Page 22 of The Alpha's Pregnant Mate

And as much as it hurt to think of her, he knew he had Rhietta to thank for finally helping him see clearly. He only hoped that she wouldn’t pay too awful a price. He knew how soft her heart was, how easily she let herself feel for the wolves she led. Just like her father, and his father before him; they’d all taken pity on Laurent, in their own unique ways. Lowell’s father had encouraged his belief that he was cut out for leadership, Lowell had fed his ego by making him a trusted advisor, and Rhietta…the ache in his chest intensified at the very thought of her. The way he’d treated her, the way she’d forgiven him, again and again, for actions he didn’t even have the good sense to feel sorry for, let alone to make amends.

He’d told her in no uncertain terms that her youth and naivete would be her downfall as a leader. In a strange way, he’d been right, but only because that naivete was what had allowed her to get close to Laurent, to give him the benefit of the doubt again and again when he’d never deserved the tiniest scrap of her kindness. He could see her tearstained face in his mind’s eye, as clearly as if she was standing right before him—the morning after that night they’d spent together, when she’d asked him to be with her, and he’d shown her yet again how little he deserved her, how all he had to offer her was pain.

At least the discovery of her pregnancy had finally given him the clarity he needed to get out of that place. It had become clear to him, in that single, awful moment of realization, that the best thing he could possibly do for Rhietta was to disappear. It was too late to prevent any of the harm he’d already done; he’d live with that guilt and shame for the rest of his life, he knew that. But the next best thing was leaving her life before he could exert his awful influence for even another second.

She cared for him, he knew that, and she’d no doubt be sad when she realized he was gone. But that sadness paled in comparison to the damage he’d do if he stayed. She had the whole pack to support her through this—every last one of those wolves loved and respected her in a way they’d never loved Laurent. He could never be worthy of them the way that she was. Better for the pack, as well as for Rhietta, that he disappear. And—this point burned fierce and deep in his chest—better for the unborn child that they never know who their father was. Better, far better, that they never even meet. He couldn’t risk passing on any part of himself. Bad enough that the poor child would have to risk bearing a physical resemblance to him, though at least they’d have their mother’s good looks to balance him out, Laurent thought with a pained smile. The more the child took after its mother, the better.

For a brief moment, he let himself picture a child with Rhietta’s auburn curls and vivid, beaming smile, and he was shocked when he felt a tear well up at the edge of his eye and roll down his cheek. He couldn’t name the feeling that had brought it on. A kind of grief, he supposed, though there was a sweetness to it, too. Nostalgia, perhaps. A yearning for something impossible, a desire to be part of a life that simply could not include him.

It wasn’t until he noticed that he could no longer see the trees in front of him that he realized that the sun was setting. His body jolted uneasily; he must have been sitting here for hours, utterly lost in thought. Reckless of him. Out here where the jungle vegetation was at its thickest, so too was the concentration of demons. He’d need to be much more on his guard if he didn’t want to get himself killed…though a deeper part of him whispered that that might not be such a bad outcome, at the end of the day. It would certainly put a neater end to his involvement with the pack were they to stumble upon his body, and it would offer them closure in a way that his disappearance simply couldn’t.

But a stubborn part of Laurent—the same part of him that had insisted on fetching his weapons before he’d walked away from camp for the last time—rejected that idea entirely. He didn’t want to inflict himself on the pack any longer, but he didn’t want to die, either. He’d build a new life for himself out here. A solitary, strange little life, limited to the wildest and most remote parts of the island where he wouldn’t risk encountering another wolf…but a life, nonetheless.

That was enough of a plan to be getting on with, at least for the time being. And with that decision made, Laurent rose abruptly from the rock he’d been slumped on all afternoon and let his wild shape take over.

As the magic tingled through him, he realized how long it had been since he’d spent any length of time in his wolf form. Lorekeepers called it the true form, something he’d always resisted—he was as much himself on two legs as he was on four, and he’d never had much time for spiritual nonsense like that. But perhaps he’d misunderstood their meaning. There was a sharpness and an immediacy in this body, a directness about the connection of his senses to his instincts. Less thinking. Less pointless, rambling intellectualization. More clarity. In that way, at least, more truth. He’d always been so quick to leap to judgment—of the people around him, of his training, of everything. Just one more mistake to add to the long, long list.

And so Laurent left behind his human shape, his pack, and his rational mind, and let the rhythms of the days and nights of the jungle claim him.

There was a beautiful, ferocious simplicity to it. Wolf-shaped, the volume on his primal instincts was turned up, and he quickly established a new set of priorities. First was constant vigilance against the demons that stalked the island, wild and shambling, drawn unerringly towards his presence thanks to some inbuilt instinct in their monstrous construction. But Laurent had no shortage of experience handling demons, and after the first few challengers had been deftly dispatched, he found that in each subsequent encounter there was a little more wariness, a little more respect from his foes. Perhaps it was the way the demon blood clung to his fur like an ever-changing badge of the violence he brought. Or perhaps it was that the more time he spent in his four-legged form, the more confident he felt, the more willing to kill.

Hunting didn’t pose a problem, either. He quickly fell into a nocturnal pattern, awake and alert in the darkest part of the night when the demons were more active, before choosing one of his favored hidden places to doze in through the hottest and brightest part of the day, when he was least likely to be challenged. Hunting was easiest at dawn and dusk, and he had no trouble killing enough wild game to keep hunger at bay. It was a great deal simpler to hunt only for himself than it had been with the needs of a whole pack in mind.

And then there was the need to avoid discovery by his old pack. In the first few days out there, before he’d settled fully into the natural routine that presented itself, there were definitely a few close calls. He’d underestimated just how thoroughly his old pack would search for him, and more than a few times he was disturbed from deep sleep by voices, far too close, calling the name he recognized as his own. Still, the jungle out here was thick and deep, and it was no easy feat to find one single wolf in its depths…especially one who didn’t want to be found. Easy enough to slip cautiously away from the trail, to lie still and quiet on the far side of a fallen tree until the footsteps of the patrol faded from his hearing. And slowly but surely, as the days drifted by and Laurent found deeper and more inaccessible parts of the jungle to dwell in, there were fewer and fewer close brushes with search parties. He still occasionally heard the sound of wolves on patrol, but it was always from a considerable distance, and it was never hard to lie still and quiet until the sounds left him on his own again.

He did consider leaving the island altogether. A distant memory of the planning phases of this trip, all belonging to a life that now seemed as distant as a dream…he remembered a map of a whole archipelago of islands, and beyond them, an even larger world. He toyed with the idea of starting a whole new life in that world. It would be a dangerous journey to reach it, of course, and no doubt he’d struggle to learn the language and to acclimate to the new society, but what did he care about hardship? The life he was living right now was hard. Knowing that he was a few short miles from a warmth and love he could never return to…that was hard. And with that fierce determination burning in him, he started several journeys, each time with every intention of leaving the island for good. He got as far as the southernmost edge of Lake Ravil once or twice, knowing that only a few miles further south lay the docks, and at least one little boat he might steal. But every time, something made him turn back.

What was it that was keeping him here, he wondered? He certainly didn’t intend to return to his pack—he knew exactly how bad that would be for everyone involved—but at the same time, he was loath to get too far away from them, even with the fear that shot through him whenever he heard the sound of a patrol moving through the trees. It came down to cowardice, at the end of the day. He was too afraid to leave for good, too afraid to permanently leave behind everything he’d ever known. At least he’d had courage enough to get out of their immediate vicinity, to free them of his direct influence. He might not have freed them of his presence completely, but at least he’d reduced himself to a ghost, haunting the edges of the pack he’d once led.

And in his darker moments, he reflected that sooner or later, his luck would run out. Maybe one of the wounds he kept sustaining in minor scuffles with demons would get infected and the fever would take him in his sleep. Maybe a few unsuccessful days of hunting would weaken him enough for an opportunistic demon to take him out. Or maybe he’d simply sleep too deeply one night, and never wake up at all, his life snuffed out by the jaws or claws of a demon before he could even awaken. These ideas, when they danced across his mind, caused a certain revulsion in him…but not fear. The sad truth was that death had lost all ability to frighten him.

Because what was there to fear, really, about the end of a life without Rhietta in it?

Chapter 17 - Rhietta

Laurent had been missing for a week when Rhietta’s worry turned into anger. She knew from long experience that anger rarely lasted long, with her; it would burn bright and brilliant for a short time, certainly, but it was never long before the flame would die out and she’d be able to get a proper look at the feeling that actually lay beneath it. It seemed pretty clear that this time, it would be sadness. Grief, despair, the awful loss of hope that all of this had been some dreadful misunderstanding and the father of her child would come romping out of the forest with an apology and a smile—as if either of those were in his wheelhouse, she thought with a miserable kind of laughter.

And so Rhietta waited patiently for the fury in her to give way to depression. But she waited in vain. Seven days, eight days, ten days, fifteen, and absolutely nothing had changed about the hot lump of fury that burned day and night in the upper part of her chest, as if a great molten rock was pressing on her windpipe, making it feel as though she could breathe fire with every exhalation. Where the hell had he gone? How did he even begin to justify disappearing like this, without leaving the faintest indication of where he’d gone, or even why? Her curiosity was shared by the rest of the pack, though she could tell her anger was unique to her. Nobody had really been that close with Laurent, that was the thing. Sure, they’d known him for years, and some of them had even spent a lot of their days in his presence. Camus and Reade were at just about every meeting he ever held, but it wasn’t as though they really knew him. And so his disappearance, though it troubled and puzzled them, wasn’t something that they could take personally.

Well, Rhietta thought grimly, that was all very well for them. But for her, Laurent’s sudden and completely unexplained abandonment of the pack was deeply personal. Not that she was about to share that with the whole pack—not right now, not with the conversation it would open up, though she wasn’t exactly sure how much longer she could hold it in. She’d never kept such a major secret for this long in her life, and it was wearing on her more than she’d ever thought possible. The only person who even knew she was pregnant was Dasha, and if the old healer knew anything about the baby’s parentage, she certainly didn’t let on. Rhietta had no idea how she did it—her respect for the woman had always been immense, but it was reaching downright impossible new heights these days.

They didn’t give up searching, even as the days passed by and hope for Laurent’s safe return seemed to be waning. Rhietta knew her pack was probably beginning to worry about the single-minded fervor with which she was conducting the search, but what could she do? If it had been any one of them, she wouldn’t have given up. And so she sent patrol after patrol out with instructions to comb over the ground carefully, to look for any signs he’d been there lately, to keep on calling his name…though that last part made her hesitate, just a little. Was it better to treat this like a search, or like a hunt? It came down to whether Laurent wanted to be found. If he was lying somewhere trapped and wounded, desperate for rescue, that was one thing, but if he was hiding from them on purpose, it would be sensible to make less noise.

But if he was hiding from them on purpose, then that would raise the uncomfortable question of whether they ought to be searching for him at all.

That was when Rhietta took to slipping out by herself late at night once the rest of the pack had gone to sleep, conducting her own secret search of the area. It was dangerous, she knew that, but desperate times called for desperate measures, and she was struggling to get any sleep these days, anyway. Wolf-shaped, leaning on her heightened senses and the sharpness of adrenaline to keep her safe from the nocturnal demon population of the island, she searched night after night for any trace of Laurent.

She usually returned to her bed a few hours later, disappointed by the lack of any conclusive evidence, but at the same time, it wasn’t as though her searches were proving that he wasn’t out here somewhere. She’d find occasional hints that a wolf could have been living wild out here, theoretically—some broken branches, a newly-worn trail down to the bank of a stream, even a slightly flattened patch of vegetation that looked about the right size for a wolf to have lain there for a short while. But nothing she found couldn’t also have been explained by wishful thinking on her part. The truth was that she wanted so badly to find him that she’d have been forced to doubt the evidence of her eyes even if she’d found him sitting in a clearing somewhere, waiting for her.

Laurent had been missing for three weeks when Reade took her aside, and with every bit of the tact and gentleness he’d honed over a long political career, he told her it was time to give up the search. She reacted poorly, as he must have known that she would, but once her temper had faded and she’d gotten out a few insults that made even the stoic Reade raise an eyebrow, she fell into a sullen quiet.

“You’re right, obviously,” she forced herself to say once the worst of her unfounded anger with him had ebbed. “It’s been weeks, it’s a dreadful waste of time and effort, I’m putting the members of the search parties at risk every time I send them out there—but Reade, I’m telling you, he’s out there somewhere.”

Reade paused for a moment before he replied, and she could tell the interim Alpha was choosing his words as carefully as he could. “That may well be, Alpha,” he said eventually, his voice gentle. “But if he is, I think he’s made it clear that he doesn’t want us to find him. And at the end of the day, that’s his prerogative.”

“It damn well shouldn’t be,” she snapped, failing to muster the venomous tone she’d been aiming for and sounding like a sad child instead. “Who would choose this? Who would abandon their pack and live in the jungle? What kind of stubborn, obsessive—I know, I know, I hear it too,” she said, dropping her head tiredly into her hands.

“He might not even be here any longer,” Reade pointed out softly. “It’s been three weeks—that’s more than enough time for him to have made his way back to one of the other islands by boat. With three weeks, he could even have swum it.”

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