Noisy banging suddenly interrupted her thoughts of the future. Someone pounding his fist on the front door. Then came Rafe’s voice “Where is she? I want to see her now!”
The loud demand brought her head up. She could also hear Mag talking to Rafe in a low tone. And Kang, but their voices weren’t nearly as loud as Alisha’s abandoned mate.
So the new Colorado king had come after his queen. The old Janelle would have cowered in her room like a good little princess. This was male business, she would have told herself. She shouldn’t intrude. Her mother had taught her from an early age not to interrupt when two kings were talking.
But the new Janelle yanked open her bedroom door and marched right down the marble staircase to confront the wolf who had forced her sister to take such drastic actions.
“You.” Rafe pointed at her as she came down the stairs, the veins in his neck straining, his whole body tight with furious accusation.
“Rafe, calm down, man,” Mag said, taking a hold of his arm from behind.
But Rafe shook off Mag’s hand and kept on coming toward Janelle until he was less than a foot away from her.
“Tell me what happened. Tell me how to get to her back. Now.” The last word came out with a vicious growl, and Janelle could all but see his black and tan wolf behind his glittering eyes.
But Janelle folded her arms, and said a word that, until now, had been utterly foreign to her tongue. “No.”
And Rafe actually flinched. He seemed taken aback, like he’d come to confront Janelle and found a stranger in her place.
“Janelle, you don’t understand. She’s my mate. You have to—”
“No, I understand perfectly,” she informed Rafe. “You figured out a way to mate my sister despite her not agreeing to your pledge. She found out about it, and she left you. What else is there to understand?”
“No, that’s not how it… she was being stubborn, so I had to make certain arrangements. And then I ran out of time. She went into heat before I could convince her to take my pledge. But she is my mate now, and she has no right—”
“No, you had no right, Rafe! She made her choice and you didn’t respect it. Now you want me to help you take away all her choices again, and I’m telling you I’ll die before that happens!”
The smooth and polite wolf she’d known as Rafe completely disappeared, replaced by a cold demon who stared her down with glowing hazel eyes. “That can be arranged, Princess,” he growled.
The new Janelle was fierce and the new Janelle was bold. But the new Janelle had to admit to being more than slightly intimidated by the wolf looming over her right now. His rage was so potent, she could nearly feel it coming off of him, but she stood her ground, chin up, silently refusing to back down or give Rafe any information he could use to thwart Alisha’s plan.
Rafe made a move forward, and for a moment, Janelle thought he just might follow up on his insinuated threat. But then Mag grabbed his arm and swung him around.
“Hey, she’s not a princess anymore. She’s a queen. My queen. And I won’t have her disrespected.”
“You won’t have her disrespected?” Rafe repeated, his lips drawing back into a full-on snarl. “She’s disrespected me. Your friend and ally. A true king would not let this stand. A true king would not let his she-wolf talk to another king in this manner. And right now, I can’t tell if you’re a true king or a wannabe who made it all way to a throne you didn’t deserve. With my help. But I am a true king born, Mag, so I’m letting you know right now as any true king would that if you don’t handle her, I will.”
The room went very still then. A silence so thick, all that could be heard was the Wyoming wind hurling snow around outside.
But then Mag spoke, his words cutting through the tension like bullets through paper. “You’re right, I’m not like you. Maybe I am just a wannabe, but I do know this: if you touch her, if you so much as threaten her again, I will end you. And I don’t how true kings do it, but my brother and me are from Freedom Town, yeah?”
“Home of the Eskimo beat down,” Kang snarled, and to Janelle’s surprise, the wolf who had gotten in her face the day before came over to stand beside his younger brother in her defense.
“Don’t touch her, don’t talk to her…” Mag’s silver moon eyes glowed just as bright as Rafe’s hazel ones now. “Don’t even look at her again, man, or we will show you the meaning of dead and broken.”
For endless seconds Rafe and Mag stared each other down, eye-to-eye, shoulders hunched forward, like a UFC poster with winter sweaters. And for a moment, a future where the two best friends physically fought each other to the death seemed a certainty.
But then Rafe blinked first. “I hope you make up with your father-in-law,” he spat at Mag. “Because any alliance we might have had—that’s as dead as our friendship.”
Then he slammed out the front door. Like a tornado that had set down to disrupt everything for world-destroying minutes, only to spin back out into the ether.
All the breath expelled from Janelle’s lungs when the door closed behind Rafe. She couldn’t believe what had just happened. She’d stood up to Rafe and he’d backed down—well, backed down under the threat of a Freedom Town beat down, but backed down nonetheless. She’d totally take it.
Her eyes found Mag, who was also breathing hard even though no punches had been thrown.
“Are you okay?” he asked her.
She nodded, patting her hand over her chest. “Better than okay now that he’s gone. Um, thank you for your help. I don’t know why you did it, but I’m very grateful.”
“You don’t know why I did it,” he repeated, his voice suddenly going flat. “Okay, do you mind coming up to my study? We need to go over a few things before you leave.”
For a moment, fear overtook her. Would Mag try to threaten her again like he had back at the portal? Would he and Kang gang up on her like they’d just ganged up on Rafe? But in the end, she squared her shoulders and followed him up to his office. She was her own woman now, she reminded herself. She’d already made that decision, and no matter what he threw at her, she could handle it.
What he threw at her, though, turned out to be a small sheath of papers, tossed onto the desk that stood between them.
Janelle, who had refused to take the seat he’d offered her, looked down at the papers.
“What’s this?” she asked, immediately recognizing it as a legal document. Was it their pledge agreement? Was there a non-divorce clause she hadn’t noticed when she read it over? Some piece of legalese he could use to prevent her from leaving?
“They’re divorce papers. Really simple agreement. Called in the council lawyer yesterday, and he drew them up. You can look them over yourself if you want.”
She did want. In her experience, council lawyers were always men and consequently, the legal documents they crafted tended to favor other men. She skipped over the financial details and went straight to the custody agreement part, read it, then raised her eyes to meet Mag’s with a sharp look.
“It says ‘to be decided by the mother.’”
Mag nodded, his eyes sad. “I want to be in our pup’s life—I have to. My wolf won’t let me let my kid go like that. But I trust you to do what’s fair. Whatever you choose, I’ll give you plenty of child support. Alimony, too, effective immediately. I don’t want you to have to go back your parents if you don’t want to.”
She flipped through the divorce contract and verified what he was saying was true. The terms were very generous in her favor. Exactly what she wanted, even sooner than expected. She should have been thrilled, but instead her heart flooded with sadness. Just one more example of how little he wanted her now that he’d gotten her.
An image of the twenty-two-year-old college kid he’d been cut across her mind. “I love you, baby. I want you to be my girl, and I wan to be your boyfriend, okay? Can you let me be your boyfriend? I want us to be together so bad. You don’t even know…”
Janelle’s heart broke rem
embering it now. He had loved her once, but he didn’t any more. Of course, he would let her go easily.
“Okay,” she said, gently pushing the memory of his airport declaration of love aside, letting it go once and for all. “You want me to sign these. I’ll do that before I go. May I have a pen?”
Mag picked up a fountain pen from a cup on his desk and held it out to her.
But when she reached out to take it, he pulled the pen back, just out of her reach. “Fuck, I can’t do this. No, I don’t want you to sign. No, I don’t want you to divorce me. If the choice were mine, you’d stay, and we’d make this work.”
Janelle shook her head, now severely confused. “Then why did you just hand me divorce papers?”
“Because you asked me for a divorce. All this time I was thinking you chose him over me, and that—Janelle you have no idea how that ate me up, knowing when it came down to it, you wanted him. But yesterday, when you chewed me out, I got it. I’ve been mad at you for three years, but you’re a princess, and that’s some heavy-duty shit. You didn’t choose him over me. Truth is, the one thing you’ve never got to do is choose.”
The observation was so simple it devastated her. Tears came flooding up from her soul and out of her eyes as the truth of his words hit her. All her life, all her life, she’d been a line item in the pledge agreement that would eventually define her role in wolf society, a pretty thing to be given to the highest bidder. But Mag, he’d seen past the exterior to who she really was, and now he was holding a mirror up to her pitiful existence.
“The only time you ever got to choose was when you gave me your virginity. You chose me three years ago, and I’m so goddamned honored you did, Janelle. I don’t want to be like your dad or the last guy you was pledged to, yeah? I’m done telling you what to do. So if you want to divorce me and leave me here with this ugly-ass office, it’s going to hurt like hell, but I’m not going to stop you.”
It felt like everything inside of her crumpled at that point, crippling her so she had no choice but to grab on to Mag’s desk for support. But even that wasn’t enough. She needed… she needed her mate.
“Mag… I can’t seem to get it together. Please, hold me. Please…”
The desk that separated them was surmounted in an instant, and a mere second after making her pitiful request, she was in Mag’s arms, crying into his shoulder as he stroked the back of her head.
It felt nice, so nice, like finally coming home after years spent in a desert. But she had to ask, “If you wanted me, why didn’t you ever try to be with me after our wedding? And why Sofia?”
She felt him stiffen, his chest and shoulders going tight. “Sofia—she’s not who you think she is. She’s a… a… I’m just going to say it. She’s a therapist.”
She could not have been more stunned if he had slapped her with a cold, wet towel. “You have a therapist? A human therapist?”
“I couldn’t find a wolf one. Not even in California. And Sofia works with a bunch of football players. A lot of us have anger management issues, and she’s the one the team doctors bring in when it gets out of hand, like when players end up in the news. I’ll tell you, she was surprised when I asked if I could start seeing her after I quit the team. Most of the Suns only agree to see her when the front office or some judge makes ‘em.”
“But why? I mean… why?” Despite the airs wolf royalty could put on, at the end of the day, they were half animal. Creatures bound up in a human shell who manifested their basic nature once a month when the moon shined full and bright. They lived, they mated, they died. There wasn’t much more than that for most wolves, and she couldn’t imagine any male—especially not an alpha—talking about his feelings with a human counselor.
Mag drew away from her. “I’m going to sit down,” he said, indicating one of the gold-colored upholstered guest chairs. “Do you mind sitting down, too?”
This time, she took the seat he offered, sensing this wasn’t Mag trying to make a power move but needing them to be at the same level when he explained why he had a human therapist who he’d been talking to nearly every night and had invited out to Wyoming for once a month, weekend long face-to-face sessions. Something had gotten him to go against his nature and see a therapist, and it must have been bad. Really bad. She waited for him to continue with bated breath.
“I’m not sure where to start. Sofia’s been trying to get me to talk to you like this ever since I started seeing her. It was hard to explain to her, because I couldn’t tell her we were both werewolves, or about how I came to be engaged to you. She was mad about us getting married after I said I was going to Alaska to dump you. And when she found out you didn’t know she was staying in the guest house when she came out to visit, she really laid into me. I told her you wouldn’t understand. I told her we weren’t from a place where dudes were cool with talking about their feelings to some broad they were paying to listen. I told her you wouldn’t respect me if you knew. But she kept on saying I had to talk to you, to make you understand. After you found us at the guest house, she left out of here and said she wasn’t going to see me anymore unless I told you everything.”
And just like that, Janelle’s feelings flipped. Instead of hating Sofia with a rage-fueled passion, she found herself nodding along with the human’s sage advice. “Mag, she was right. Tell me. You have to. Whatever it is, it can’t be worse than what I’ve been thinking.”
He gave her a sad look. “I don’t know about that. My brother, Kang—you got a good look at his face, yeah?”
Janelle thought of his brother who had several tattooed lines on his face—ones she doubted he gotten for whale hunting. “Yes, I saw him. But I’d never judge you based on what your brother’s done…”
“My father had even more lines than Kang. So many, they covered his neck and then the whole upper half of his body.”
Again, she didn’t see what this had to do with Mag. “So your father also killed? I wouldn’t judge you for that, either. I know Freedom Town doesn’t operate by the same rules as the rest of the Alaska state pack. That’s why my father was so insistent about bringing you guy’s under Lupine Council law.”
“Janelle, my brother got his tats for killing wolves who challenged him or wolves that broke our laws. Only a few of my dad’s lines came from that. Most of them he got killing wolves he thought were attracted to my mother or wolves she was attracted to. Their marriage—it was fucked up. They hated each other, they loved each other. You never knew what you were going to get from night to night. They both drank and a lot of times it got out of hand. Most of the wolves in our village knew better than to even look at my mother when they were walking by her. They kept their eyes down. But sometimes when my mom got drunk, she’d go out to the place where everybody gathered to drink at night. She’d look at a dude, and her arousal scent would go off. She’d do it on purpose, just to watch my dad go nuclear on the guy. And he handled it the same way every time, by killing. Sometimes he’d beat him, sometimes he’d stab him, sometimes he’d just pull out a gun and shoot him—didn’t matter how he did it, dude would be dead by the time my dad was done with him. Then he’d take my ma back to our RV and put his mating scent on her again. I guessed they loved each other, but they were fucking toxic.”
Janelle couldn’t help but agree, but she kept her thoughts to herself and let him continue.
“You probably already guessed their story don’t have a pretty ending. After I went away to college, my mom went off the rails. She’d been against me going in the first place. Said I needed to stay, follow my uncle’s example, and serve as Kang’s beta. But I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in an RV, following the game around Alaska, drinking ‘til I passed out every night, stirring up drama cuz I’m cold and bored and drunk. I wanted better, but my ma never forgave me for leaving. She started drinking even more after I left, sun up to sun down, made it so I could barely stand to visit them. But I came back every summer to help with the hunts. Figured it was the least I could do.”<
br />
Mag’s eyes became haunted. “Summer before my junior year, I’m back in Alaska. Sitting outside the RV with them, enjoying the weather, you know and drinking. My Uncle Po comes over, asking me to get him some more Natty Lite out the fridge. My brother’s there, too, but I’m the youngest so I go inside the trailer to get ‘em. I can hear my uncle outside. He’s joking around with my dad and ma, teasing my dad about me fumbling a pass in my last game of the football season. Nobody else could talk to my dad like that, but they’re brothers, you know. Blood. My uncle could say whatever he wanted and my dad would just laugh. But then my ma’s arousal scent went off.”
Janelle’s heart dropped.
“It was bad. I’m not going to lie to you, it was real fucking bad. At first I thought, oh fuck, me and Kang are going to have pull Dad off my uncle. I come running out the trailer, but they’re not fighting. My dad’s got his gun out, pointed straight at Uncle Po. He’s crying. He’s so fucking drunk, Janelle, and Kang’s all like, “Dad, no. He’s your brother. Ma tell him your nose opened for him. Not for Uncle Po. Tell him…”
Mag shook his head. “My ma just laughed. Everything was a joke to her. I want to say cuz she was wasted, but Sofia says maybe she had a narcissistic personality disorder. Might even have been a borderline sociopath. Anyways, she never could take anything seriously. And Dad’s crying so hard. I’d never seen him cry before that. He was always tough, you know. Pack king. Number one hunter. But he was straight up bawling like a baby. I couldn’t believe it. And for a few seconds I relaxed, like ‘Naw, he ain’t going to do it,’ but then he just…” Mag had to rock back and forth a couple of times, and give his head a hard shake, like he was jostling the words free, “…he pulled the trigger. Put a silver bullet in his brother, like he was just another dude from the village.”
Wolf and Punishment (The Alaska Princesses Trilogy, Book 1) Page 20
