by R. E. Butler
She remembered once from her early teen years, an older female hadn’t taken the herb and had been real flighty about the birth control, and if she hadn’t been able to get inside her home and lock herself safely in her room, she would have been attacked by half the males in the school. As she recalled, the female never made that mistake again. And no young female that saw what happened ever took the whole going-into-heat-thing casually again.
Inside the house, she made a move to go back to the bedroom and Eryx grabbed her arm, “Wait. Are you okay?”
“I just want to take a shower, okay? Ethan, you need to burn your shirt. That scent won’t ever come out of it. And I’m sorry that the dress is toast.” She was trying not to turn into a ball of weeping goo on the kitchen floor. She wanted to be strong for them, to not let them know that she’d been shaken to the core by the lion females’ callous disregard for her. Eryx let go of her and she practically ran back to the bedroom, stripping the dress off as she went. She had no doubt that Melania knew what she was doing when she dumped that liquid on her. That she thought nothing of her being raped? She couldn’t wrap her head around it. She’d had people hate her, she’d had women want to beat her until she cried for mercy, but she’d never had someone want to see her get raped. The depths of their cruelty were never more evident.
She wasn't sure how long she was in the shower, but Eryx opened the curtain and made an unhappy sound. “Angel?”
She looked up at him from the floor of the tub, where she was mindlessly rubbing a cloth across her chest. She blinked up at him. “I don’t think it’s gone yet.”
He slammed his palm on the faucet and turned off the water, taking the cloth from her hand and making another unhappy sound. As he wrapped her in a towel and lifted her from the tub, she got a glimpse of her chest and the angry red marks that she’d given to herself as she tried to get the pheromones from her skin. Not that it really mattered; they were already in her system and would be there for a few days at least, but she couldn’t stop herself from scrubbing where the liquid had touched.
With a swell of warring emotions, she did the only thing she could do to keep her head above water: she sank her hands into his hair and turned his head and kissed him. He stopped walking from the bathroom and kissed her back, squeezing his arms around her.
He pulled away with a throaty groan, “We need to talk, angel.”
She shook her head and wriggled in his arms, “No talking. Sex. Hot, screaming sex.”
She dug her teeth into his ear lobe and pulled and he shivered from his head to his feet and moved into the bedroom. Ethan was waiting to talk, but they weren’t talking anymore. She didn’t want to talk. She didn’t want to think about what almost happened, what would have happened if they hadn’t been so concerned about her safety and let her wander alone. She didn’t want to do anything, but feel their hands on her, their mouths, and their bodies sinking deep enough inside to erase away what almost happened from the whole night and her conscious mind.
Chapter 15
**Ethan**
Neither he nor Eryx slept well that night. Callie was asleep between them, worn out from a mixture of making love to both of them when they got home from the wedding and the stress of the evening. He’d known in the back of his mind that she was so needy for them because she’d been freaked out by the doc’s behavior and was trying to distract herself. If that was how wolves looked when they had plans for a female, it was no wonder she’d been ready to leave the pack.
It just wasn’t fair to her that she had to be subjected to this harassment, and it pained him to know he couldn’t keep her really safe. He would have bet his eye teeth that they wouldn’t try anything in public, around the humans, but he’d been seriously wrong. He just didn’t fucking know what to do about it. He didn’t want to keep her prisoner in the house, but every time they left, something seemed to happen.
He had finally dozed off well after two a.m. when a terror-filled scream split the quiet in the house and Callie was thrashing between them, trying to get off the bed. They stilled her as best they could without hurting her, both of them talking to her and trying to keep her from hurting herself. Her eyes blinked open and she stared at them in the light from the nightstand he’d clicked on, and then she burst into tears. He positively hated to see her cry; it made him feel like such a failure. While she sobbed into his chest, he and Eryx shared a look that was one of grim determination to see that she didn’t have any more nightmares. Eventually she settled down, but she never really went back to sleep again. Whatever had seeped into her subconscious had terrified her.
“We should cancel tonight,” he said as he scooped scrambled eggs into a bowl. Callie was inhaling the steam from a cup of coffee, her face drawn and weary.
She set the cup down hard. She not only looked exhausted, she had gotten out of bed angry but wouldn’t talk about it. “No. We can’t cancel. I want to see the kids and your family, and we only have three weeks before we’re going to be leaving.”
He and Eryx exchanged looks and she groused, “I really hate when you guys do that twin thing, you know.”
He put the bowl down on the table and tweaked a lock of her hair. “Sorry, love, we’ve been doing that for a long time. Fine, we won’t cancel tonight but I do expect you to take a nap today at some point.”
She gave him a slight glare and then smirked, “Jawohl, mein Kommandant.”
He and Eryx both laughed and he joined them at the table. They discussed the move and getting the house ready. They couldn’t take everything with them, because they were going to have to drive both vehicles as it was, and getting a rental truck meant that she’d have to drive, too, and neither of them wanted her to right now. Not for such a long trip. They wouldn’t coddle her forever about the driving, but she hadn’t made a mention about getting another car since her meltdown in the dealership on Monday and they weren’t keen on a repeat. They were planning to come back later in the spring with a moving truck and get the rest of their things.
“Well, I just won’t unpack my stuff then.” She shrugged, taking a bite out of a piece of toast. “I need to do laundry, though.”
“I’ll do your laundry while you rest.” He offered.
She made a face, “I can do laundry, I’m not helpless.”
Puzzled, he said, “I didn’t say you were helpless. I just, I want to take care of you.”
She leaned back in her chair and there was something distinctly unfriendly in the action. “Right, because it’s in your nature.” She said it like it was a bad thing and he didn’t understand that.
“Not because it’s my nature, Callie, but because I love you. Why wouldn’t I want to?”
The silence stretched for a few minutes and he shared another look with Eryx. Was she retreating again? This was what they’d both feared, shared last night when they couldn’t sleep. That she would decide it wasn’t worth it. That they weren’t worth it. If she suddenly took off without them, they’d both be lost.
She stood up. “I guess I’m just tired.”
Eryx grabbed her wrist, “Wait, you didn’t eat very much. Are you not feeling well? Did those pheromones bother you more than you said?”
“They weren’t meant for me. They didn’t affect me, just the way I smelled to him. It was artificial. I’m sure he feels badly about it, but,” she pulled her wrist away from Eryx’s grasp, “it’s just a little too much like what I was used to. If the males scented an unmated female in heat but couldn’t get to her, they could get, out of sorts like that and unless you were fast enough to get away, they would just overpower you.”
They both stood up. “You were raped by wolves claiming they couldn’t control it?” Eryx nearly shouted.
She paled and took a step back. She shook her head and said, “No, I wasn’t. I...would have been once, but Cadence saved me.”
She took in a shaky, slow breath and then closed the distance to them quickly and grabbed them both and they held her between them. She seemed to be f
ighting not to cry, and they soothed her as best they could when they didn’t understand quite what she was dealing with. Her voice was small and low when she finally said, “I just, I love you both but I hate it here. I hate being afraid, I hate that I can’t do anything about it but sit around and wait for them to do something else to try to get to me. If you hadn’t been there, he could have...I mean I know that look he had in his eyes. He thought I was in my heat and males can’t resist that kind of thing. How could Melania think it was okay to let me be raped? To do that to him, too? It would ruin him.” She shivered and they hugged her tighter. He marveled at her concern for the wolf that had the potential to hurt her.
“We wouldn’t let anyone take you from us, Callie. If we’d needed to rip his arms off to get to you, we would have in a heartbeat,” he promised.
“Less than three weeks and we’ll be gone, angel.” Eryx murmured gently in her ear. “We can keep you safe until then. We’re not going to take anything for granted when it comes to your safety.”
She relaxed further and Ethan straightened slightly after kissing her ear, “I’ll clean up the kitchen and get to the laundry. Maybe you should lay down with her?”
Eryx didn’t ask if she wanted him to, he simply swung her up in his arms and carried her to the couch. He settled on his side against the back cushions and cradled her in front of him, clicking the TV on and flipping for something to watch. Ethan smiled at the scene, knowing that Eryx had often wished to have a woman to cuddle with on the hooker-red couch.
His dad called him an hour later, when he was separating all their clothes in the basement laundry room. “The doc wanted to stop by the house and apologize, son, but I told him that was probably a bad idea.”
He grunted, “Probably. Callie said the pheromones will be in her system for a few days anyway and I’m not sure what Eryx would do if he saw him right now. Callie had nightmares last night because of it; she definitely doesn’t want to see him again even though she said it wasn’t his fault. I know it wasn’t, too, but it’s hard not to, you know, want to rip his throat out.”
“I understand. You and Eryx were not the only ones that wanted to hurt him because of what happened. There was a doctor at the reception that gave him a sedative to calm him down, but we had a hard time keeping him from going after her without physically hurting him.” His dad sighed deeply. “I’m going to need her to make an official statement if she wants to press charges against Melania. Xavier is willing to add to her statement about what the pheromones did to his mind.”
“She’s in no position to rehash last night, Dad.” Dropping the lid of the washer with a clang, he cranked the dial and then walked out into the main room.
“How often have we told victims that the best thing they can do is make an official report as soon as possible? If you guys hadn’t carted her off so fast last night she could have done it then. I know why you did, you had to get her away from him, but that doesn’t mean that she can skate on this. I can only hold Melania until tomorrow night without filing against her.”
“I know, it’s just I’ve never been on this side of it before. She just told us that what frightened her about the doc was that it’s how males will act when they believe a female is in heat, and that they’ll just overpower the females. Rape them.”
His dad swallowed audibly. “Was she ever attacked like that?”
“Her friend stopped it. The more I learn about the pack life she was part of, the happier I am that she left. I can’t imagine her being forced to live a life dictated to her by ancient traditions and leaders that call all the shots.”
“Well, she’s not part of it any longer. She’s going to have what she wants with you. Being the only wolf in her family and loved for who she is and not forced to hold her place in the pack.”
He could thank his lucky stars for that. “I’ll talk to her about the statement. I don’t want to ruin her mood tonight, but maybe it would be better for her to just get it over with.”
He hung up with his father and went upstairs to plan the food for the get together. It hadn’t escaped his memory that she said her favorite food was Italian, so since he’d failed to ask her if she’d liked his lasagna, he made baked ziti instead, being as quiet as he could be in the kitchen.
By the time Eryx extracted himself from her sleeping form on the couch and joined him in the kitchen, he’d made good headway into preparing for their family to come over. They quietly discussed her statement and what to do about Melania. In the end, it was up to Callie. They wanted justice for her, but if they went after Melania and killed her, there were so many humans in the town that there was no way they’d escape it unharmed. They just wouldn’t understand and would demand what they saw as justice for her death. While Callie had told them about the pack justice being handed down by her former alpha where they’d hunted and slaughtered wolves from a rival pack that had kidnapped her friend, it had only worked because the town was mostly wolf and it had been well hidden. The females would never allow them to do that unscathed; they’d make sure that they suffered publicly for protecting their mate.
Eryx made a gesture with his knife as he sliced apart a rotisserie chicken. “If she makes a statement, they’ll hold Melania for a while; maybe even the three weeks until we’re gone and she could call and drop the charges. That way we wouldn’t have to bring her back here to testify.”
“That would only work if there was no bail. No matter how high the bail is the females will pool their resources to get her out. And then, well, she’ll be even more pissed. And you know as well as I do that the human judge and D.A. aren’t going to understand what the big deal was about pouring some liquid on her when it didn’t hurt her physically.”
He handed over the prepared pizza crust so Eryx could top it with the shredded meat, making a bbq chicken pizza. “If she makes no statement?” He asked, washing his hands at the sink with a sigh.
“I don’t know,” Ethan ran his hands through his hair after he popped the pizza into the oven and tried to reason both sides out. “If only there were a lion council or something, where we could take her to be held accountable for her actions. There’s never been any consequences to their actions, any of them. And it’s partly our fault as males, because we’ve always allowed them to get away with that behavior. They have all the power for our kind because they hold the ability to carry children.”
Eryx nodded. “You know what I kinda hate?”
“What’s that?”
“Leaving dad behind. I wish he’d come with us. I think he wants to, I know for sure he’s jealous of what we’ve managed to fall into, but with Alek acting the way he is and the rest of the family here, I don’t suppose it will happen.”
“Yeah. Me, too.”
They worked for another hour in silence before Callie woke up. They walked around the couch as she made her cute little waking-up noises when she stretched and because she was tangled up in the blanket Eryx had wrapped her in, she rolled off the couch with a squeak of alarm and landed hard on her butt. She burst out laughing, kicking at the blankets until her legs were free. At least her mood had improved with some rest. They helped her up, and he offered to massage her butt to make up for it. She smiled playfully and said that she was fairly sure he couldn’t just keep his hands on her butt and not touch anything else in that area, and he was pretty sure that was true, also.
She talked to their aunt Lisa on the phone for a little while, helped them in the kitchen, supervised him doing the laundry, and then followed him into the shower when he went to clean up.
Her soapy hands were heavenly hot on his skin. “I’d rather you not use your body wash, love,” he sighed, closing his eyes as she rubbed vanilla scented lather all over him.
“But we’ll match.” She laughed.
He wouldn’t argue that point. As if he would deny her anyway. She could use baby powder scented body wash and he’d wear the scent happily. They made love in the shower, slick with soap and water, and when they rinsed an
d dried off, she sat on the bed and let him brush her hair. It soothed her frayed nerves as much as his.
When Eryx found them sometime later curled up on the bed under a blanket and talking, she sat up and said, “I’ll make a statement but I don’t think it’s wise to press charges. All it will do is fuel the fire that’s already blazing in their minds about me.”
Eryx sat down on the edge of the bed. “We’ll support you either way, angel.”
“Do you want me to press charges?”
Ethan sat up and slid his hand up and down her spine. “We want you to do what you feel comfortable doing. Our hands are tied to an extent because of her public job and us being former police officers plus all the humans that witnessed the event. If she suddenly went missing, well,” he shrugged because he didn’t want to finish the sentence and make her feel guilty.
“Then it’s for the best. Maybe we could put a GPS chip on her, huh? Know where she is all the time?” She smiled, but it was small and forced.
Damn females.
**Eryx**
Their dad was the first to arrive that night, and after kissing her cheek, he took Callie into the kitchen and took her statement. They stood behind her, each with a hand on her shoulder, but kept their mouths closed. It was her statement to give not theirs to influence.
She told the events with an unemotional voice, and he worried a little over her detachment to the whole thing, but he could tell that she was trying to get past it and for her, that meant shoving the fear aside and moving on. He hoped she would be able to sleep well tonight. He didn’t like her being afraid in her sleep; when their arms were around her it should be a safe haven for her.
“She’s been let go from the police department,” their father said as he flipped the notebook shut and laid the pen down on top of it. Eryx had expected some kind of reprimand for her so he wasn’t surprised.
