Page 21 of The Sacred Wolf

I stopped, chest heaving. Beneath my shuddering human self, my wolf was like stone, cool and hard. More importantly, she was right. I turned the idea over in my mind like a rock with a hidden treasure beneath it.

“It’s Damian.” I whirled to face the males. “He isn’t influencing shifters to carry out these attacks; he’s influencing humans to frame us.”

Sebastian raised an eyebrow and pursed his lips. “That’s… actually a very interesting theory, Elyse.”

“She’s right, Sebastian,” Kenzo said slowly, surveying the scene again. “You know… the fact that it looks fake makes it seem like activists instead of shifters to us, but like shifters instead of activists to the humans. It’s kind of perfect.”

“I’m going to have to go back and discuss this with my father and Mateo, of course,” Sebastian began, and then turned to me, “but if anything could make your point that I shouldn’t have kept you out of the loop, this was it.”

Even though I was still taking shallow breaths so I didn’t have to smell death on the breeze, I managed a weak smile for this version of him that hovered somewhere between the Alphahole who grated on my every last nerve and the cinnamon roll I wanted to devour in one sitting and lick off my fingers.

“You take the car, then,” Kenzo said. “I’ll work on getting this mess cleaned up. I’ll text Mateo so he’ll be looped in before you get back.”

Sebastian looked up at the sky, his eyes narrowing. The sun was on its way down, the surrounding shadows stretching long fingers across the emerald lawns. Ribbons of cloud were tinged pink and tangerine above us.

“I don’t think so, Kenzo,” he said. “I’m feeling amped after all this, and I’d like to walk back. You know, get a feel for the vibe in the city.” He turned to me, a small smile tugging at his square jaw. “Elyse, would you like to come with me?”

The softness in his voice and posture, that smile laced with sadness for me, knowing how I’d felt reliving Charlie’s loss, and the invitation rather than the command… At that moment, I needed nothing more than to melt into him, but not so that he would bite my neck and tug my hips against his—though, the more I thought about it, the more that image filled my mind—but so that he could hold me. I craved his muscular arms around me, pressing me to his hard chest and enfolding me until I could barely breathe so that, for one second, I could just let myself cry and know that he would love me anyway.

“Thank you, Sebastian.” My voice sounded rough and strange. “I would like that.”

Chapter Ten

Strolling up 5th Avenue with Sebastian, I tried to leave the carnage and my trauma behind. The early evening was cool, but not chilly, and I relished this opportunity, however unfortunate its origin, to explore more of Sebastian’s borough. Over the past few years, when I’d snuck away from the Bronx to catch movies with my friends, I’d only been able to check out the area directly around the bridge and Last Century Cinema. It was too risky to trespass further, a fact that was finally made abundantly clear to me when those Manhattan males attacked and Sebastian intervened.

Haven’t seen any of those guys around…

No, I thought uneasily. And I don’t suspect we ever will.

Our conversation on the tram had spawned as many questions as it finally snuffed out. He didn’t just love movies; he loved the same seedy movie theater. So why had he bought me the fancy one around the corner that meant nothing to either of us instead of just taking me to the one we’d both grown up in, albeit at very different stages of our lives. And why didn’t he just tell me the truth to begin with?

You weren’t the only one caught off guard at the ceremony.

True. He had earnestly believed he would be mating with me, not Kiana, and I had proof now in the form of the username BashBux. Bastian Bux was the main character in The NeverEnding Story, and Sebastian had adopted the name as some sort of human alter ego. Yara, and only Yara, was allowed to call her son Bastian because the movies were their little secret, but on the night he met my friends, Sebastian had told them his last name was Bucks. I should have guessed it right then. Not only did he love movies, but he had one-upped me on 80s movie trivia. I was a disgrace to my shirt.

“Hey, crabcakes?” I tried, remembering our pre-show banter about another famous Sebastian. I squeezed his forearm just above the four tiny scratches that told me he’d probably been lying earlier when he said I hadn’t hurt him.

“Is that really necessary?” he groaned.

“Why were you signed into your streaming account in our honeymoon suite?” I asked, admitting for the first time that it had always been rightfully mine, not Kiana’s. “I don’t think that’s how most wolves spend their first evening together.”

“Maybe I didn’t want to be most wolves, Elyse.”

I looked up at his profile, coarse around the edges now with a five o’clock shadow that I kind of wanted to rub my cheek up against. “You didn’t want to mate?”

He ducked his head and turned it slightly away. “Elyse.”

“What?” I bumped my shoulder against his bicep. “What’s the point in being shy? We both know what was expected of us that night.”

“I just wanted to offer you an alternative activity,” he mumbled. “In case you weren’t ready right away.”

“Good call.” I hugged his arm. “Turns out I wasn’t.”

He laughed. “How long did it take you to discover it?”

“I binge watched the first season of Alma Mater Animalis that night.”

“Second season is better.” Sebastian wrinkled his nose. “Not so much cat man.”

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