Page 75 of The Wild Wolf's Rejected Mate

“What are we talking about?” Alroy asks, falling into step beside us.

“How my balls are bigger than the alpha’s here,” Max answers.

I growl.

He raises his hands. “Sorry, my balls are bigger thanJustus’s.”

Khalil and Alroy both hum in ready agreement. I roll my eyes.

“I was asking Justus here why he won’t grab his balls—smaller than mine though they may be—and claim that mate of his. Tell her she’s First Pack now, and that’s that.”

“That is not how females work.” I’d love to hear him repeat that in front of Elspeth. He’d be out of the den, bunking with the pups again, as soon as the words came out of his mouth.

“Oh, so you know how females work now?” Max raises his bushy gray eyebrows, and Alroy snickers.

“He read about ’em in that book that said only wolves in zoos have alphas.” Khalil smirks at me. He’s spoiling for a fight. He must have sobered up.

“It’s a matter of respect,” I say, flagrantly ignoring our long and storied tradition of stealing our mates from under their birth packs’ noses.

“It’s fear,” Khalil shoots right back, holding my gaze with his laughing, red-rimmed eyes, daring me to deny it. “Brother Justus won’t claim his twitchy little mate because he’s figured out that if he has nothing, he has nothing to lose.” He flashes me a wry smile that tells me he figured out the same thing himself.

I smack him upside the back of his head for calling Annietwitchy. He grins and ducks away. He knows he overstepped, and we all know he’s right.

We’re pack. We let each other spout our preferred brand of bullshit, but at the end of the day, we’ve run together our whole lives. We’ve shared hundreds of kills, breathed each other’s farts, huddled together in the dead of winter to keep from freezing. We’ve stood together in six-foot holes, shoveling dirt so we could bury our dead.

We know each other to the bone.

It would kill me to really have her and lose her. I couldn’t walk away from that. And then what happens to the pack? Who will remind them, over and over again, that freedom for safety is a bad trade?

I listen to the elders’ stories. I know that history repeats, and we could so easily go the way of Quarry Pack.

When the lost wolves moved out of the dens to build their towns and cities—seduced by light at night, cold air in the summer, and fresh meat from a box at any time—some banished their wolves more thoroughly than others. Moon Lake built high rises so they didn’t even have to smell the earth anymore. North Border built walls to cage their own people.

For a long time, Quarry Pack kept to many of the old ways. Some even lived in dens, and we still ran with them then during full moons. And then, when my parents were young, Declan Kelly came from nowhere, killed their alpha, and took over, in part by convincing them that we were the enemy.

Obviously, there were no more runs after that, but until the wasting sickness decimated our numbers, our males would still risk occasional incursions onto their territory. Twice they found runts left to die in the forest, and once, they rescued a female beaten and left for dead in a gulch. One of the runts died, but the other lived, and the female happened to mate the male who carried her back to camp and birthed Alroy before she was taken by the sickness.

I love my pack, but I know them. They’re as susceptible as anyone to the lure of a strong male who promises to keep the bad wolves away. They want to believe that someone has the power to keep them safe, and if they were weak and scared again, like they were after the sickness, they’d follow any old asshole with a loud mouth and confidence.

No matter what they call me, I’m not the alpha, but I am the male sitting in the alpha’s seat so no one else can take it. As long as I’m here, Alroy’s dickishness is a nuisance. Khalil’s fatalism hurts only himself. If I’m gone, what happens when Alroy realizes no one can tell him to shut up? What happens when Khalil’s death wish tells him the pack can outrun a blizzard on the way to winter camp?

I almost didn’t survive walking away from Annie the first time. I’m a flawed, flawed male, but I know myself. I wouldn’t willingly live through that again.

But do I have a choice?

Already, thoughts of her run on a constant loop in the back of my brain—is she okay? Elspeth will keep an eye on her, and noneof the males will dare go near her. The worst that can happen to her is boredom, but she doesn’t know that. Is she scared?

Of course, she is.Whatis she afraid of? Or maybe she feels better without me around.

Is she relieved that I’m gone?

Is she thinking about me?

I march on, stiff as a soldier, and my mind spins. I don’t know what to do. Fate is making all the calls, like she always does, and I need to make it right, and what do Ido? Who do I fight? Who do I bark into submission?

Max must smell my angst because he snorts and says, “Oh, don’t worry about it too much, pup. Soon enough, you’ll be fetching her a snack at three o’clock in the morning because you were an asshole in her dream, and she can’t stand smelling you for another second, and she’s hungry.”

Alroy and Khalil’s faces twist in mocking disbelief.

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