by T. S. Joyce
“Oh, God,” Grey said, heat creeping up his neck. “It’s really okay. I shouldn’t have even asked.”
“Why not?” the alpha asked with a frown.
“I don’t know. Talking about this stuff is…” Is embarrassing. He cleared his throat. “Well it won’t change anything.”
Dean sighed and leaned onto the side of Grey’s truck. “Well, let me say my piece anyway. In a mated pair, it’s different for a male and female. Rachel probably explained it as best she could, from a woman’s perspective, but for males? A mating bond will fucking wreck you. Make you feel insane. Kick every instinct up and take over your whole head. When I figured out Rachel was mine, I couldn’t think of anything else. Couldn’t function. I wanted to be there every second of her life to keep her safe, my instinct was so strong. It’s harder on dominants. That need to protect is powerful, and it’s hard to rein it in. Human women, they don’t understand the need to defend, so it’ll be an issue you have to deal with. She’ll think you are being controlling. She’ll go talk to her friends and family about how you won’t let her walk to a car alone, or how you snap at people who make her obviously uncomfortable. You’ll want to know where she is all the time so your animal can pull her from danger the second she cries for help. But, Grey? You’ll have to contain that instinct eventually or your woman will run away. Or maim you,” he finished with a serious look. “Trust me. Learn from my mistakes. I almost lost Rachel because I couldn’t leave her alone. I suffocated her with that overbearing attention and she buckled. Left me for a few months, and it was torture. If you like a woman? Train yourself to care for her in a way that empowers her.”
Holy shit. This was the first time he and Dean had talked about anything so seriously. He hadn’t known that Dean and Rachel had split for a while, they were the perfect couple. King and Queen werewolf, and so obviously head-over-heels for each other. “Okay,” Grey murmured with a nod of thanks. “I hear you.”
Rachel brought containers filled with leftovers and pressed them into his hands, then hugged him goodbye. Dean gave him a two-fingered wave in the rearview as he drove away, and as the minutes passed on those old back roads, Grey couldn’t get something Dean had said out of his head.
Mating bond.
Was that what this was? It sounded important.
The driver side window presented blurred shades of green leaves and tall meadow grass as he navigated the winding road. Mesquite and blooming cactus dotted the dark land, and he thought about everything Rachel and Dean had told him about relationships with humans. So many aspects of his Change had been abnormal, as the pack was quick to point out. He failed as a human and couldn’t even manage turning into a werewolf properly.
But…
Perhaps…
As far as mating bonds went, he might be kind of normal.
And small victories were victories nonetheless.
Chapter Six
Grey gasped and sat up. The mattress made a rustling sound as he kicked the sheets into a pile at the end of the bed. He panted deeply, ignoring the cold sweat on his skin and chilly breeze drifting through the cracked window. The last of the screams echoed through his bones.
He hated that nightmare.
He rubbed his hands through his hair, a stress habit from childhood. He would never get back to sleep. The first streaks of gray filtered through the old window, and he readied quickly in the dim light. His muscles buzzed with restlessness. Would he have to Turn today? Probably. Wolf filled his head.
Today was the day. It was Tuesday. Morgan might be in her class today.
He pulled sweats and a hoodie on and went for a jog to ease the tension that constantly strummed through his body like the pluck of an over tightened guitar string. He’d be at the gym if it wasn’t too risky. Dean enforced a lot of rules, but most of them made sense. Allowing someone to see how much he could lift was just asking for trouble.
Nope, his main outlet had to be running, and not on some stuffy treadmill, either. Being outside was good for his soul, just as it always had been. Running outdoors helped him get rid of the caged feeling the city suffocated him with.
He ran a six-mile circle back to the apartment, showered and changed, and made his way down the apartment building stairs to grab breakfast at a cafe a few blocks down the road.
It was Tuesday. Tuesday, Tuesday, Tuesday.
Though a couple hours still remained between now and Morgan’s class, the nerves were already getting to him. The only thing that kept his hands from shaking was Wolf’s relentless focus. He finished off a big meal and headed over to stake out a better spying place than the one from last week.
A doorway a couple shops down from the corner where he’d watched her last time was perfect. Here, he could sit on a quaint little bench, with a newspaper and a coffee and no one would easily notice he was looking over the top of the paper toward the boxing gym. The angle was perfect. Plus, it brought him closer to the parking lot Morgan used so he could make sure she got in and out of there safely.
Morgan arrived early, driving the same black F-150 extended cab she’d driven last week. A truck girl. So fuckin’ hot. The second he saw her get out, his heart started racing a mile a minute, drumming against his chest and drowning out the sounds around him.
She reached back into her truck for a gym bag. Grey took a long drag of air. He couldn’t help it. Her scent was tantalizing and intoxicating, like female and fruit shampoo, mixed with a tangy scent that belonged to her alone. How did no one else around him smell it? He’d smelled her the last year, on that awful night, and it had stuck with him. He took a pull on the air again. Underneath it all, there was an underlying scent of animal he couldn’t put a finger on. She probably had a pet.
Hopefully, she was a dog person.
****
Morgan glanced over her shoulder as she jogged for the entrance of Todd’s Boxing. She was being watched. Some innate instinct had been telling her that for weeks. A small uninterested crowd gathered at the stop light to cross the road. A mother with a baby on her hip walked at a fast clip down the sidewalk. A man sat relaxed in a doorway across the street, reading the daily news and sipping coffee. A trio of teenaged boys on skateboards talked comfortably while they rolled across the uneven walkway. With a quick shake of her head, she sloughed off the paranoia. No one watched her. It was all in her head, just like everything else that had happened in the last year. She opened the door to the boxing gym and tossed her bag in the corner, near a wall of shelves.
“Hey, Todd,” she said to the owner behind the counter.
The old scrapper looked up from a stack of paperwork with an easy smile. “Hey Morgan. You ready to work today?”
“Always,” she said as she wrapped her left knuckles in purple hand-wraps. They always said the exact same thing to each other when she came in here. She liked the consistency of this place. Her hands wrapped, she tossed her gloves beside a favorite heavy bag, then pulled her arm in front and gave it a deep, long stretch as Todd made his way to the front to start the class.
The workout was intense, but that was the point. She’d done martial arts when she was younger, but this was such a different work out. For one hour a week, she got to lose herself completely. After Marianna...well, she just wanted to hit something until her arms went numb. Exhaustion was the only relief from that awful survivor’s guilt.
“Alright,” Todd said from the front of the room. He turned down the blaring rap music so they could better hear him. “You guys did great today. Do some burnouts. Crunches with a medicine ball. When you can’t sit up anymore, you can go, and I’ll see you next time.”
Morgan lasted the longest, and Francine waited for her near the cubby holes that housed their gym bags and water bottles. She was older, and only an acquaintance, but kind, and always took the time to catch up before and after class. She also didn’t take crap from anyone. Points for her.
“So, listen,” Francine said, unwrapping her hands. “My son is your age and I’ve told hi
m all about you, and he would love to meet up for drinks.”
Uh oh. How did she explain she was completely unavailable for blind dates for the rest of her life in as polite a way as possible? She didn’t have many friends after last year’s meltdown, and Francine was nice to talk to. If she hid her crazy well enough, maybe she could keep her.
Morgan zipped her gym bag up and took a long drink of cool water from the fountain. Such a little staller she’d become. Water dribbled down her chin and she wiped it with the back of her forearm. “Thanks for thinking of me, but I have way too much on my plate right now to date anyone. It wouldn’t be fair to them.”
Francine sighed and searched her steadily with her dark eyes. “Don’t wait forever, child. You deserve happiness. Your sister would want that for you.” She waved and left without another word.
Morgan’s stomach went cold, like a patch of ice in some frozen Arctic tundra. How did Francine know what her sister would want? How unfair, that she would assume the feelings of the dead.
Morgan should have died that night, not Marianna. Her sister had a daughter to live for, so no, she couldn’t just go happily on. Her self-inflicted punishment for the unfairness of Marianna’s death would be loneliness.
Rage turned into a scalding ember in her soul, and she reared back and blasted the nearest bag with a clenched fist. It rocked and sprung back but Morgan was already gone.
“You okay?” Todd asked as she strode for the door.
It was kinder not to turn around. He didn’t deserve her anger.
She shoved open the door and walked crisply for the parking lot around the side of the building, head down, as if the cracks in the battered pavement held a roadmap for how to ease her stupid broken heart. God, she was a mess, and she didn’t have a clue how to put herself back together. She missed her old self.
“You got a light?” A man asked from behind.
She searched the gym bag for her keys. “No,” she replied in a clipped tone without turning. She’d never smoked a cigarette in her life.
As she reached for the door to her truck, she was launched backward. She would have screamed, if it weren’t for the shock of hitting concrete riddled with broken glass. The keys splashed into a puddle of rainwater right in front of her as a man gripped her by the hair. Fuck! There was a tiny pocket knife on the keychain, becoming her in the dim light. Salvation, if only she could reach it.
Baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, worn boots, impossibly strong grip, bad teeth and oh he smelled.
The man dragged her toward the darkest alleyway. She kicked and fought, loosening his grip only to have him replace it with one more determined. His fingers dug into her ankles, and the gravel scraped her back where the shirt slid up. She dragged air into her lungs to scream but the large man was on her. His foul breath skittered across her face as he clamped a dirty hand over her mouth, found her throat with his relentless fingers. She couldn’t breathe, and thrashed as he yanked her behind a blue metal dumpster. What air molecules she managed to drag through her nose stank of garbage and waste.
This wasn’t happening, this wasn’t happening! Muffled sounds screeched from her throat but they would never be enough. His belt jingled as he tried to remove it with one hand, and she clawed at his face and arms and desperately sought purchase with her knees.
And then he was gone.
The man flew backward into the brick of the next building. His body made a dull thud as it hit and he lay on the ground grimacing as he looked up. Morgan followed his fear filled stare. A man stood off to the side, tensed and aggressive, his back to her. He was tall, over six foot, with broad shoulders and a tapered waist. The most inhuman snarl ripped from his throat, and she gasped and sank as far as the brick against her bleeding back would allow. That sound. She’d heard that sound before. It visited her nightmares.
The attacker ran, and her rescuer tensed to follow. He stopped and glanced to the side, as if he couldn’t leave. His barely offered profile could never hide all of who he was. Not from her.
She was hallucinating. She had to be! He’d died in the woods. Search parties had looked for his body for weeks, and found nothing. They’d thought she was crazy. Said she’d made him up, but here he was in a dark alleyway, the man who had saved her all those hours and days and weeks of mourning ago.
Her voice caught. “Greyson?” she whispered. Why wouldn’t he look at her?
His hair was the same, sandy blond and chin length, but he was skinnier than she remembered, and his face had morphed into something fearsome. He wouldn’t meet her eyes, but even facing the ground, an unnatural sliver of color exuded from them. Terror and relief warred within her. He wasn’t right. Wasn’t natural, but he’d protected her.
He spun and took off at a clipped pace and she ran after him, holding a hand to her throat as if it would make her crushed neck better. “Greyson, is that you?”
He plucked her keys from the puddle and opened the door to her truck without a word. She had to see his eyes. For her continued existence, she needed to know without a shadow of a doubt it was him, alive and well and not just some sick figment she’d created to ease her guilt. That she wasn’t just imagining him. “Please look at me.”
“Best if I don’t,” he murmured in a voice rich and deep, like velvet. His nostrils flared slightly. “You’re bleeding.”
“I’m okay, please—”
“Get in,” he snarled, and then lowering his voice, he asked her, “Can’t you see I need you to get in?” His voice tapered into a low, rumbling noise that sent a chill up her spine.
Fear was an overwhelming motivator, so she scrambled into the cab of her truck and parked her ass in that driver’s seat. Her heart galloped like a runaway horse and he jerked his head to the side.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured before he slammed the door. And then into the shadowed parking lot, he disappeared like he’d never existed at all.
A sob escaped her throat, and she wiped tears from her cheeks with the back of her shaking hand. With the truck in drive, she peeled out of the parking lot. The tires screeched as she slammed on the brakes at a pile-up on the main road. Her attacker lay lifeless in the middle of the street, near the front tire of a car, and a crowd was gathering around the scene of the accident.
“Oh my gosh,” she murmured shakily, shock freezing the blood in her veins.
Should she stop? What would she tell the police? The man was probably dead already. It looked really bad. Did she file a report about his attack and the man who saved her? Greyson? She’d been down that road before and no one had believed her. Hysterical, they’d called her.
No. Fuck that man. He would’ve done something horrific to her if Greyson hadn’t showed up.
Jaw clenched, she pulled around the scene. She wasn’t talking to anyone about the man who kept coming to her rescue.
Lesson learned the first time.
Chapter Seven
Seeing her again was out of the question. Grey was too dangerous and she hated him anyway. He’d given her a second glimpse of the monster. And what if she had called the cops? She remembered his name, clearly. It wouldn’t even be that hard for the police to track him down. His name was on the damn lease of his apartment.
She’d remembered his name.
Which meant she remembered what he looked like from that night last year. She remembered him.
But…
There were a hundred reasons he couldn’t see her again and all of them were imperative to his continuing survival. And hers. What had happened the first time he’d let himself interact with her? Wolf had pushed him to chase a man into the street knowing that car was coming fast.
Murder. That’s what Wolf did.
Stop pretending it wasn’t satisfying, Wolf said smugly. We protected her. We would do it again.
It was Tuesday again. Today was the day she would be just a few tiny blocks away. Too close. So tempting.
Outside, it was pouring rain, but that was okay. It suited his mood,
and he went for a run in it regardless. Tiny, painful raindrop grenades motivated him to run faster than his usual pace. Then he showered and grabbed a breakfast burrito from the food truck down the street so he could take his lunch home and eat it there. The apartment was a nice far walk from the gym. He would simply eat inside today, maybe head to the roof for some woodworking, and skip stalking her. Her. Morgan. Yeah, he would just not stalk her. Easy peasy, booby squeezy.
The keys jangled in his shaking hand as he unlocked the door to his apartment and went inside. His seating options were limited to the worn couch or the small kitchen table he usually avoided eating at. Tables were meant for friends. For family. He had neither. Feeling a little panicked, he pulled one of the dining chairs out, and it screeched against the cracked tile floor. He slumped into it, then ran his hands through his soaking wet hair and watched a beetle’s slow progress across the grout near his shoe. Only the most self-indulgent creature would go back to see her after scaring her that badly. The bitter stink of fear had wafted from her skin in waves, and he was the reason. What right did he have to flaunt what he was in front of someone who’d been hurt by werewolves? He took a bigass bite of burrito and closed his eyes, ignoring the chant of Wolf
Go to her. Go to her. Go to her.
Damn animal was giving him a headache.
His weekly Morgan stalking was the one thing he looked forward to in this life. Every single thing had fallen apart, but for that hour a week, he was happy. He got to see her. Now, there would be no happiness. No break from the suck. Rain came down harder on the window, encouraging him to stay inside, and he threw an angry glance at it.
Go to her. Go to her. Go to her.
Appetite gone, Grey dropped the burrito on the paper plate and pushed back from the table. Who was he kidding? It was only a matter of time before he gave into his little Morgan addiction. Her class started in three minutes, and he would miss it if he didn’t get moving. He grabbed a hoodie and a pair of sunglasses, locked the door behind him, bolted down the stairs and out of the apartment building, and started off down the rain-soaked sidewalk at a run. By the time he reached the second block, his clothes were already soaked clean through.
