Watching him get that close to her—again—as if he has a right to, mere fucking hours after I came close to tearing his throat out for it?
It’s a miracle I managed to restrain myself, only going as far as breaking the table instead of every damned bone in my cousin’s body.
Putting Avery on kitchen rotation was a mistake. I thought it would be best to show the pack nothing’s changed after last night.
I’m fooling myself because everything feels so different.
Everything about her entices me. Tempts me to take her as mine.
To learn if her caramel hair is as soft as I’ve wondered when I wind it around my fist and use it as leverage to make her bare the delicate column of her throat for me. To see if it’ll make her amber eyes flash in the audacious way that lights my veins on fire. To knead the dip of her waist and map her slight curves as I take my time scenting her, scraping my stubbled jaw over her skin until she smells so much like me no other male will come near her.
My wolf is amped up, prodding me to go find my female. Now, right now. I jerk with the force of his pull on my will, exhaling forcefully.
If I don’t find a way to keep him in check, this mate bond will continue upturning the careful order I’ve strived for to run this pack smoothly. I rejected her, so my life should return to normal. A sharp buzz pings around inside my chest. I rub at it with an annoyed grimace.
Callie leans against the wall behind the broken head table, arms folded. Her sour assessment of me prods at what’s left of my patience.
“What?” I ask through my teeth. “Are you pissed off because Liam made you face the consequences of your actions with Taryn last night? Tough.”
She scoffs, shaking her head. “You’re an idiot.”
My head jerks. “Your undermining isn’t funny. It’s time you grow up, isn’t it? Think of what Dad would say. I’ve told you a hundred times, everything reflects back on me. So when you follow Taryn’s wild impulses—”
“Yeah, yeah. Follow your rules, set good examples, blah fucking blah,” she snaps with an eyeroll. “I didn’t mean that. It wasn’t a big deal, anyway.”
“I beg to differ,” Liam interjects behind me. “How do you think it looks to have the alpha’s own family doing as she pleases?”
She serves him a withering stare before turning it on me. “If you can’t figure out why you’re an idiot, goddess help us all.”
My jaw sets when she stomps off. I scrub my face, adding one of her tantrums to my list of shit I don’t need right now.
“Let’s go.”
Liam falls into step with me when we exit the building. “I take it your wolf’s still attached to Av—”
“Yes.” I whirl on him with a growl, fur sprouting across my forearms.
He freezes, lifting his brows. The outburst attracts attention from people milling around the commons. I grunt, shaking off the sense I need to fight my loyal beta and best friend. What’s wrong with me? He’s my trusted right hand man, not my enemy because he said her name.
“Sorry. I’m just—fuck. I don’t know.”
“Don’t look at me.” Liam smirks. “It’s not like I know what happens when you reject the Fates’ plan. This is why I’m more inclined to keep things strictly casual between me and any female interested in a night together. Maybe that’s what you need to sort this out.”
“No.”
This time the wolf rides me so hard I nearly choke on the thundering growl. It startles several birds from the trees. Liam bends his neck, as do the people dotted around the central lawn when my glare shifts around. I blow out a breath and shake off the intense power of my wolf.
“It must be an aftereffect,” I mutter. “I’m handling it. We just need to go about our usual business, and in a few days it’ll fade away.”
It has to.
He stares at me. I can tell he wants to say something else, but he keeps his mouth shut as we head for my office in the lodge.
I barely manage to focus on a review of various trade teams. One’s asking for personnel reassignments and another’s put in a request for a new auger for drilling fence holes because they insist the one we have is busted and they’re fed up with repairing it. I’ll have Neil go over. If the mechanic can figure out how to keep the engines running on every vehicle we have, hopefully he’ll be able to troubleshoot an alternative to get the thing running until after the summit.
Every few minutes, the words blur together. My mind strays to rain drenched meadows, and bright amber irises that dare me to chase, to hunt my prize and claim what’s mine.
Adam bursts in. The youngest enforcer added to the patrol roster last year is a welcome interruption from my wayward thoughts. Liam stops him with a hand to the chest before he rushes my desk.
“What’s the problem?” Liam urges.
“It’s—Alpha, you need to come,” Adam blurts.
I exchange a tense look with Liam and rise. “What’s happened?”
“It’s maintenance group C. They’re on my patrol route. They wouldn’t stop.”
The three of us are on the move, Liam signaling for Ford to leave his post in the hall. Adam explains on the way that the group was causing a scene and turning on itself.
The raucous fighting echoes through the trees before we round a bend in the road, finding maintenance group C brawling. Two have shifted while the rest throw punches. It’s unclear who the instigators are at first glance. Their truck is in a ditch at the side of the road and their tools are strewn everywhere.
Liam and Ford enter the fray, shouting orders to stop. One stocky female holds off one guy while elbowing another who charges her. An older male spots me and snarls.
“Enough,” I boom.
The fighting ceases, even Ford and Liam jerking to a stop mid-movement from my Alpha command. I ease back to free them and they round up the three Adam points out as the cause of the scene.
I pace before the lineup, arms crossed. “What the fuck is going on here? Why are you turning on your packmates?”
“They didn’t think they needed to work anymore,” says a male who has shifted back and prods at his swollen eye. “When we tried to stop them, they did that to the truck.”
“This is unacceptable. You’ve destroyed pack property and attacked the members of your group without cause.”
“We got cause,” the youngest male jeers.
He can’t be more than eighteen. I stop in front of him, staring him down until he falters and lowers his gaze to glare at my shoes.
“And how long have you been assigned to team C?”
“Six months too fucking long,” the older one beside him complains. “I’m sick of it. I ain’t doin’ no more.”
The other two pipe up with similar sentiments.
“It doesn’t give you a right to do this. The job rotations mean everyone pulls their weight and puts in their fair share,” I say. “If you want to remain part of this pack, you contribute no matter what the pack requires of you. It’s so we’re all working together.”
“I didn’t sign up for it,” he objects.
I shake my head. “And what do you expect instead?”
“What I been promised!”
My eyes narrow. “What promise?”
“Promise of somethin’ better. Not working to the bone doing grunt work day in and day out. Not this bullshit life you’re forcing on me with a rule and schedule for every little thing, down to when I shit.”
Liam jerks him with a warning snarl for his outright disrespect, forcing his head to bow. “Watch how you talk to our alpha. Where did you hear that?”