The Wild Wolf’s Rejected Mate (The Five Packs Book 5)
The Wild Wolf’s Rejected Mate: Chapter 4

“What the hell was that, Alroy?” I roar as I pin together Max’s wolf’s flailing forelegs so I can wrap the bloody gash that Killian Kelly ripped down his side. Max is not making it easy. The old dog has more fight left in him than I’d have thought.

None of our wolves escaped Killian Kelly unscathed. They stand around the clearing thunderstruck, listing side to side and dripping blood in the dirt.

Only Alroy and Khalil are on two feet, and only because I commanded them out of their fur and into their skin. Since we were pups, they’ve been the source of all trouble and a constant burr in my side. I’m not sure which is worse—Alroy’s inability to think through an idea or Khalil’s utter disregard for consequences.

Alroy paces, dragging his hands through his red hair. “It was supposed to be a straight trade. I made the deal with the younger Byrne. He said Kelly wouldn’t be an issue.”

Alroy’s balls have long since dropped, but you wouldn’t know from the high-pitched whine in his voice. He sounds like he shifted for the first time yesterday.

He almost got us all killed, and Khalil, with his death wish, was happy to egg him on.

“What did you trade?” I growl at Alroy. “Your ever-loving mind?”

Max nips my hand, taking advantage of my distraction to express his displeasure that I’m wrapping up his guts so they don’t plop onto the forest floor. I hoist his carcass high in the air and give him a shake. “Enough, gray belly! You’re bleeding all over the place. You’ll leave a trail.”

Finally, he sees sense and goes limp. His paws and tail dangle like a chastised pup’s. I set him down on a log and finish binding the wound. He got the worst of it. It’s a miracle no one died. Alroy and Khalil didn’t recruit our best for this misadventure. Just our dumbest.

“Could you not smell a trap? Is your snout stuck as far up your ass as your head? Eh?” I tie off the bandage and pat Max’s haunch. He grumbles and immediately starts gnawing at the shirt I used to staunch the bleeding. I whack his nose. He waits until I walk off a few paces before he starts back at it.

I get in Alroy’s pasty face until it blanches so white, his freckles look like they’re floating.

“I’m sorry, Alpha,” he whimpers, baring his neck and backing away.

“For the hundredth time, I’m not the alpha.”

All the males in the clearing, wolf and man, give me that look. I bare my fangs, and their gazes slide away and their heads tilt.

“I’m not the goddamn alpha.” I repeat it loud enough to shake the remaining birds from their perches in the high branches. Signaling to Killian Kelly exactly where we are. Now I’m being a dumbass, too.

If I were the alpha, I wouldn’t be here. Alroy would have felt obliged to run his fool plan past me. I wouldn’t have heard it from Max too late to stop this sad-sacked, Fate-forsaken pack of absolute shit-for-brains from crossing into Quarry Pack territory before I could reach them.

I wouldn’t have seen her.

I wouldn’t feel like this.

“By all rights, we should be dead right now,” I snarl and swing my gaze around the clearing, and they stumble backward. “If Kelly wasn’t more interested in the traitors in his own pack, we’d be worm meal.”

Well, Alroy and his band of merry dipshits would. Kelly is a majestic fighter—unworldly—but he defaults to expecting his opponent to come at him head-on. That’s how the lost packs fight—in roped-off stages with bells announcing the first blow. It’s a good thing he wasn’t raised in First Pack. He’d be invincible if he’d spent his pup-hood like us with his pack brothers leaping onto him from behind every boulder and every tree branch sturdy enough to hold them.

As it is, it’d be a toss-up whether I could win against him. He’s clearly not the young, stupid male he was back when I found my mate.

Annie.

My guts knot, and my gorge rises. The old rage drags its claws down my skin from the inside. I ignore it, scanning my pack to see who else is hiding a potentially mortal injury. Elis is crouched low to the ground with his rear up in the air. I grunt and carefully keep my eyes focused on the others while I slowly sidle closer to him.

Killian has learned a few things in the years since I basically strolled onto his territory. His patrols still travel the same routes, but they’re staggered, and they overlap, and he has sentries at the river now. And his reputation as a monster has even reached us. He must be fearsome indeed if even out in the camps, we hear tales.

He relies on his opponent being thrown when he shifts mid-air, though. He wasn’t raised playing snatch ’em like we were in First Pack. I was king of that game. I could predict where a tail would appear, and I’d grab it and swing the wolf like a lasso and then let him go to see how far I could make him fly. Those were good times.

Maybe that’s what’s wrong with my packmates. I threw too many of them into tree trunks when we were pups.

“What the hell were you thinking?” I bark at Alroy, sneaking a glance at Elis’s wolf. He’s trying his best to hide a gash in his belly, but blood is seeping into the dirt around him.

“I was thinking three unmated females,” Alroy answers, awfully defiant for how badly his hands are shaking.

I snort. Except for the blessed one, not a single one of those females was unmated, and I’d like to see any of my pack brothers claim the blessed one’s wolf. He’s a beast. You can smell his size. He must be as big as a moose.

“You’re a fool.”

“You don’t understand,” Alroy whines, his face flushing from white to red like beet juice poured into a glass of milk. “Fate gave you a mate. You had a choice.”

A choice. Annie’s stiff body and fear stench flash in my memory. I wouldn’t call walking away a choice.

She’s even thinner now. Her brown eyes are hollows, eating up even more of her face. Back at the Quarry Pack dens, while the Byrnes were strutting around and blustering like stuffed roosters, she didn’t look at me once. Not even from the corner of her eye. Her fear stink was the same as I remember. My wolf almost took our skin. If I wasn’t stronger willed than him, he would have.

I never told the pack that she didn’t want me. I told them she was too afraid to live like a real wolf, that she was twisted in her head like the others in the lost packs, so I left her where she belongs. Where she wants to be.

I hate her, and I hate myself for it. It feels wrong to despise such a weak and cowardly female, so I am ashamed of myself, and I hate her for that, too.

“What were you planning to do when Quarry Pack came to fetch their females?” I ask Alroy to distract myself from that train of thought.

“It was a fair trade, not a theft.”

“And what were you trading?” I ask. I bend over Elis and rest my hands on his sides. He tenses and whines. I wait for him to relax. The last thing I want to do is upset an injured Elis. When his wolf bites, he goes for your dick.

Alroy mumbles an answer that sounds like pelts and steaks.

He better not have fucking said pelts and steaks.

“What?” I ask sharply. Elis startles and presses himself more stubbornly into the dirt, whimpering when it hurts. Dumb wolf. I pat his haunch and rumble.

Alroy hangs his head. His expression is still ornery, but his face is turning green. His lips are mashed together. He’s decided silence is his best move.

I look at Khalil and raise an eyebrow.

“Pelts and steaks,” Khalil says.

My stomach sinks. “How many?”

“All of them,” Khalil says, holding my gaze. He’d love for me to take it as a challenge. He’s been angling for a real fight for years, but if he wants to go out in a blaze of glory, he can find someone else to do the dirty work. There is no room in the pack I carry for any more ghosts.

“Fate’s own idiots,” I groan, searching my memory. I don’t remember seeing a stack of pelts and steaks at the Quarry Pack dens. “Tell me you hid the goods somewhere until after you had the females in hand.”

Khalil’s brown cheeks darken. “One of their males hauled it all into a den before you got there.”

I lift my hands off Elis so I don’t squeeze his guts out through his belly as my fingers ball into fists. “And you thought you’d make this trade right under Kelly’s nose?”

Khalil shrugs. “Old Byrne said something’s wrong with Killian’s new mate. He said she’s made him weak and distracted.”

“And you didn’t question how reliable the word of a male making deals behind his alpha’s back might be?”

“We make deals behind your back.” Khalil smirks.

“I am not the alpha.”

Khalil shrugs again.

Every word from these idiots’ mouths pumps more blood into my brain. It’s going to explode. “The lost packs have alphas,” I begin for the thousandth time. “They are the ones so lacking in pride that the stronger make themselves bigger by standing on the shoulders of the weaker, pretending that’s our way. Our instinct. But that is man’s way. Look at the natural wolves. You only find alphas in cages. In zoos. In the woods and hills, there are only packs.”

My pack gapes at me, blinking.

They’re tired of hearing it, and I’m tired of saying it, but damned if I can stop myself. “When the smoke shed is full, and the firewood is piled high, when everyone is cared for, from the weakest to the strongest, there is no need for alphas.”

“Well, Alpha, I have some bad news for you. Don’t know that the smoke shed is full anymore,” Khalil says, raising a pointed black eyebrow.

My wolf snarls in my throat.

Khalil puffs his chest and opens his arms. “Well, come on,” he says. “I’ve been waiting. Alpha.”

My temper snaps.

We meet mid-air in a collision of fur and skin, limbs and fangs and feet and claws. He moves faster than the last time we brawled, but his weakness is still his weakness—what he really, truly wants is pain, not a win.

Except for Elis—who lies still and watches with his muzzle flat on the ground—the others edge away, licking their wounds while they enjoy the show. I don’t fight much these days. No one will try me except Khalil.

He attacks with no strategy, snapping and swiping at whatever part of me he can reach, shifting to dodge and lunge without thinking about where I’m going to be or what I’m doing.

He leaps for my neck. I shift, squat, grab his hindlegs as he sails overhead, and swing him through the air at an oak, just like a game of snatch ’em. He hits the trunk with a meaty thud. I’ve still got it.

He shifts back to man as he slides to the forest floor.

“Stay down,” I tell him, but his eyes are on fire. For all his nonchalance, he’s angry that he had to walk away without a female.

I understand the feeling.

He leaps back to his feet and sprints at me. I wait until he’s close, and I shift, clamping down on his calf with the full force of my jaw. I dash forward, dragging him so he lands flat on his back. He shifts to wolf, curling and writhing, trying to get a piece of me, but I hold him tight and shift again, knocking him across the dirt with the force of my bigger human body exploding into his wolf.

He comes at me over and over, in fur and skin, and I carve him up like a bird at the full moon table. After his calf, I rip into his shoulder, and then a knee, and a hip. It takes him longer and longer to drag himself upright.

He’s fighting to stop hurting. It doesn’t work. I learned that the first few years after I walked away from Annie.

Finally, after a lucky hit directly to his human sternum that steals his breath, he falls onto his ass and stays there. When he’s finally able to speak, he huffs, “We didn’t know that the Byrnes planned to take Kelly out.”

I grunt, spit blood from my mouth, and then crouch next to Elis to continue checking him out. “You should have bailed the minute you figured it out.”

“It was too late. We already scented Kelly on the wind. Would you have had us run like cowards?”

I pluck a stick from the nearby undergrowth and hurl it at his head. He ducks, and it misses, nailing Tiny Jac’s wolf in the side of his head. He yelps and skitters away.

“I wouldn’t have had you do anything because I am not your alpha!” I shout, scooping up Elis since he’s already startled and peeking at his belly. It’s a mess. “But if I had been fool enough to join forces with a bunch of delusional lost packers trying to overthrow their battle-chosen alpha, then yes, I would have run when I realized I’d kidnapped his mate. Give me your pants!” I snap at Alroy. He’s the only one of us who took the time to snag his clothes when we did, in fact, run.

Alroy immediately fumbles with his waistband. I quickly look down. Guts peek through the gash in Elis’s underside. It still beats seeing Alroy’s dick.

His pants land in a heap beside me. I amp up my rumble and murmur to the young wolf huddled and shaking in the dirt. “It’ll be over quick, brother. A few moments to get your stuffing back in, and you’ll be right as rain.”

His sad whine tears at my heart.

“On three,” I say. “One. Two.” I roll him onto his back, pin him in place with one arm, and frantically pack his wound with moss before any more intestine pops out. He manages a few weak kicks and swipes before he passes out from the blood loss. I finish binding his stomach and then glare at the others. “Who else is hurt?”

They scuff their paws in the dirt, hang their muzzles, and keep their traps shut.

I raise my voice. “Who else? We’re not leaving a trail for Kelly to follow. We’re already going to have to move the pack. Did you even think of that? Kelly will come after us.” I’m bellowing now. “Did you consider the elders and the pups? Do you think our females are going to be happy to leave their dens because you took it upon yourselves to kick a gods-damned hornet’s nest? For nothing?”

I give my anger free rein. The rage is well-worn, as familiar now as breathing, but I still remember a time when I didn’t feel it burning in my guts every waking minute. She gave it to me. My mate.

I had hope before. I knew the odds were against me finding a mate. The wasting sickness took so many of us, so many females. But if Max could find his mate picking flowers in a field beside the North Border wall, then maybe mine was out there, too.

And then I found her, and she cowered from me like I was a fate worse than death, and I would have done anything at all to ease her fear. To please her.

And then she invited me into her nest, and I thought everything was going to change, and I wouldn’t be the male that everyone came to with trouble, who always slept alone. I was Annie’s mate.

And she ruined it. Made it foul. I can’t bear to remember, but at night in the dark when I stroke my cock, I always think about that pile of leaves beside the river, and then when I’m at my weakest and about to come, the shame kicks me in the gut, again and again, and I spurt my seed onto my belly, disgusted with myself and hating her.

She has no shame. No regret. At the Quarry Pack dens, she clung to the other females, refusing to look at me, like I was the enemy, like I don’t feel our bond in my chest every minute of every day, a constant aching empty reminder that there is no hope left for me. I am as alone as these sorry, mangy males slumped in a circle around me.

“Alpha?” Alroy’s quavery voice brings me back to the moment.

My pack brothers are all hanging their heads, tails tucked. The stink of their shame drifts like the stench of scum on a warm pond.

I sigh, loud and long, and bend over to pick up Elis’s limp carcass.

“Khalil, take Tiny Jac and Calvus up to the north camp and clear out those dens. Don’t just check for bear. Look for snakes and lizards and such. The females don’t care to share their nests with critters. Alroy, you take the others and tell everyone what you’ve done. Tell them to be packed by the time I return. Max, can you walk?”

He grumbles.

“Well, go on then. Go,” I bark at my packmates. I cradle Elis to my chest like a baby to add pressure to the wound.

I’m last to leave the clearing, but I don’t linger, and I don’t look back toward Quarry Pack.

Annie didn’t spare a look for me.

I have no choice. I walk away again.