Page 32 of My Hexed Honeymoon

In the meantime, I’ve been dealing with pack meetings from morning till night, until I’ve seen for myself why Conall was so damn grouchy all the time. While there are good ideas and items we absolutely have to discuss and address in the mix, the majority of it is complaints and requests. It makes me feel like some angry Santa Claus who goes around telling children there will be nothing but coal in their stockings this year.

This week, we discovered the hunters dedicated to finding us and torturing information and our powers out of us before slaughter are calling themselves the Arcane Tribunal and grow bigger each day.

All while the pack members are arguing who gets to be in charge during PTA meetings.

Conall reminded me that when there’s a danger outside our walls, our members need normalcy more than ever inside of them.

More than anything, we needed to protect ourselves from those outside threats so that we could go on arguing about whether or not the kids needed to learn cursive.

I lift a finger to signal to Riven I’ll be with them in a minute, then dial up Sasquatch and tell him to pick up Natalia from my place and escort her to the meeting chamber. While I could tell it was a difficult shift for the mountainous ginger who looked like a time-traveling Viking to go from Conall and Kerrigan’s personal bodyguards to taking orders from me, at this point, he’s the only one I trust to handle Talia with a modicum of respect—even if she gets sassy.

Hoping my best welcome-wagon pair could work their own type of magic, I sent Kerrigan and Gina over yesterday afternoon while I was in meetings to check in on my wife. Not even they could get much out of her, and she was surlier than ever by the time I arrived home in the evening.

At this point, the only way the two of us would create a supernatural heir was in the lab.

Is that the kind of thing Kerrigan could do at the clinic?

It’d be a pity to skip the fun part, where I buried myself between Natalia’s thighs and savored every little whimper and moan…

At the thundering of my heart, I have to press pause on the dirty thought reel. With a shift of my feet and a clearing of my throat, I calm my breathing and remind myself I’m standing in the middle of a forest.

Across from an overly smooth vampire.

“Come with me,” I say after confirming Sasquatch is on his way to the meeting chamber with Natalia. He didn’t bother commenting on how her mood was, but I’m sure as soon as she lays eyes on me, it’ll be downright icy.

As I escort Riven inside the compound, a line of bodyguards at my side, I scrub a hand over my face. After a day of being the decider for so many things I didn’t give a shit about, I was spent. I didn’t want to have to determine one more thing.

But with so many lives hanging in the balance, what I wanted no longer mattered.

That was the other thing about becoming alpha—it never stopped. And with a dangerous faction of humans out there with the sole purpose of eradicating us from the earth, we needed every ally and extra minute we could get.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The council chamberis remarkably colder than the rest of the compound. Maybe it’s the stone floors, the absence of windows, or the uncomfortable-looking wooden benches. The raised platform of werewolves up front, like the room itself, is built for judgment.

Sasquatch, the werewolf acting as my too-tall, hulking shadow, delivers me inside with a nod to my husband. The enormous guy knocked on my door hard enough that the window frames rattled, informed me he’d be escorting me to Diego as ordered, and that I could choose the easy way or the hard way.

As tempted as I was to tell him he could go fuck himself—and Diego, too—there was a whole phrase about working smarter not harder. Plus the guy didn’t say a word, refusing to answer any of my questions or respond to any of my insults about werewolves.

“Go on up,” Sasquatch says, pointing his finger like I’ll struggle to find my way. Diego’s seated in that center seat on the raised platform like a king, his men at his side—and that very much included Nissa.

As I’d learned the night of the bonfire and ax throwing, the head of the Bridgewater Pack is all Diego De la Cruz will ever be, even to me. No going and thinking we had any form of friendship or intimacy.

No more cuddly chats by the fire or swooning that he cares if I’ve had a s’more before. I opened the shutters to my heart too wide that evening before the flickering flames—wanting so badly to fit in, even in a pack of mangy wolves…

It stung every single time I recalled the entire audience shrinking away.

Evidently,theygot to use their supernatural strength to show off and throw axes, but I received the message loud and clear that they didn’t allow others to do the same.

Since that’d led me to declare my magic was the curse both of us always knew it was, I couldn’t currently access it. Not that I’d told Diego or anyone else that my powers were giving the silent treatment to me.

So big surprise, training isn’t going so great, and the instant I see Riven, a suffocating sense of failure settles over me.

I’m a champagne bottle someone’s shaken within an inch of its life, corked too tight and ready to pop.

I’m not sure if it’ll be anger or tears, only that it’ll be wrong either way.

“I trust the night finds you well,” they say, their eyes extracting all my secrets with the briefest of glances. Brightly painted lips purse, conveying they’ve noticed the night has not.

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