Total pages in book: 182
Estimated words: 171176 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 856(@200wpm)___ 685(@250wpm)___ 571(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 171176 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 856(@200wpm)___ 685(@250wpm)___ 571(@300wpm)
“We need to talk this out,” I said, trying to clear my head. “We’re overreacting.”
“You were the one that ran.”
“Did you not also run? Are you not hiding out in a random small hole you found after crawling through a bunch of thorns?”
She didn’t respond for a while. “You make some excellent points. We’re nobody. We might have power, but our dad didn’t want us, our mom had no magic, and you don’t even know how to eat soup properly. We don’t know how to exist in a real community because we’ve never been properly welcomed in one, and now suddenly we are supposed to be the head of a kingdom-wide pack.”
She wasn’t doing a good job of talking this situation around, nor did she stop there.
“I don’t know my ass from my teeth, and training hasn’t been going well. I know he said we were waiting for the king’s go-ahead, but I think I’m actually the reason he was delaying. I bet Hannon was just an excuse. I can make a bond with Weston, but I take over the bond when I try it with Hadriel. I have no finesse with it. What’s going to happen when there’s a whole pack to connect to and I fumble it? He’s going to have to tell me that I’m not good enough and can’t participate. Then what’ll become of me? You have a job as a human, but I won’t be of any use as a wolf. I’ll let them down. What kind of alpha would want a mate that is useless? He could have anyone, literally anyone, and he got stuck with me. Love isn’t enough, not for an alpha.”
“Breathe,” I said, and this time it was for her, not me. “Why haven’t you said any of this before?”
“If you’d been paying attention, you’d know.”
“I thought you were doing well in training. You catch on really fast. There’s a learning curve, but you’re handling it really well.”
“I’m great for a new wolf, sure. I’m not so hot for a twenty-seven-year-old wolf who is about to take over a fucking pack.”
She had a point.
“We can’t hide here forever,” I said, though I had no idea what to do now. What if she couldn’t rise to the occasion? What if the wolf part of us was useless? Did that mean we would be forced to go to the fairies?
“We’re not going to hide here forever,” my wolf replied. “We’re going to hide here until you, as the more positive half of this terrible partnership, do your job and talk this situation around.”
So we sat there for a while, me trying to get a handle on things and both of us running from our uncertainties.
“You know,” I said at one point, “if a dragon wanted us out, all he’d have to do was blow fire on the thorns and stuff covering the hole until we ran out of air. That would be an easy way to kill us, actually. Or just blow fire right down the hole. We’d be fucked.”
“What the actual fuck—and I mean this genuinely—is wrong with you?”
We sat in silence for a while longer.
Concern radiated through the bond, and we felt Weston drawing closer. Not panicked or hurried, he made his way to our not-so-hidden location. It was hard to get away when your bond-mate could feel your whereabouts. Hell, everyone could probably smell where we’d gone.
He paused at the surface, way too big to fit down here. There he stayed, patience settling in, waiting at the mouth of our hidey-hole. He could’ve howled down at us, or yelped, or shifted and shouted for us to come out. He could’ve even sent a bird or something down to peck at us until we had no choice but to crawl out to flee. Instead, he waited for us to be ready.
“I really do love him.” I thought about all the things he probably had to do, a claiming he had to get ready for, and realized maybe he was nervous himself. He’d put all that aside to come for us. “I really, really love him. I want to be with him.”
“We have a lot of baggage.”
“But so does he, right? We’ve heard about his struggles, and not just personally, but as an alpha. In the first pack he ever ran, he basically stole people for the crown. The next pack essentially brushed him off after he came back from the demons. He’s dealing with baggage, too. He’s combating it by growing, by ensuring that he is better going forward. He has trauma he is working through, too. He’s just further along in the process.”
“Yeah. True, I guess.”
“He knows you are new. But this whole kingdom is mostly new. Didn’t that guy in the village say that? They were all suppressed until, like, a year and a half ago. It’s a kingdom being rebuilt. Even those from elsewhere are new to each other. We’re behind, but we work hard, we learn fast, and we don’t give up. If we have training—and everyone agrees he’s an amazing teacher—we can do what is needed. I can learn to eat soup like a king, and you can learn which end of your body the shit comes out of.”