Page 24 of The Alpha's Arranged Bride

Where Atreus and so many others succeeded, he’d failed.

Atreus had warned him repeatedly that the only road peace and mercy led a man to was his own demise, and where one man suffered, so did an entire pack.

Agnar hadn’t slept all night but had lain awake going over and over the slaughter of good, innocent people in his mind and everything that led up to that moment. His thoughts plagued him like that every night.

He should have never shown mercy to a man who tried to kill him outside of a challenge.

He’d picked a path that broadcasted his weakness to every pack in the country.

Peace was less than fragile. It could never last, and he knew that.

If he’d never grown a fucking conscience and believed that independent thought was right, if he’d never recalled the one thing his father made him promise that morning the raids started, before he’d been taken and ever even knew what a Phaethon wolf or man looked like, if he’d never become alpha, then his pack would still be there.

The stars shimmered up in the sky, far away, cold and distant. Would he join them soon? His ancestors? Probably not. When the end came, there wasn’t anything after, no matter what ancient beliefs the pack tried to keep alive. They weren’t much for religion, but they liked the idea of joining the stars somehow, as some kind of matter or spirit.

He hoped there was nothing after death. That the dark would be the last thing he ever knew. He’d have his peace then. He was only sorry that it cost so many people so much misery for him to get there.

He’d left the cabin that Prairie Rose insisted on calling his, even though he was just a stranger passing through a strange land. The land of the living wasn’t for the already dead. It must have been over an hour ago. He’d walked through the woods aimlessly, until he found a spot that felt right. Their land didn’t have any large trees like these ones, and he found them intriguing. They’d stood for generations, towering up to the sky, watching over the land and the people and all that life rushing beneath them. They’d stood through storms and strong winds, probably floods and droughts. He didn’t call it comfort because he wasn’t supposed to feel anything at all, but he felt pain and remorse, regret and guilt now, so why not admit that he felt calmed by their massive, solid presence?

“Agnar!” His head turned sharply. He was on his feet in an instant, lurching out of the snow he’d cleared to sit down and stare up at the sky. Though he called himself a man lost and condemned, his old warrior instincts told him to fight.

He let down his guard and relaxed his stance when Prairie Rose rushed out of the darkness, appearing between trees and flying through the snow like an apparition. She had a black snowsuit on, black mitts, but no hat, and her white hair streamed out like the train of a ghostly dress behind her. He swallowed thickly. It was easy to believe she wasn’t real. A spirit of the night. Her beauty always had affected him more than he liked to admit. He was confused by it. He didn’t understand the way she felt like a massive thorn, driven into the very depths of him, pricking him at all times.

He’d taken her to be gentle, tame, and lacking spirit the first time he’d seen her. Just because she was sweet and kind and good didn’t mean that she wasn’t also stubborn and brave. He was starting to learn just how tenacious she could be.

She’d come out after him into the biting cold, in the dead of night, and she was carrying his jacket. She looked stricken, which made his chest constrict like he’d just gulped down too much of the frigid air.

“What are you doing?” she barked, shaking the jacket she held out. The red on her cheeks wasn’t from the cold, it was from rage.

She was angry because he’d gone out in nothing more than the fatigues he slept in. A long-sleeved black Henley and black pants. He’d slipped into the same boots that he’d always worn. All of it was completely unsuited to heavy snow, harsh wind, and the cold of Wyoming.

His mate charged at him and thrust his jacket into his chest. He thumbed it with his almost useless hands. They were frozen with cold, stiff and unworking past even the damage already healed. He felt the bulge in the sleeve and extracted a pair of warm mittens and a beanie.

“Are you an oath breaker now too?” He’d never seen Prairie Rose like this. She was practically incandescent with rage. “You gave me six months, Agnar Phaethon. Six fucking months. Why am I finding you out here trying to freeze to death?”

He couldn’t answer that without sounding like a complete asshole. He deserved it, but this woman didn’t. He could tell her, again, that he couldn’t feel it. Dead men didn’t need warmth. He was nothing. Not even a Phaethon because their pack no longer existed. He could tell her he was nothing. He could tell her to stop fighting a war she was never going to win. But he’d told her all of that, repeatedly, and she’d refused to listen or budge.

“I heard you get up. I tracked your scent.” She unzipped the voluminous snowsuit and produced a small, thin thermos. “Drink this. It will warm you up.” She uncapped it for him, and the rich scent of strong black coffee steamed through the dark. “We have to go back. Drink it as we walk. Sitting here in the snow in this kind of cold, you could lose fingers or toes.”

He didn’t take the thermos. He stared blankly at her until the fire in her eyes made him feel guilty enough to at least put on the fucking gear she’d brought.

Tears shimmered in her eyes when he was done. She stepped forward again, picked up his hand and thrust the thermos against it. “Don’t you dare disrespect me by saying you don’t care. How can you not understand that you harming yourself harms me? We are connected now. Your pain is my pain.”

She’d said that before and it had registered, but not the way it bit into him now. Her naked sorrow was like twin axe blades sliding between his ribs.

He’d always been a stubborn, hardheaded, cold-hearted bastard at the best of times. He turned his back on her, flung the thermos into the snow and sat back down in his spot. It turned out that a woman he thought was meek and mild really had a death wish. She charged him from behind, something a grown and fully trained warrior would never have dared to do and wrapped her arms around his neck. Her knees bumped his spine as she leaned forward, her warm breath frosting his neck and ear.

“Tell me about the night Blake was born.”

“Why?” he growled like a beast, barely restraining himself so he didn’t shake her off. Not to hurt her physically, but because he needed to get away. Away from the heat of her, away from her intoxicatingly feminine scent, away from the sweetness of her breath and her heart slamming into his back.

His pulse had escalated. He could feel it trying to break through the skin at his neck. His chest felt too small to contain the shitstorm brewing inside of him.

“Because I want to know. I want these memories for their sake, but I want more than that. Tell me how you felt when you watched your son come into the world.”

Instantly the memories came flashing back. Blake Agnar Phaethon came into the world bellowing like most babies did. He feigned disinterest, but he felt something he’d never felt before. No battle, no training, no life lived up until that point could have prepared him for the powerful surge of protectiveness that nearly knocked him over. He could have set the world on fire if it threatened to even make Blake unhappy.

He was scared to look at him, but when he was handed to his mother to put at her breast, he turned his face up to Agnar and all he saw was how perfect he was. Huge gray eyes just like his. Chestnut hair like his mother’s. Even as a newborn he had the strongest jaw and the oldest, wisest expression on his tiny little face. He looked like a pinched old man. Agnar’s whole body was light. He didn’t know what true happiness was since he was taken from his home and family, made to stand in for the ones the Phaethon Pack lost in their many raids and wars with other wolves. He was this great warrior standing there and a tiny little newborn baby could have brought him to his knees. He was enthralled. Mesmerized. For all that he’d tried to shut it out, he felt a tremendous amount of love the moment he saw him.

---