shoulders. “There isn’t a damn thing wrong with you or our blood.”
“There was always something different about me too, something off. Everybody knew. Farron and Dad delayed arranging my mating because I wasn’t right, was never what I should be.” I swallowed to quench the parched Sahara of my throat. “What kind of omega doesn’t want kids?”
Joth regarded me with hooded eyes that glinted. “Your kind.”
“No.” Though my stomach churned sick and sour, I violently whipped my head from side to side. “An omega is a parent. An omega breeds.”
“I wish I could take this burden from you, but I can’t. No one can.” Joth sighed, his stare sad. “When are you going to realize and accept that you alone decide what an omega is? Only you choose who you want to be and what to build with your life. No one else.”
My eyes burned. “The pack—”
“Submit to them. Or don’t. Fight for what’s important to you, if that’s what it takes. God knows you’re strong enough, but I can’t make you.” My brother pushed a weary breath from his lungs. “That decision is yours, Nox. It’s always been yours.”
Chapter Nine
“Are you all right?” Dio found me in the dark workshop later. I’d shifted as soon as I reached home, ranged through the pack’s territory and beyond our borders, as though my wolf sought a challenge. A fight. Lone wolves, another pack, humans, I hadn’t cared. The compulsion to run and to keep running wiped out everything else. No one had confronted me, though. Eventually, the hot fury had banked to embers, leaving chaos and confusion in its aftermath. Shaken, I’d returned home. Other than uncovering and staring at the headboard I’d been carving as my mating gift to Dio, I hadn’t moved a muscle since.
He stood in the doorway, shifting his weight from foot to foot. “Nox?”
I wasn’t okay, and the recordings from my visit with my brother on the flash drive passed to Dio after my trips into the towns proved it. “I don’t want kids.”
Dio froze. “Okay.” He fidgeted. “Would you please consider sleeping inside tonight? In a bed? The floor is killing my back.”
“I’ll never want children.” I stared down at my chest, which only reminded me what my pecs, as a male omega, had been biologically designed to do. Imagining mine swell as they filled with milk, I shuddered. “The process creeps me out, honestly.”
“Bullshit. Maybe when you were young the physical toll a pregnancy would take on your body unsettled you, but that’s the least of your reasons for not wanting to breed.” He waved at me. “Lie to yourself if you like. I can’t stop you, but you don’t fool me.” He tapped his nose. Then, he sighed. “What’s important is you understand no one will force you into anything you don’t want, especially me.” Leaning a hip against the doorframe, Dio studied me in the darkness. “Except for sleeping inside. If you hate my bed that much, we’ll tear it apart, break the wood into kindling, and light a bonfire with the pieces. Mattresses on the floor will do until you finish my mating gift, but if I have to wait until you’re done to sleep comfortably again, I’m going to need a chiropractor.”
I scowled at him, then at the headboard. “You know about the bed.”
“Sometimes, you are a locked door. A paradox. A puzzle none of us will ever solve. Other times, you are as transparent as glass.” He pushed off the doorframe and shrugged. “To me, you are anyway.”
“I can’t figure myself out, but you can see through me?” Irritated, I wrinkled my nose. “That’s so typical.”
“My wolf knows yours, has been drawn to and fascinated by you from the start. We are a matched pair, you and I. Yes, I see you, more clearly than you see yourself sometimes.” He nodded once, decisively. “I don’t want kids either.”
I gawped at him, shock numbing me. “You… don’t?”
“You are an omega who has no desire to breed.” He chuckled. “Is an alpha equally disinterested in children impossible to believe?”
“Yes.” My eyes felt like they’d boing out of my skull. “You’ve been trying to knock me up!” I frowned in consternation. “You did knock me up.”
“I thought that’s what you needed to feel whole again, and I’m no less vulnerable to insecurities over failing to meet my pack’s hopes and dreams for me as you are.” He jerked a stiff shoulder in an awkward shrug.
“The pack wants you to stay and lead permanently.” Painful hope and its cousin, fear, collided inside me. “Breeding to continue your line would reassure them—”
“Farron has four sons and three daughters.”
“Exactly.” I licked my lips. “Producing a litter of kids is no guarantee any of them will be fit to lead. Farron’s sons and daughters prove it, but as an alpha, your blood is strongest. Sometimes the ability to lead skips generations like it did with Farron, but you’re still most likely to produce the next alpha. They’ll expect you to try, if for no other reason than the pack will be nervous after Farron’s age and ill health left them beholden to a fixer once already. Now that you’ve mated, locking down the line of succession will be their next order of business.”
“Not if I pick an heir.” A line grooved his brow. “One of Farron’s granddaughters shows promise.”
“Shema?” I glared at him. “She’s two years old.”
“Yet, you knew which of Farron’s granddaughters I meant. You admitted alpha skills occasionally skips generations. His passed to Shema. Scent never lies.”
I gulped. “She’s a baby.”
“I’ll train her as she grows. When I step down, she’ll be an adult fully equipped to lead this pack and because ours is the pack of her grandfather, of Farron, the others will gladly accept her.” Dio walked to me, crouched. Instead of reaching for me, he let his hands dangle between his thighs. “You know it could work.”
I yearned for his embrace, the heat and strength of his arms around me, but his assurances wouldn’t matter if I didn’t believe them. “What if, once she’s matured, she decides to be a fixer like you? Alphas don’t always stay in their home packs. Many don’t. What if she leaves—?”
“What if she doesn’t?” His chest heaved on a prolonged sigh. “No one understands the wanderlust like another fixer, and if I sense it in Shema, I’ll find someone else to take up the mantle in her stead. I’ll choose another. I’ll train a few other cubs with leadership potential alongside Shema, and when the time comes, the pack will have plenty of options.” He focused on me, his stare beseeching. “None of which requires you to give birth. We don’t need to breed unless we one day mysteriously decide children would fulfill us and they are what we want.”
“I’ll never change my mind about breeding.” I bit my lip, but integrity required me to finish my warning. “Mental illness can be hereditary, Dio. Why risk passing that on to a child? I can’t.”
He lifted a hand to cup my cheek, as though I were infinitely precious to him. “You aren’t crazy, Nox. What you endured would traumatize anyone. Give it time.”
“Say you’re right. Maybe someday I’ll be okay ag
ain. Not just functional, but healthy.” My mouth thinned. “Joth will still be my brother and he is a homicidal maniac. We share the same blood. Even if we didn’t…” I quivered under his touch. “I’m too messed up. I’m certainly in no shape to provide the stable, loving environment a child deserves.” I lifted my fingers to his lips to silence Dio when he opened his mouth to argue. “I can make myself talk sometimes, and I’m slowly figuring out how to navigate the chaos in my mind. As ferociously as I hate seeing Joth, meeting with Dr. Bennet, and stupid couples’ therapy, all of it helps, but I have many miles to go before reaching the same zip code as mentally healthy or normal.”
“What’s normal?” Dio snorted. “You are perfect for me exactly as you are. How can you not grasp that? You’re aggravating and contrary. Loyal when no one else is. Sexy as hell. Brave. Too stubborn for your good or mine. The more I learn to love you, the less willing I am to gamble your health on a baby. Or risk our relationship. We’ve only found each other. Why allow fertility problems to stress our mating when there’s no need?” He stroked my cheek. “I want you, Nox. You and this pack. Loving my mate and leading my people are more than enough to complete me. I suspect focusing on your art and loving me are enough to fulfill you. I only ever dreamed I could have and share such a life. Until you.”
I leaned into his touch, my fear choking me, but… This was Dio, my mate, the man who would love me and I would love in return. The one I would create a future with.
“I’m afraid,” I whispered, the confession soft on my lips. “Of you, of us. Of everything.”
“I’m scared too.” Finally, he pulled me into his arms. His warmth enveloped me as he cradled me against him. Solid. Steady. My fingers curled into the meat of his biceps, holding him fast. “Mostly, I fear losing you.”
He stroked my hair, from the top of my skull to where the tips brushed below my shoulder blades. “Everyone is frightened of something. Fear isn’t a weakness. Only denying your fear is or refusing to let the ones who care about you share your worries. Facing what terrifies us, together, makes us stronger men. It just takes courage.” He kissed the crown of my head. “Luckily, you have that in abundance.”
