Luna
“No,” Axel says flatly, rolling away from me, onto his back. I can feel his wolf raging inside him, though, and mine cowers. Somehow, by some wolf bond, she can feel how irate he is at my request. Axel the man may be keeping himself under control, but his wolf is wild with fury, and I can only imagine how hard it must be for him to control it right now. He’s so strong, stronger than anyone I’ve ever met, to contain that level of wolf fury. The mattress vibrates from the energy pouring out of him, but he doesn’t move a muscle to tear me apart like his wolf wants to.
Still, I feel like I’m going to be shoved through the wall from the force of his wolf’s anger.
I shrink away from him, covering my face with my hands. “Okay,” I say meekly, pulling my knees up to my chest to protect myself from his wolf’s outrage, in case it gets loose.
“Shit,” he groans. “You can feel that, can’t you? My wolf?” He turns to me, and I can feel him watching in the near darkness, though my hands are still over my face. “I can feel yours. That I’ve scared you.”
I nod mutely.
“Fuck,” he mutters. “Luna, I’d never hurt you. Neither would my wolf.
I promise.”
He strokes my hair with his palm before trying to pry my hands from my face.
“Luna,” he says, his voice coaxing me to come out. “I was surprised at your request, that’s all. After today… I thought you’d reconsider. You asked to mate. That means something.”
“It does?” I ask from the shield of my hands.
He lets out a breath of laughter. “Yes, Luna. It does. To me, at least, it does.”
“What does it mean?” I ask into my palms.”
“It means… I want to be your mate. That I thought you wanted to be mine again when you said you’d let me fuck you.”
“Oh,” I whisper, remembering what the triplets said about choosing and jealousy. I didn’t choose Axel. I just like the way he makes me feel so good I think I’ll die, and the way my wolf feels cozy and warm when he’s near.
“Please take your hands away from your face,” he says gently. “I’m sorry I scared you. And I’m sorry I can’t give you what you want. Anything else in the world, yes. But not that.”
I shake my head. “That’s all I want.”
Axel sighs and rolls onto his back next to me. “I’m sorry.”
I peek through my fingers at his expression. Even though it’s nightfall, the moon outside the house lends enough light to witness his misery.
A chasm of silence swallows the two of us in its embrace. “Let’s go hunting,” he says at last.
“Maybe,” I say through my fingers, my heart speeding with excitement at the thought. The triplets told me not to leave the area around their house when they weren’t home, and aside from checking Callan’s traps a few times before that, I haven’t been out and let my wolf really run since before leaving the swamps. The thought of a hunt has my wolf yipping for joy inside me.
“Not the whole pack,” Axel says, sounding more excited, too. “Just the two of us.”
“Really?” I ask, cautiously lowering my hands.
“We usually hunt as a pack, since it’s a bonding experience that unifies us. But it’ll be good for us, and I need to work off some of this frustration.”
“Frustration that I want to leave?” I ask. “Sure,” he says with a little smirk.
I feel like I’m missing something, but I don’t know what else he could be frustrated about.
I let my legs unfold from my torso. “Okay. I’d like that.”
“That’s my girl,” he says, clearly pleased. “We’ll go at dawn. That’s the best time.”
My wolf preens at his praise, even when I try to quell her excitement. I allow her the comfort of his arms, though, and let him pull me in and hold me while we fall asleep. I dream of Callan, Warrick, and Ethan. In my dream, I’m wading through water to get to them but as soon as I get close, a storm pushes them away.
When I wake, Axel is gone, and I’m groggy despite sleeping all day yesterday. A hunt will do me some good. I pad downstairs, excited by the prospect.
After coffee, toast, and eggs prepared by Axel, we drive off to the preserve. The skies are dark, and the clouds hang bloated with their liquid offspring. It reminds me of my dream last night, and I wonder how the triplets are preparing for the storm.
As the truck speeds out of the neighborhood, I turn to Axel. “Can I ask you a question?”
He glances at me, then nods and returns his gaze to the road.
“Why isn’t Ama your mate? Ethan told me more about True Mates, so I know you can’t choose that. But since we’re no longer True Mates without the bond, you can choose anyone as a regular mate. Why choose me, after
you went to all that trouble and pain to get rid of me? Ama is here already, she knows the pack, and she wants to be your mate something fierce.”
“I told you. Ama’s too dominant to be my mate,” Axel says. “She doesn’t temper my impulsiveness. We work well together, but we’re not suitable mates.”
I think of them leading together, the way he said he and I would if I was his mate, and my chest gets all tight and funny. I wish I could go back to my men, where I didn’t have to think about anything else and didn’t have to know about leading a pack.
Thinking about them makes the ache in my chest even deeper. Not wanting to bring brooding energy to the hunt today, I try to shake these thoughts out of my system. Hunting is fun and exciting, a way to catch food, and a way to let our wolves take charge for a while. It’s rejuvenating and as essential as being in our human form sometimes.
“Let’s hunt Key deer,” Axel says, seeming to sense my mood. “You ever caught one of those?”
“I don’t know,” I admit. “I got a few deer before, but I don’t know the names of them.”
“They’re smaller than a regular deer,” Axel says. “They used to only live in the Keys, but the hurricanes and storms flooded the islands, and they swam north to the mainland. The ones that survived and made it to land
spread out and migrated throughout the southeast. We’ll have to coordinate our hunting efforts because they’re smart.”
“Good thing we’re smart, too,” I say, offering him a little smile.
“They aren’t usually taken down without a good chase, but that’s exactly what we want-a good chase, right?” Axel grins, and my wolf does that swelling-up thing in my chest, like it would when I did something that made Mama real proud of me.
“Yeah,” I say, turning to the window to hide my giddiness. “I haven’t hunted for weeks.”
The truck bumps and jostles over a section of road marred by potholes. I stare out the window at all the dilapidated buildings sinking into oneness with the earth. Living with Mama in Bogbeast Waters, I never encountered city buildings. I only first saw one when Ama dragged me to Jacksonville to mate with Axel. Sure, sometimes we’d find the remnants of a house, but more often than not, we just found stuff washed up in the bog. When we ventured far enough to happen on an old homestead, Mama would say it was time to turn around and head home. She said old houses have bad juju. But I’d go back on my own sometimes and get things we could use. They never brought any kind of juju.
“Weeks, huh?” Axel says, reaching for my hand and squeezing it. “That’s too long for a wolf.”
I let my hand go limp as a dead swamp rat in his, and Axel sighs and pulls back.
“Tell me how you’d hunt with your mama,” Axel says.
That brightens me up, and I sit up straight in my seat. “The deer we hunted traveled in small herds. They’d try to outrun us, but that was when we’d keep ’em running, so we could find out who’s the weakest or the oldest. That’s the one we’d separate from the others. If it happened to be a male, then watch out, Mama! Their antlers could gore us real bad or gut us on the spot.”
I bounce in the seat, starting to get caught up in the thrill of the hunt.
“That’s right,” Axel says, with a broad grin. “That’s exactly what we’ll do today. Once we’ve found our mark, we have to flank the deer on either side. If we both stay on the same side, it’ll get away from us. We’ll surround it and keep pace. When it starts to wear itself out, you go for a hind leg. When the deer stumbles, I’ll go for the throat. That’s my role on the hunt.”
Axel pulls off on some gravel on the side of the road, and we toss our clothes into the truck and shift into our wolfskins. I’m practically dancing with excitement. Axel jumps on me, startling me, and we roll over and over in the grass together. I finally break free and skip away, shaking off to get
the dirt and grass out of my fur. Axel’s tongue lolls out happily, and he pounces at me again.
This time, I hop out of the way, then grab him with my front legs. We tip over, rolling in the grass and playing for a few more minutes, nipping and yipping and pouncing on each other. Even though he’s twice my size and he’s the Alpha, Axel even lets me pin him on the ground a couple times. When I was a pup, Mama used to play wolf games with me, but as I grew older, she got more and more into her own mind and snapped at me if I tried to engage her in play, so I stopped trying.
I forgot how much I liked it-needed it. It feels like I’ve been starving for years and finally fed my wolf soul. By the time Axel gets up and lopes into the woods, my wolf is so happy I think she’ll turn into pure sunlight.