Page 27 of What's Rogue Got To Do With It

Our food had dwindled but Auden had plenty and an adjoining shed, which was an outdoor pantry of sorts, housed dry goods. I wondered why the local rats and mice didn’t raid the place but he’d marked every inch with his Alpha scent and that was better than any “Keep Out” sign.

As the days passed, we joked more and didn’t scan the road leading up the slope with binoculars as often as we had when we arrived. I marked out an area for a new garden but without being able to go into town, I couldn’t plant anything. Even the half-bond seemed less urgent here. My wolf enjoyed the wide open space and stopped pacing.

Whatever Auden was planning, I hoped we could stay.

16

CREVEN

Some found other packs willing to take them in at the time.

Auden’s words kept playing in my head on repeat. When he first spoke them, they hadn’t registered. We’d just learned that this place was a sanctuary and I’d been so busy wrapping my head around that, nothing else sunk in. But now that he was gone and answers were unavailable, they came flooding back to me and refused to leave.

At the time there had been so much information being hurled at me. The more I discovered, the more I realized how little I knew about shifter life outside of my old den.

My father had been very much team ‘we keep to ourselves’. We didn’t have alliances with local packs and we didn’t work together the way they seemed to around here. If anything, my father saw them all as potential threats, shifters to be leery of and on guard around. I’d thought that was the norm at the time. How wrong I’d been.

Everything about this pack and region were so new to me. There was a lot to take in and process. And now? Now my entire being was hyper aware of that one sentence.

Gods, I wished Auden was back already so I could ask him what he meant by that. Maybe it had been a slip of the tongue. That would make the most sense. Laws were laws. But what if it hadn’t been a slip? What if they really were with a new pack.

How did they find another pack willing to take them in… willing to risk their own safety for a rogue? There had to be a loophole I was missing, right? Only he’d said it like it was an easy peasy solution, not like a huge deal. I had so many questions and zero ways to answer them.

I slipped out of bed and went outside, needing the fresh air. We were still a couple hours or so away from dawn, but I was restless. Sleep wasn’t going to come again and the longer I stayed in bed, the greater the chance I’d wake up my mate. He had enough on his plate without losing sleep over something his mate may or may not have misinterpreted.

The moon was still high, casting light on the land we were currently habitating. It had an eerie beauty. I closed my eyes, trying to envision what it had looked like back when the pack had been thriving. How wonderful it would be to see the place vibrant and full once again.

It would take a lot of work to get most of the property safe enough for people to live there. The buildings were in various states of repair, and none of them good. Trees and brush were overgrown and what looked like had once been a community garden was now a pile of weeds. The place was a disaster.

But there was so much potential here. We could easily set up an area for chickens, pigs, and maybe some sheep. And the garden could be brought back to life with some hard work.

Except, I had to remind myself that this place wasn’t ours— there was no ‘we’ when it came to this land. There was Auden. Only Auden.

And that by my mate and I being here, Auden wasn’t safe. He could say all he wanted that this was a sanctuary city, but all it took was one shifter to freak out and go to the Council for that safety to be out the window.

I knew too well how easily one person could get their ass in a fit. My mere existence had Rayne threatening me with death and casting me out. And Daniel? All we did was exist and that was enough to make him hunt us down. Sanctuary or not, we wouldn’t be able to stay here long.

Despite knowing that our days here were limited, I kept thinking about all the ways to bring these packlands to life. I wanted Auden to have a pack again, not just in name, but in numbers. And maybe it was growing up as the son of the den Alpha that had my brain working over time, but the ideas for how to achieve that end kept flowing.

I tiptoed back inside and found an old notebook I’d seen on the counter when we first arrived and a pencil. And after making sure my mate was still asleep, I sat on the stoop and started writing down all of my ideas—each and every one of them. The great ones, the horrible ones, the half ideas, all of them. It gave me something to do and I figured that once they were on paper, my brain might let them go.

My pencil glided over page after page, my attention so focused on what I was doing that I hadn’t noticed the sun rising or my mate coming out with a cup of coffee in his hand until he said my name and I nearly fell off the stop.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Don’t be.” I patted the space beside me for him to join me and shut the notebook, placing it beside me. Somehow I managed to fill over half of it already.

“What are you working on?”

“I was just brain-dumping. I figured if I got everything out of here,” I tapped my head, “then I wouldn’t be focusing on it nonstop.”

He kissed the side of my head. “I made you some coffee.”

“Oh! This is mine? Thank you.” Before I could take it from him, it fell to the ground and he took off into the tree line.

I raced after him, keeping back as he emptied the contents of his stomach. My poor mate was miserable. I inched closer, wanting to give him privacy, but also wanting to take care of him. He crossed over to me and wrapped his arms around me.

“That wasn’t fun.” He snuggled into my chest. “It came out of nowhere, but I feel good as new. A little gross—but other than that, like I was never sick.”

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