“I wasn’t expecting you,” says the grim-faced shifter whose large shoulders are blocking most of his log cabin doorway.
I keep my gaze fixed on his stubbled chin, much as I have since I knocked on his front door and he opened it moments before. “B-but Talis said you would have an update. About the furniture. A-and…” My voice trails off, and I’m thankful I run out of words to stutter.
One glance into the towering shifter’s intense blue eyes was enough to confirm he was an alpha, to make an already uncomfortable situation a thousand times worse. Since then, I’ve been busy staring at his chin as the rain continues to drip onto my hair and my clothes.
When he lifts a large hand from his side, my heart leaps and instinctively, I edge back.
He freezes with his hand half raised, and I wait with my body coiled with tension, ready to run at a moment’s notice.
After several seconds, he lifts his hand and rakes some of his thick dark hair back from his face. “I won’t hurt you. Please come inside.”
I lower my gaze to his navy flannel shirt, thinking he has to be larger than Jackson Stone, unable to silence my fear that he could hurt me.
I would be alone with him, and if he didn’t want me to leave, there would be no way of me convincing him otherwise.
He doesn’t speak again, just waits a few feet back from the doorway, holding the door open with one hand.
It takes a couple of minutes before my fear eases enough that I feel I can move, and I enter his rustic cabin half-filled with wood in various stages of being carved.
“Thank you. I’m sorry I… I’m sorry, it’s not easy being around strangers,” I say quietly, keeping my eyes on the blue buttons running down the front of his shirt.
“No harm in being wary around someone you don’t know.” His voice is surprisingly smooth and low. Nothing like the gruffness that greeted me when he first opened the door.
I guess now he knows I’m a submissive wolf, his protective instincts are rising to the surface.
“You want a towel and some coffee?” He crosses the open-plan space toward a closed door, which I’m guessing must be the bathroom. The kitchen, in the same rustic style as the rest of the cabin, is on my right, so I know it can’t be that.
Since he’s already on the way, I know not to bother responding. He doesn’t look like he needs an answer from me, anyway.
But then he surprises me by stopping. “Or not?”
I jerk my gaze away from an unfinished log sculpture in what he must use as his workroom, which takes up fully one-half of the spacious cabin. “What?” My eyes dart quickly to his before returning to his chin.
“You didn’t answer. Did you want a towel, or am I just railroading you into it?” The faint amusement in his voice has me lifting my head again in curiosity. “We alphas like to think we know what everyone needs and wants. Feel free to tell me otherwise.”
At his mild tone, more of my tension eases away. I wasn’t expecting such a gruff-looking alpha who lives in an isolated cabin in the woods to have a sense of humor. I think I was expecting a hermit old man. Nothing like this attractive alpha who knows how to laugh at himself.
Briefly, I meet his eyes and smile. “Yes, please.”
He nods and continues to the closed door. I glimpse a wooden sink and then he’s back out again with a thick mustard yellow towel in his hand.
Taking it gratefully, I dab at the moisture from my face as he heads toward the open-plan kitchen. “I’ll make the coffee. Feel free to look around. Maybe not the bedroom. I, uh, wasn’t expecting anyone.”
I can’t help darting a glance at the unmade bed with a rumpled tartan blanket before turning my attention to what I’m most interested in exploring. His wooden sculptures.
I wander over to the one half of his cabin that seems to function as his workroom as I rub the towel over my hair.
There’s an array of equipment and tools spread over a worktable near a framed window that reveals the rain has intensified since I came inside. Other than the table, everything else is half-finished wooden sculptures.
“I thought you were making furniture for Talis,” I call out, as I peer into the carved face of a large brown bear. It’s so realistic that I struggle to believe he carved it with the hand tools on his table. The level of detail makes me think it’s something only machinery could achieve.
“I am. Those are my fun projects, or some commissions I take on. My real workroom is in another cabin just behind this one.”
Nodding, I circle the bear that stands a couple of feet taller than me. I wonder if the bear is lifelike in height as well as face, because at five-three I’d have a serious problem if I ever came face to face with this one. “And you carved this, by hand?”
The sound of the kettle whistling on the stove tells me the water has finished boiling. “I did… uh, I didn’t ask your name.”
I glance over at him. “Jenna. And you’re Kier, the carpenter.”
He doesn’t look up from the silver tin he’s scooping coffee from into the two mugs he has on the wooden counter. “I am. I’m surprised Talis sent you here, instead of coming here herself or sending one of the others.”
I shrug. “I don’t know. Has she sent someone else here before?”
Kier turns around at my question. While it looks like he’s returning the silver container to the open dark wood shelving, I get the impression he doesn’t want me to read his expression.
“No, I’m just surprised they’d send a-”
Annoyance has my brow creasing. “Submissive? Someone who can’t protect herself?”
Kier turns in response to the sharp note in my voice. “No. That isn’t what I said.”
Now, it’s my turn to spin around and wander away. “I know what you meant. You didn’t have to say it.”
He’s silent for a couple of minutes. “You the only submissive in the pack?”
I hesitate about answering because I don’t know what, if anything, I should reveal to a shifter who isn’t pack. Probably nothing.
“Look, Dayne and I have a longstanding arrangement about me being here. I have no intention of harming you or any interest in discovering any secrets about your pack. I came here to be alone, and that’s all I care about.”
There isn’t any doubt in my mind he’s telling the truth. Not only because of the ring of truth in his voice, but because of Dayne and Talis knowing he lives here. If there wasn’t some kind of arrangement between them, Dayne would’ve chased Kier out the moment he realized there was a lone wolf on his territory.
I continue my meandering stroll through this indoor garden of half-finished wooden sculptures.
“Yes, I’m the only submissive,” I admit. “Why?”
Kier pours the hot coffee into the cups. “Cream and sugar?”
“Yes. Both, please.”
I watch him add one sugar and cream into both cups, and when he approaches, I don’t tense or retreat. While he isn’t pack, and he’s still a stranger, nothing about him is making me think he intends to hurt me. Not anymore.
When I’m clutching a brown ceramic mug full of a delicious smelling coffee in both hands with the towel slung over my shoulders, Kier backs up and leans against his workroom table a few feet away.
He crosses one leg over the other. “You told any of your pack how you feel?”
Just before I can take a sip of my coffee, I pause. “What?”
His gaze is on one of the half-finished sculptures, so I focus on his face for a moment, thinking that his stillness is reminiscent of a sculpture. Roughly hewn, but beautiful all the same.
He should do a sculpture of himself. It would be just as impressive, if not more than the bear.
“That you need room to breathe. That you can kill a bird just as easily by holding it too tight as by letting it loose and some predator seizing it.”
It doesn’t take me long to guess who the bird is in this analogy, and I grip my hands tighter around my cup. “I’m not a bird.”
He nods. “Maybe there’s a better way to say it. But what you are is…”
“Fragile? Delicate? Breakable?” My voice gets sharper with every word.
Although Kier must feel my gaze on his face, he doesn’t turn to meet my eyes.
“Rare. Precious. The true heart of the pack. Otherwise, there’s no reason to fight except to prove we can, and nothing to protect because we don’t have a heart.”
I blink in surprise because I’ve never heard of a submissive being called the heart of a pack before. Omegas, yes, but submissives, no. It makes me study him a little closer, wondering if he’s older than the thirty he appears because he sounds old, wise. Even if I’m not sure that I believe a single word he just said.
His lips curve in a faint smile soon hidden by his chocolate brown mug. “We wolves are a violent bunch. You ever hear that?”
I choke back a laugh because his words are ridiculous.
There’s no doubt in my mind that the reason our pack didn’t see half as much of the infighting as other packs do was because of Regan, our omega. Now, even though she’s no longer with us, Dayne would never let us become a pack that fights all the time.
Our old alpha, Owen, used to make Dayne go in his place to gatherings of alphas, events that were supposed to cut down on the fighting between packs. Dayne wasn’t convinced they did anything when most of the fighting used to take place there. He stopped going altogether because Owen was no longer alpha. Dayne was.
Luka asked him once if he’d ever start going again if all the alphas would stop fighting. Dayne was quiet for a long time before he spoke. No, he said, there wasn’t any point in it, because all being there did was remind him that he didn’t want to be anything like them. None of us understood what he meant until we learned what’d happened with Talis.
With our pack keeping mostly apart from others, we never learned about all the rumors that Talis’ uncle was mistreating her. But later Dayne did.
We didn’t learn until she told us that when she was thirteen, her uncle tried to sell her to a wealthy alpha at a gathering. All the alphas did was send Glynn Merrick away and told him she was too young. They didn’t do anything to help her. They didn’t care.
Dayne told us he never wanted to be one of the alphas who didn’t care, and who would turn a blind eye to another shifter’s suffering the way they did to Talis.
So, the Blackshaws keep mostly apart from the others. When it seems like every meeting we have with another pack ends with a bloody fight and with death, it seems like Dayne made the right decision to keep us so isolated.
“I’m guessing from your laugh that you have,” Kier says.
I nod. “I have.”
“A pack needs a heart. That heart comes from the submissive, not your omega. Though I’d understand why you’d believe it’s the other way around.”
I start in surprise because it’s not something I thought Kier, an outsider, would know. “Did Dayne tell you?”
Kier shakes his head. “I met Regan briefly. I knew at once what she was.”
I sip from my mug, appreciating the warmth of good, strong coffee and the perfect amount of cream and sugar. “But you don’t think she was the reason we didn’t fight.”
He shakes his head again. “No, I don’t.”
I think of Hallee and Nathan and even Dayne and Talis sometimes. “But we argue. We fight.”
Before I’ve finished speaking, Kier is already shaking his head. “No. I’m not talking about a few squabbles or anything that burns itself out in a couple of hours. I’m talking about challenges to Dayne’s leadership. I’m talking about Dayne imposing his will on the rest of the pack to stamp out fights that end with blood spilled, and even death.”
He’s talking from experience.
There’s no change to his expression. None. He carries on in the same casual tone, as he leans on his desk with his bare feet crossed in an easy pose, but there’s a richness to his words, a… depth that tells me he knows what that’s like.
I think about what an alpha is doing living alone in an isolated cabin. A place, which he must have been for a while, perhaps years since he mentioned having a longstanding agreement with Dayne. Was he an alpha of a pack like that?
When he shifts his gaze to my face for the first time, I turn away when I realize I was staring.
“Jenna? Does your pack have those kinds of fights?”
I wander over to an aspen log that looks like the only one he hasn’t started working on yet. But as I round it, I realize he has, and he’s carved the beginnings of a face on the furthest side away, a familiar female face.
I dart a glance at Kier and find him eyeing me closely as if waiting to see what my reaction will be, but I walk away and continue studying the other sculptures. “Our pack doesn’t fight like that. But you don’t think it was because of Regan.”
“No, I don’t. I don’t doubt she had some effect, but it wasn’t all her.” He takes another sip from his mug, and I do the same. “There are some packs where there are too many dominant shifters. They spend more time fighting to do anything else. If they had even one submissive, if that pack wasn’t yet rotten to the core, I’d guarantee that would lessen the fights by half, possibly more.”
“Surely, they’d just kill the submissive and go back to fighting.”
“Some packs are have become so infected with rot that nothing would stop the fighting but the end of the pack. Dayne said you came across one of those.”
The Merrick pack.
“But there was a submissive there.”
He raises his eyebrow. “You mean the submissive who betrayed Talis to save her own skin?”
Once again, I’m stunned by how much Kier knows. “Dayne told you.”
Kier shrugs in a way that could mean yes or no. But it must’ve been Dayne since he couldn’t know any other way… Then I remember the carved face and guess someone other than Dayne or Talis could’ve told him.
“When you have the submissive behaving like that… better the pack dies and a new one takes its place. There’s no coming back from that.”
No, I don’t suppose there is. Not if the submissive is supposed to be the heart of the pack, as he seems to think.
Kier clears his throat, drawing my attention away from the fate of the submissive who didn’t have to die. “Do you know why a submissive would have such a powerful effect on a healthy pack?”
Again, I shake my head.
“Because the pack would have a heart. They’d have someone who had no desire to fight their way up the pack hierarchy. There’s a strength, Jenna, in not being the loudest or the strongest in the room. I don’t think you realize it, but you have just as much power to affect change as Dayne does. You have the power to make people care.”
“I don’t want to be that person. I don’t want to be someone everyone feels like they have to protect all the time,” I say, not knowing why it’s easier to open up to a person I don’t know than someone I do. I think about Marshall. “I don’t want to be weak. I want to feel equal to… to everyone.”
“I say again, have you told your pack that you feel this way?”
The fight goes out of me, and my burst of energy is exhausted. I lower my head and resume pacing. “No.”
“Why not?” There’s no judgment or criticism in his question, just simple curiosity.
“I don’t know.”
“I think you do.”
I stop pacing around the sculptures and tilt my head in his direction, waiting for him to speak because it feels like he hasn’t finished yet. That there’s more he wants to say.
“And I think you’re afraid of what will happen-of what will change-once you do. Start small. Try one person and go from there. See what happens. And Jenna? Tell Talis that furniture will be ready soon.”