Authors: Aliyah Burke
Without hesitation, she walked into his embrace. He curved his arms around her then stiffened in the next second. She leaned back but kept her hands on his black leather jacket.
“What?”
His thick brows drew together. Then he leaned forward and damn if the man didn’t sniff her.
“Seriously, you’re sniffing me? What the hell’s wrong with you?”
“You smell different.”
“Stop sniffing me,” she ordered, shoving at his chest, getting a modicum of pleasure when he inched back. Seconds later, it was replaced by alarm. “Wait. What is it? Am I dying?”
He slashed his gaze to hers. “What are you rambling about?” He pushed her further into the room, closing the door behind them.
“You can smell sickness. You know, like some dogs can detect cancer. You just said I smelled different so—”
The hand he slapped over her mouth cut off her words. She could see the wildness of his leopard in that amazing gaze. “Did you just compare me to a canine? A
dog
?”
She gulped. “Some cats know when people are dying also,” she squeaked out through his fingers.
He narrowed his eyes and a warning rumble filled the room. She stilled, aware he was barely retaining his control. She didn’t fear he would hurt her, but there truly was no sense in provoking the animal within. Unfortunately, her mouth didn’t get the memo. “I’m just saying, since it’s possible for some animals and you’ve said before that it had happened.” Her final muffled words ended on a whisper as he glared some more even as he removed his hand completely.
“You really need to never say that again.”
“You’re the one who came off all about how I smell different. What was I supposed to think? So, is that it? Am I dying?” Lord, she had diarrhea of the mouth.
“My God, Dyana, really?”
She shrugged. “Again, what
was
I supposed to think?” She lurched back, hand on chest. “So I’m not dying?”
“Of course you are.”
Her heart, which had begun to slow, ramped back up. “I am? What the hell aren’t you telling me?” Her question ended on a screech this time and he winced. She almost felt bad for hurting his feline hearing. Almost.
He sniffed again, circling her. “We’re all dying, so of course you are.”
“Ass.” She turned in time with him. “Will you
stop
doing that?”
“I can’t help it. You smell.”
She snarled at him. “Stop
saying
that. Christ I’m getting a complex. Tell me,” she demanded. “What do I smell like. Flowers? Sweat? Panic? I’m opting for that last one because damn if I’m not careening down Panic Hill into the Losing My Shit Lake.”
His eyes, which had gone back to human, once again shifted to leopard. “No. You smell wolf.”
She snorted. “No way. I fucked him. Once. No way I still smell like him. I’ve showered since.”
Ranger stepped back. “I didn’t say you smelled like him—although we’ll get to you fucking him in a minute—I said you smell wolf.”
“What’s the motherfucking difference?” Her accent was so thick even she noticed it.
He crouched before her, maintaining eye contact. “It’s huge. I’ve known you for years. Years, Dyana.”
“You’re scaring me, Keane. Seriously. What’s going on?” She reached for him and furrowed her brow when he stepped back. Her heart shattered. “You stepped back from me. You’ve”—her voice broke. “You’ve never stepped back from me.”
Moments passed before her words sank in and remorse washed over his features. “Beautiful, I’m so sorry. I’m so damn sorry.” He wrapped her tight in his strong embrace. “I’m just… How the fuck did I miss this?” His frustration leaked over.
“Miss what? I was with shifters, of course I may still smell like them.”
“No, it’s more.
You
smell like a shifter.”
She scoffed. “I just told you I was with them.” He didn’t respond. “What? Now you think suddenly I’m a shifter. I go to Washington for a few days and come back a shifter and a wolf one at that?” He didn’t blink and she blew a sharp breath. “You’re serious. Oh really, Ranger? I’m not a shifter.” He continued staring. “I’m not.”
“You weren’t.”
Her brain didn’t want to accept the words coming from his mouth. Couldn’t accept. She was human. Always had been. “Surely if sleeping with a shifter turned a person into one, I’d already be one. A leopard shifter, not a wolf one.”
He groaned. “I’d forgotten in all this for a moment, just how much of a dead man I truly am.”
She pinched his arm. “Can we focus on me here, please, and the fact my DNA has apparently taken it upon itself to rewrite and make me a shifter.”
“So that’s it?”
“She’s banned, Paps. She sided with Jetje.”
Paps sighed heavily, all at once looking like an alpha who’d fought more than his share of battles, bearing more of his share of scars, and his age. The lines were present in his weathered face. Casimir realized he was not looking into the face of the man who had led and protected the Tatra Pack for so many years while he’d been away and growing up and surviving—instead of dying.
He rubbed his eyes and sank onto the black leather couch. “Is this where you ask me to leave as well?”
Casimir sat across from the one of his family who’d ever been nice to him the few short years he’d been there as a young pup. “Paps, you are free to stay as long as you want. You were our Alpha, you’re my grandfather.”
“Marta was—”
“Not your true mate. I know this. Have known since I was with the Úlfravaldr Pack. I’ve always wondered why their Alpha reached out to me and took me in. One day I asked about you and I was told.” He leaned forward and toyed with the magazine on the coffee table. “Now I want to know why you asked them to take me in.”
His grandfather walked away and returned later with two beers. “Here.” He sat back down. “Had you been here your brothers would have killed you. Martha nursed their evil side. Encouraged it. For her it was never enough power. Your father didn’t listen to her so she knew her need for more would not be heard.”
“Need for more?”
“More land, more power. Just more. So she wanted to groom the next Alpha. Create one who would still be under her thumb.” He drank. “To be fair your father was an idiot. I wasn’t handing my Pack over to him.”
He leaned back. “But why the Úlfravaldr Pack?”
“If you could survive there, you would be able to handle anything life threw at you.”
“But you just got through saying even you thought I was going to die.”
“I did. You were so sick we weren’t even sure you would make it to the next season.”
“So you sent me all the way to Russia to grow up away from all I know. I worked on oil rigs from the age nine.”
“And look at you. You’re strong, ruthless when necessary and damn good at defending your Pack. I was right in my decision, I will stand by that without any excuses.”
“I’m not asking for excuses, Paps. I’m looking for answers. There’s something out there after me. Using masking agents to hide explosives. Killing those I care about and putting my Pack in danger.” Wolf leaked from his throat.
“I know.”
“How do you know? How can you? I just realized it myself.”
“There’s always going to be someone out to take your Pack. It’s the nature of our lives.”
“You sound a lot like Pyotr.”
“We have a lot of the same beliefs.” He finished the beer and rested his hands on his knees. “My mate was murdered right before my eyes. We’d not even been together for a year. Martha was compatible. Like Jetje for you.”
Casimir scowled. “She was going to be my mate. Why wait so long to tell me I was married? Why not say that when I took over the pack?”
His smile was small. “Do you remember the state of the Pack when you arrived home? We were nearly at war with the Western Clan. The leopards wanted nothing to do with us. We teetered on the edge of our own self-destruction. Telling you then you had a wife and had been married to her since you were five didn’t seem all that important to me.”
“You’ve always had a plan, Paps. Always. I’m not buying that this was all because of the state we were in here. You have had ample opportunities to tell me. The deliberate withholding of the information had a reason. Tell me.”
“That from a grandson to his grandfather or from an Alpha to Pack?”
“Give me the answer and you can think of it anyway you wish.” He held the astute gaze. “I want to know.”
“She’s wolf.”
His heart thudded. “How the hell did you know this? Have you always known?” He rose in a sudden jerk. “Why didn’t I know until just now?” Casimir raised his voice.
“Because you were so focused on her weakness, you refused to see what she had within her.”
“No one knew. How did you?” How was this possible? How had she fooled an entire pack?
“There is a lot for you to learn still. For instance, you don’t even know where she is at this moment.”
“Resting.”
His grandfather laughed. “Resting? She’s not even on Pack land anymore. Your problem, Casimir, is you focus on one thing and think that everyone follows your orders. These past times should show you otherwise. She didn’t listen to you. She has her own way of doing things.”
Dread filled him, along with more anger. “Where. Is. My. Wife?”
Paps shrugged, unconcerned by the air filling with increased tension. “No clue. She was headed south.”
He shoved one hand through his hair. “And you let her go?”
“It’s not my place to tell my Alpha what to do.”
“Bullshit, that’s all you’ve ever done since I took over. Why not to her?”
“You should be happy I’m finally conforming.”
He snorted. “You don’t know the meaning of the word. I have to go after her.”
“You have problems here to address. She will wait.”
It irked the hell out of him that his grandfather was right. He did have to speak with the Pack and his lieutenants. Then he had to look deeper into this nephew of his Tora informed him about and go from there. After which, he would track down his wife and claim her. She was his wife. She was wolf. She was
his
.
αβ
“I still think y’all are crazy. Shouldn’t I feel different or something like that if what you’re saying was true?” She arched her eyebrows as she drank some of her cactus juice. She enjoyed the mix of pineapple, coconut, and melon.
Neither of her companions spoke for a moment, instead they shared a look. Dyana grunted, bringing their attention back to her.
“While I had been suspicious when Keane first told me, I have to agree with him, Dyana. You are a shifter.”
Shira Cortaine held her gaze while she blinked those damnably long lashes she’d been graced with. Long slender fingers curved around the stem of her glass and she lifted it to drink some of her ginger martini.
Dyana huffed. “This doesn’t make sense. In any way. Shouldn’t someone have been able to figure this out a long time ago? I mean, how the hell do I go from being human one day and a shifter the next?” Sure, Casimir had mentioned her being wolf, but that had been followed by the best sex of her life and so she’d not given it another thought.
“There are ways to mask your scent. We’ve been doing it for a long time.”
“I know you have, Shira. But you had to for survival because like you said there are so few of you left.” Another drink to finish off the glass then Dyana waved for another. “But I’m not endangered. Or at least I didn’t think I was. I mean, perhaps I am and that’s why they were killed.” Her words hitched on that last bit.
Ranger covered her hand and squeezed briefly. “I don’t think that’s it. I’ve never scented the remotest bit of shifter in you and let’s face it, I’ve smelled you all over and then some.”
“We don’t need to rehash the fact that you and I have fucked one another, Ranger.”
“We’re not rehashing, beautiful. Just speaking fact. I should have scented it then. But I didn’t, not even the slightest hint that there was a shifter hiding within you.”
“Is that what you both think? That this wolf has been hiding inside me?”
“Yes,” they answered simultaneously.
“Thank you,” she said to the waiter who delivered another drink to her. “Okay, then,” she continued when it was just the three of them once more. “So, let’s recap and then you both tell me you don’t think I’m absolutely insane or not. I was wed to a sickly shifter cub when I was about eight months old as payment—seems like money would have been better to me—for my grandfather saving this bitch of a woman’s life. A child they never thought would make it so this marriage and the protection from this pack would last as long as he did. Surprise was on them, he not only survived but became one of the most feared Alphas. Such that the Silva clan is hesitant to do business with him.”
“We’re just cautious.”
“Whatever, Ranger. He shows up out of the blue to claim he’s married to me and he needs a divorce in order to marry another shifter. Another bitch. Anyone else sensing a theme here?” she queried sarcastically.
Shira gave her an encouraging nod.
“I lose my two best friends to an explosion and drive across the country with a man I don’t know from Adam, reach his Pack, and am told I have to wait to receive these papers to sign. So I stay at his cabin which was bigger than my house, just wanted to throw that in there. And I have to deal with his mistress. I’m accused of attempted murder and Casimir shows up in time to save me. After which he gives me the most amazing sex I’ve ever had in my entire life, sorry Ranger, but it was just that damn mind-blowing and calls me wolf. I push it off. Leave and come here to find out that apparently, he wasn’t the only one who was smelling wolf on me. Shouldn’t I have to have been bit or something like that to become a werewolf?”
Shira laughed, her voice garnering the attention of most men in the bar. Dyana had noticed how Shira never failed to do that when she laughed.
“You’ve watched too many Hollywood movies. This isn’t a curse, being a shifter.”
Dyana stole some of Ranger’s poppers and ate them. “Tell me you don’t convert them with a bite,” she pointed at Ranger.
“It’s more complicated than that, Dyana. Plus, you said he didn’t bite you, so that is irrelevant.”