“Looks like someone’s been out in the woods rolling around with some nig—”
I punched him so hard he crumpled like a house of playing cards.
“I’ve wanted to do that since the first moment you opened your mouth, you stupid son of a bitch.” I stepped over him and up to the bar. Jackson, who’d been across the room, was suddenly at my side and looked ready to take on the world if anyone tried to avenge Hank. No one made a move until the pack’s sole African-American member came up to me and placed a hand on my shoulder, beaming.
“Thank you.”
Giving him a tight smile, I said, “You can thank me by bringing Their Majesties here.”
He nodded, clapping me on the shoulder another few times before he went to get Callum and Lucas. I accepted the scotch offered to me by tonight’s acting bartender and told Jackson he could stand down. It didn’t escape my notice that Morgan hadn’t moved from her seat once. Not that I would have made any great effort to defend her either, mind you.
Magnolia—showing an impressive display of strength—dragged Hank back to his table and gave him a dirty dishcloth to staunch the bleeding. “Serves you right, stirring up shit,” she told him.
He kept giving me the stink eye, but I wasn’t having it. Hank didn’t scare me.
“Are you planning to hide out on the porch all night?” I hollered to my hidden mystery guest.
Eyes pivoted from me to the door. Amelia was the first to react, with a gasped, “My God.” Ben was the next, staggering to his feet and sending his chair skittering back across the hardwood as he cleared the room in a heartbeat and lifted his sister off the floor in a crushing hug.
“You’re home,” he whispered, tears streaming down his cheeks.
“I’m home.” Eugenia buried her face in his neck, her cheeks wet with emotion as she hugged him back. “I’ve missed you so much.”
The room was far from quiet now. Newer pack members asked who the girl was, and others were just excited to have Eugenia home. She and I were the only two out of the loop on our relationship. Before Callum had told me I had siblings, I’d assumed Ben was either Callum’s own son, or my Aunt Savannah’s. Savannah, as it turned out, was out west shacked up with a prince there.
Now a huge chunk of family was back together, and everyone in the room was treating it like a damned reunion. Beer flowed as freely as water, and people were toasting Eugenia’s return when Callum and Lucas walked in a few minutes later.
Callum went to Eugenia and held her at arm’s length, getting a good look at her. His eyes glistened, but no tears fell. Kings don’t cry. They did hug, though, because Callum pulled her in for a hug so fierce it put our brother’s to shame.
Lucas couldn’t care less about Eugenia’s triumphant return to the fold. He cleared the room in a heartbeat and lifted me off the floor and up onto the bar, wrapping his arms around me as he kissed the breath right out of my lungs.
My vision swam. His fingers slid under my shirt, clawlike, trying to pull me closer to him than a human body could go. I returned his fevered kiss, then, begrudgingly, pushed him away. “Baby, we have an audience.”
He released me with a growl, telling me he didn’t give a hoot who could see us.
Callum, with one arm around Eugenia and another around Ben, beamed like a proud father. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for this.”
“About that. You and I need to have a little chat.”
A hush spread through the crowd. I guess I’d forgotten my manners in the swamp. Along with my give-a-shits. I shot back the scotch, grimacing, and grumbled, “Apologies. Your Majesty, might I request an audience?”
“Of course.”
We left the bar, Lucas insisting on coming along. I’d already impressed upon Eugenia the importance of not telling any of the wolves about Holden, and I had to hope she’d remain true to her word. The kings and I settled into Callum’s office.
“I suppose you want to finalize the details,” Callum said.
“Before we get into the agreement you and I made, there’s something way more important you need to know.”
“Secret, I doubt there’s anything more important—” Lucas began, but I silenced him with a squeeze of the knee, not wanting to interrupt him in any more obvious way in front of another king.
“There is a pack in Maurepas Swamp.”
“A what?” Callum shifted to the edge of his chair, suddenly very interested in what I had to say.
“A feral pack. At least twenty, not counting the women and children. Not that the women are wolves. They’re just incubators.”
“I don’t think I understand.”
“There is a pack of fucking Lost Boys on an island in the swamp. They are kidnapping and raping tourist women and making them give birth to their offspring, and then turning the children.”
“How do you—?”
I drew his attention to the mud and blood.
“Did they…?” Lucas asked the question, but his words dropped off before he could finish the sentence. “Are you…?”
“I don’t think their Alpha will be siring any new pups anytime soon. And I definitely didn’t make any friends. But I’m fine.”
“My God,” Callum said.
“I don’t want to tell you your business, Callum, but I think your last goal should be expanding into our territory when you have a dissenting pack not one hour from your front door.” I leaned across the table and fixed him with a hard stare. “You know how bad a dissenting pack can make you look, don’t you?”
Callum didn’t appear too impressed with me right then. He turned to regard Lucas, as if to ask if my king had put me up to this, but I think Callum knew me well enough by now to understand that no one put me up to anything against my will. “Yes,” he said at last. “I do know.”“So do we have your word that for the time being, until your feral problem has been dealt with, you won’t be trying to move into our territory?”
He sat back and once again spoke to Lucas. “Look at what you East Coast wolves do to my nice Southern girls? She’s cutthroat.”
Lucas shrugged. “Blame Canada.”
I smiled.
“She’s going to make one hell of a queen, Rain.”
“She will if you let me marry her.”
The Southern king leaned back in his chair and chuckled in a warm, smoky way. “Like I could stop you with her involved.”
And with that, we had what we’d come for. I let out a sigh of relief.
“In fact, why stop there?” Callum added, and the sigh got caught in my throat.
“I don’t—”
“Your sister is home now, and your brother is here too. Let’s go for broke. You two will proclaim your mate-hood here. Tomorrow night, during the full-moon ceremony.”
Shit.
Chapter Thirty
Alone in our little cabin, I was allowed to pace back and forth, for all the good it did me.
“What does he mean, proclaim our mate-hood? You already activated our mate bond.”
“It’s different.”
“Okay, fine. Explain it to me.”
Lucas was sitting on the couch, watching me pace. “There’s a ceremony all werewolf couples must participate in at the full moon. They declare their bond in front of the whole pack, share blood, and then—in the eyes of the wolves—they are married.”
“But we’re getting married in a week. For real.”
He shook his head. “That’s a human custom. This ceremony is the real marriage. We would have done it after our wedding at the next full-moon gathering. I wanted to tell you after our wedding in the city, to give you time to adjust to the idea.”
I sat down on the stone hearth and tried to run my fingers through my hair. I needed a shower. And blood. But more than anything I needed not to be forced into a full-moon ceremony. What would happen when I couldn’t change? How was I supposed to explain that to Callum and his pack? And what would it mean for Lucas?
“I can’t do this.”
“I don’t see what choice we have.”
“But I can’t shift, Lucas.”
“I’m not worried about that.”
“I haven’t shifted in over twenty years, not since I was a baby and even that I don’t remember. I’m worried about it.”
“You’re a werewolf attending a full-moon ceremony with two kings present.” He smiled like this should explain away my fear. “You have nothing to worry about.”
“Yeah, that doesn’t help.”
“Secret, trust me.”
“But—”
“No, no buts. You have active werewolf blood in you. I don’t care how many shields you have up, or how deeply you think you’ve buried that part of you. No werewolf can resist the shift when they are in the presence of their king. None.”
“Boy will your face be red tomorrow when I prove your theory wrong.”
“Actually it will be furry and sort of golden, from what I’ve been told.” He got up and crouched in front of me, taking my hands in his and kissing my forehead. The wrinkling of his nose didn’t escape my attention. “Now go have a shower and I will take you to the ceremony site so you know what to expect.”
I smelled like raspberries and anxiety.
The werewolf ceremony site was deep in the oak forest, in a clearing with a giant fire pit in the middle that reminded me way too much of my dream with Mercy. I’d never been here before, but the details were spot-on. It made my stomach queasy.
At least this time I was wearing clothes.
Lucas tracked the circumference of the fire pit, prattling on about the way tomorrow’s ceremony would go. Goody, I got to attend two rehearsals and two weddings in one week. Both of them mine. I didn’t want to get married here. My pack was in New York. Those were my people.
And what about Desmond?
Oh God. What about Desmond? This felt like such a betrayal because I couldn’t explain the circumstances to him ahead of time. I would come home married in the eyes of werewolves everywhere, and I hadn’t given him a chance to prepare himself. I couldn’t even call to tell him. He was out at the mansion with the rest of the pack preparing for their own rituals. I wanted to call him right then, but not only did my cell phone not work, could I really explain something like this to him over the phone? What could I say? The only proper way to talk about it was in person, and there just wasn’t going to be time.