Filed to story: The Tyrant Alphas Rejected Mate
“So who’s ‘we?'” he asks.
“The ringleader and I.” I cast a glance at the cabin. Her scent is subtle but obvious. I attend to the bond. Sadness. Fury. It makes my skin burn. Still no pain, though. Because this wasn’t her first time.
“And you’re hanging out here while your mate’s inside because-” Darragh’s really enjoying kicking me when I’m obviously down. Dick.
“It’s a nice night.” The clouds have thickened, hiding the moon. It’s humid, and the mosquitos are out. “I’m getting some air.”
“You want some advice?”
I lift a shoulder. Not sure what the pack’s mountain man can tell me about females, but clearly I don’t know what I’m doing.
“Oil the meat, not the pan. And you want to use a low, wet heat.” Darragh nods sagely as he smirks through his salt-and-pepper beard. Then he winks. “Did you think I was gonna tell you what to do with your female?”
I chuckle. “Maybe.”
“I know shit-all about females.” Darragh jerks his chin toward the porch, asking permission. I nod. We walk over, lower ourselves to the steps. Wish we had cigars. I’ve got some in the cabin, but I haven’t got the courage to go back in yet.
I lean back, resting my elbows on the rough porch boards. “What would you do if Mari, uh, took up with some other male?”
His chest rumbles, and his nails lengthen into claws. “Give me a name.”
“I don’t mean Mari. She’s got no interest in-in that sort of thing. I’m asking, like, for example.”
“You tell me if some asshole starts sniffing around her. Kill him first. Then let me know.” He’s not joking. I understand completely. I nod, and we’re silent together for a while.
Somewhere, there are males who know what my mate’s pussy feels like. They’ve seen her-felt her-come. And what was I doing?
Training. Fighting. Busting skulls so half-feral males would fall in line? Doing the bills?
She could’ve been hurt. She could have been stolen.
But she wasn’t.
Haisley, Rowan, a whole bunch of other females are willing to do whatever with a high-ranking male. I don’t disallow it. It’s better that the females choose. Better than how it used to be when males took.
Una chose. I hadn’t claimed her. I have no right to feel this way. I don’t change what I believe day-to-day to justify whatever I want to do in the moment. That was my father’s way.
If I was okay with females spreading their legs last week, I can’t have a problem with it today. That’s logic.
I don’t actually believe a word of it.
“There’s no rule that females have to save themselves for their mates,” I say out loud, test if it has the ring of truth. “This isn’t the old world.”
Darragh grunts. It’s an acknowledgement of fact, but not an endorsement of the idea.
“Males mount whoever’s willing before they mate.” That’s a fact.
“Some keep going afterwards,” Darragh points out. He speaks the truth.
I’ve had plenty of opportunities to get my dick wet over the years. I always told myself I didn’t because it’d mess with rank in the pack. The natural order of things. And that’s true, as far as it goes. But I also didn’t want anyone who wasn’t mine.
I was waiting. And I knew I’d wait forever, and some nights were long, and I’d wonder why I was making such a big deal out of something every animal does when the mood strikes him. But I never changed my mind.
I never wanted anyone until Una Hayes, and it came on so gradually. She slipped into my hands, and I am so very painfully aware that she can slip right out again. Maybe she already has.
I’m an idiot, but I feel what I feel.
Why couldn’t she have waited?
I sigh. “I want to kill someone, and I don’t ever want to know who he is.”
“Did she want it?” Darragh asks carefully.
“Yeah. That’s what she says. She says it’s not my business.”
“You’re her mate.”
“I am.” Everything about her is my business.
“Heard you rejected her in front of the whole pack. Had Tye throw her out back by the trash.”
My chest aches. None of this has been auspicious. None of it has been right.
“Yeah. I made a mistake.”
“And now you’re losing your shit because-I don’t mean to presume, but-she, uh, has seen a little bit of the world?”
I don’t think I’d put it that way, but I grunt. I don’t want to be talking about this, but at least with Darragh, he’ll take it to the grave.
“Alpha, I don’t know another way to put this, so I’m just gonna say it-she’s, what, twenty-eight years old?”
“Twenty-seven.”
I wait for his point.
He coughs. “Twenty-seven,” he says again. “In the old world, she’d be a couple years away from being a grandma.”
“This isn’t the old world.”
“No. It’s not. It’s your pack.” He pauses a second and then he plunges ahead. “I don’t know. I don’t keep up with the comings and goings so much down here. You keep the lone females in the lodge basement for the males’ entertainment like your father did?”
“Fuck you.” My fists ball, fur sprouting up my spine. Those are wrongs I have long put to rights, and everyone knows not to speak of it.
“Why change things?” he pushes.
“You have to ask?”
“It’s a-what do you call it-like Socrates did? To get at the truth. Just answer the question.”
“You’re fuckin’ Socrates?”
“Not lately. We’re on a pause.” He smirks again. Asshole. “Just answer the question-why did you change the way things were done in this pack?”
“It was wrong.”
“Why?”
“She wasn’t safe.” And then the memory sails into clear view like a galleon, canvas billowing, churned up whole from the black storm of the past. The memory that had been there all along, waiting, biding its time.
In the bed at the crone’s cottage. Bundles of lavender and Queen’s Anne Lace hanging from the wooden rafters to dry. Una huddles into my side. The moon shines through the thick glass pane. My mother is asleep in a rocking chair, head tilted at an awkward angle, snoring.
New Book: Veiled Desires of the Alpha King Novel
Dayson was the alpha of the largest pack in North America. Powerful figures from other packs sought to offer gorgeous girls as potential mates for Dayson. He steadfastly rejected these advances, he was not a pawn to be manipulated. But eventually there came a mysterious girl he could hardly say No. Who was she?