Into Their Woods (The Eerie, #1)(32)
“You don’t know that,” Perth argues.
“I do, and if you had seen what I did in Ellery’s office you would too.”
Ruger leans against my countertop, the mirror fogging up behind him, his face ghost pale. “Do you think it was the Bianchi den that put a block on her? That’s who was after her when we stepped in and claimed her.”
“I don’t know,” I admit, smacking the dial and turning the water all the way to scalding. “Did you two scent any other dens nearby? Anyone else hunting her?”
“No,” they both answer in tandem, their gazes now far away as they wrack their brains for any detail that might help all of this make sense.
“Like I said, it doesn’t matter though. Noah is a naif. She can barely accept what she is, let alone accept a mate claim by the next full moon. And we all know what that means.”
Silence billows and swells like the steam from my shower.
I shouldn’t have come home. I should have kept running until my legs collapsed under me from exhaustion, leaving me too tired to think.
“She’s just in shock. Once she accepts things—”
I shove my face out of the spray and wipe my eyes clear so that I can glower at Ruger. His posture might be defensive as he leans against the counter—ankles and arms crossed—but his expression is hopeful, because that’s who he is.
I need to strip him of those delusions quickly, or he’s going to end up more broken than any of us knows how to fix.
“It’s not going to happen,” I tell him outright. It’s up to me to rip off the bandage, because apparently I’m the designated asshole around here. “When she saw me shift…” I trail off as the phantom scent of her fear hits me once again. “She’s not just terrified of all this, she’s disgusted.”
“But you know what that’s like,” Perth states, standing off to the right and blocking my access to the towel rack. “You can help her.”
Fuck me. He sounds just as optimistically blinded by Noah as Ruger is. “It’s not the same,” I counter as I smash my hand into the knob and roughly twist it until the water turns off. So much for the shower easing some of my tension; my denmates have just brought it all raging back. “For me, the shifting was the biggest issue. But she has the shifting to contend with, our claim, pack dynamics—”
“You had to deal with pack dynamics.”
“Not at first. By the time I got to Pack Arcan, I was fucking grateful to deal with them,” I burst out, frustration leaching out of every pore as I stomp out of the shower and roughly gesture for Perth to move aside. He does, his lips pursed and his eyes defiant as he goes. I whip a towel off the rack and start vigorously drying off, not even bothering to be careful of the scar on my right knee or the way the joint stings. “Joining this pack was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
They don’t get it, even though I’ve told them that, more or less, for years. How could they get it? It’s like trying to describe debits and credits to someone who’s never even seen money. Im-fucking-possible.
I wrap the towel around my waist as I turn to deliver the worst part of the news to them. I lay it out point-blank. “What I saw in that room today was the polar opposite of excitement. She almost wolfed out twice despite Alpha trying to shut it down.”
“What?” Ruger’s brows shoot up as a tattooed hand comes up to swipe the humidity beading on his brow from the shower. “That’s not possi—”
“She booted him out of her head like he was nothing more than a pesky fly. Alpha implied she had no connection to Pack Arcan despite our mate claim running. That should have created a tether to the pack. It didn’t,” I interrupt him, waving off his disbelief, because improbable and impossible are very different things. “Whoever she’s related to was no joke, and there’s something seriously fucked going on here.”
“Was?” Ruger asks. Of course, focusing on that insignificant detail instead of everything else I just pointed out.
“If she’s a naif, they’re obviously dead. Even the worst of our kind wouldn’t let their kid run around with no idea about what’s lurking in their veins,” I say, explaining things that really should be utterly obvious as I walk to the second sink, on Ruger’s left side, and grab my toothbrush.
Wolf shifting sometimes leaves a disgusting film on the tongue after the fact—probably because it’s hanging out in the air half the time. I slather on as much toothpaste as I can fit onto the bristles and start vigorously brushing while Perth and Ruger stare at me, unfazed.
I take a break to spit and add, “We just destroyed everything she’s ever known. She’s lived her entire life as a human. She’s going to reject our claim—”
“Whoa!” Perth holds up a hand and gets the calm voice, the one he uses for his students, the one that annoys the absolute shit out of me. “You’re jumping to all kinds of fucked-up conclusions. You don’t know that.”
“She is,” I assert, giving him a hard look.
“A mate bond would give her stability though. Protection. She’ll feel the connection.” He’s so superior but screw him.
I can logic with the best of them, but I can also absolutely see the abyss where logic falls away and emotion runs rampant. That woman? She’s in the freaking abyss right now.