Caine watched Luke hold his head up, telling no one that he had forfeited. Nor had he won. He left the fight and approached the bed once again. Chloe’s eyes smiled at the wolf, but her mouth stayed firm. Not frightened. Not even intimidated by Luke’s poise and confidence as he brought his muzzle close to her face. And it took a moment for Caine’s canine eyes to name the emotion he saw emanating from his mate’s eyes. But when he did, it made even the part of him that was human proud of the pack’s new alpha bitch.
Respect.
She understood that concept completely.
It was a start. Caine had no idea of how much more she could accept of him or his ways. But she did at least hold a place in her that was open for the consideration of what he was. And with that, acceptance might not be too far away.
It took only a matter of seconds for Luke to stand erect and become human again. Caine eyed the scar on his brother’s face as well as the new wounds and gashes that would also show themselves long after the flesh had pieced itself back together.
But Caine would never see his brother’s newest scars.
Luke would leave the territory. Tonight. It was something that had to happen, but it would forge a cleft in Caine’s soul of which neither of the men would ever see the scars. Because it would never mend.
Luke reached to each of Chloe’s hands and untied her. She watched him closely as he loosened the bindings at her ankles and then gently tugged her feet from their confinements. Taking care to gingerly place her limbs back on the bed when he was through. Caine moved to stand guard by his mate’s side.
She slowly rolled and glanced at Caine only for a second as Luke brought his mouth down to hers. The kiss was soft. Caring. And one that Caine would never have imagined could have come from his brother’s lips.
Until tonight.
He heard the sound of his brother drop back down to four legs right outside the bedroom. As Luke left the cabin, Caine stood still, his eyes watching Chloe’s until he heard what he needed to hear.
The low, mournful call of another alpha bidding goodbye to his former pack. To the other half of himself, Caine knew. Because he was not born one person, but two. While still inside his mother’s womb, Caine’s split with himself had begun. As had Luke’s.
And now, there was finally two of him. And befittingly the strength and power of an alpha, it had taken the wombs of two more women to bear the final stages of their birth.
Chapter Twenty-One
Chloe watched the alpha close his eyes and silently listen to the howl announcing that Luke was leaving his family’s territory. The animal by her bed was bloodied and battered and his angst over having lost his twin was heavy in the air around them.
And he had no idea of how she was going to react to what he was.
She scolded herself for having allowed her dreams to wane for even a moment as she studied the wolf standing by her bed. Proud. Victorious in a battle he had never waged, nor wanted to fight.
Nor thought he would ever truly win.
Much like the one she had imagined inside herself at times.
He didn’t turn to her. He made no effort to persuade her not to be afraid of him or of the situation. And the animal made no move to transform back into his human form.
The alpha knew things about her that she had never told anyone. He knew that she thought she had been with his brother. And he knew how much she loved him and wanted him. He knew that she didn’t really understand what he was.
Even though she had.
Chloe had known on some level that the alpha and Caine and Luke were basically one in the same. On some unconscious level that she tried never to let her mind wander through for fear of what might be lurking there. What creatures of her own making might leap out at her. Grab at her mind and heart and soul. Consume that in her which was not flesh and bone and able to repair itself.
But still, a part of her had known. Because she hadn’t been able to kill that hope inside her. The part of her that refused to stop dreaming, even when her conscious mind told it that her mate was not going to be the perfection she had imagined as a girl. It had known. Just as Chloe had always known better than to ignore her true instincts.
And just as she had always known that she was also part of them. Maw had been one of them. And Chloe’s mother and aunts and great-great grandmothers. They were all part of the forest and they all lived among the animals who were very capable of killing and destroying them were they to venture too far away from the other parts of themselves.
The bond her great-grandmother had felt with the only man she had ever loved had been one that a woman searches for her entire life. The one Chloe had felt to Caine before she had even met him simply because she had opened her mind and allowed the possibility of his existence to be. And Chloe had been one of the lucky ones. As every female of every species knows, some searches for that bond can go on for a lifetime without a single track being found where the creature from her dreams has passed by as he made his rounds. As he tried to protect his territory. His mate and his family.
But they are there all along. Unseen sometimes. Elusive. Like the wolves she loved and protected. And they never go away. Ever. Even though they can’t always live the lives they should. Love and nature, it would seem, are also very closely related.
Chloe’s great-grandfather’s name should have been Grey Caine.
And her being should have been born fully within one of the creatures she loved so much. But a man interfered with what was supposed to be. And Grey Caine had disappeared from the face of the earth in 1909.
Neither Maw nor Chloe had ever forgiven the man who took from them something that even they, themselves bearers of life, hadn’t yet been able to replace.
The soul of a woman seems cruel at times and callous and unfeeling at others. As does everything else necessary and good and right in nature. But only because of the pain woman is born with an innate knowledge of and respect for, does she prepare to defend what is rightfully hers. What she loves. And what loves her.
And so what is commonly called fate for those less inclined to believe in the perfection of nature determined that Grey Caine become Damon Caine’s great-grandfather. And in being this, he had now managed to give back the life and the love that Chloe’s matriarch had lost a century before.
And the cycle of nature had continued just as it should have.
And just as it would from now on, regardless of man’s defilement and mistreatment of the world. Chloe Evans had been born craving a greater understanding of creatures like the one who stood patiently at the foot of her bed. The man who was waiting for her to find a greater understanding of herself. And therefore, of them.
One in the same. In every sense of the word.
The sheet came off with a sound that whispered sleepily to her as Chloe slowly pulled it from the bed. The alpha sat down at the sound, his pulse showing in his neck as he waited for her to investigate him. Identify and greet him.
And determine if he was a male worthy of marrying her.
Chloe sat on the floor in front of the wolf and reached for the longest of the wounds with the sheet. On his chest. It would heal without stitches, but the scar would be there when their great-grandchildren were learning to hunt and stalk and tie their shoes and mercifully take down deserving prey. And Chloe would love its bearer and its maker more that day than she did even now.
The progression and perfection of nature and the endurance and strength of love.
Coincidence is for those not yet strong enough to believe.
The wound created a patchwork of ink blot bloodstains on the sheet as Chloe cared for the alpha. Her best friend. Her mate. She reached up and stroked the back of his neck while she waited for the blood to stop, but couldn’t bring her eyes to meet his yet.
She had never let herself go this far with another living thing. She had never chanced the feelings that coursed through her as she sat in front of the man who had tortured her for years, not with the possibility that he would not love her and not even with his works, but with the possibility that he didn’t exist at all-not for Chloe. Not for any woman, she had often feared. It was much, much more than mere sex. And it was much more beautiful and frightening than anything she had ever imagined.
He did exist. And he had found her. In fact, he had been so close to her the very day Maw had first told her of the possibility of his existence that Chloe wondered if he had been able to smell her love for him on the very day it had been conceived in her young girl’s heart.
Somehow, she suspected he had.
“Caine?”
The alpha’s eyes blinked slowly but he didn’t turn to look at her. Chloe used her fingers on either side of his muzzle to turn him to face her.
Caine still looked away from her gaze.
He was as frightened as she. It showed in his posture. In his reluctance to look at her. And in the fact that he remained in wolf form even after she knew what he was.
He was more comfortable with her like this. And it was her own fault. She had opened up to him when she had thought he couldn’t judge her or scold her for her desires. But any time he had been human and readily able to share in her dreams, Chloe had withheld herself from him. And therefore rejected that part of him in the process.
“Caine, I want you to talk to me.”
The alpha swallowed hard and Chloe watched him stop his eyes from wanting to look at her. He wanted to be human. He needed to know that it was all right for him to be that way. As all men do from time to time. And he needed to know that she would feel the same about him whether he was man or beast or something riding that razor sharp edge dividing the two.
As all men do from time to time.
Chloe wrapped her arms around his torn and bloodied body and buried her face into his neck.
“Caine, I want you,” she stated. The alpha’s pulse quickened against her cheek at her words. Chloe’s own pulse also pounded in her chest. From the fear of her next admission. In anticipation of what that admission would afford him. And in what she would gain once she gave this man what he needed from her.
“All of you,” she whispered quietly into the long, wolfish ear of something she had missed since the day she was born. And something she had tried desperately to deny ever existed.
A huge part of herself.
The arm that came around her was loving. Strong. And its hand reached for her face before Chloe could look up to watch her mate become what she wanted him to be.
Beautiful. Imperfect. Male.
Human.
She tasted his lips. His tongue. His hand wove gently into her hair at first, pulling her closer to him. And then more forcefully as his need grew stronger than his control. Chloe felt his pulse increase even more as his breath flowed into her with his kiss. It became more urgent and possessive. Invading her mouth and lungs without regards to whether her own breath had room to live in her.
It didn’t matter. Not to this side of him. And not to her. Not anymore.
Every memory that had never happened, save for in the deepest corners of Chloe’s mind, came back to her. They trickled freely through her mind as she felt the touch and kiss of a man she could no longer view as something that shouldn’t be. Her yearning to be taken by force of desire in a man more animal than human and all of its entities roamed through Chloe’s mind as her fingers grazed the sex of the creature who would grant her everything she had ever wanted.
And even more than that if she ever needed it from him.
And sometimes she would.
His wound was still open and weeping gently when he gripped her hips and turned her to face the bed. His hands pushed hers outward and down into the mattress, pressing the wound his fight for her had earned him against the pale bisque-colored skin of her back.
Chloe’s knees rested lightly against the oak boards underneath her until Caine shoved them apart and drove his beautiful, hard, life giving cock up into her. She couldn’t even feel the scrapes she was sustaining on her lower limbs as Caine began to pound into her harder and with more abandon than she believed he had have ever allowed himself to feel. Even with Meagan.
His prick was too hard and too long and it forced Chloe’s body to give and stretch and accommodate in ways she had never had to before. Even the first time he’d made love to her, Chloe realized that Caine had held back much of the power and force he’d possessed. But not this time. This time he gave her everything.
Chloe cried out when he reached around and grasped her breasts and then bit down into the tender flesh of her neck again to help drive himself as far into her as he could. He buried himself. Forced her body to accept his. Just as his heart had forced her to accept the rest.
Chloe took it from him. She accepted it all. Every inch and thrust and flaw and fear. It hurt. It was raw and uncivilized and bestial in its appearance. Anyone not knowing what the two people enmeshed within one another’s bodies shared between them would have thought it obscene. And if anyone else had been in either position, had Chloe allowed herself to be treated this way by any other man or had Caine been so vile and uncaring as to treat any other woman but his mate this way, it would have been.
But Chloe was his mate. As Caine was hers. And together, they fought a war that they could win, but only when they joined together. Caine’s pack would survive. Chloe knew this as soon as his cock spilled itself inside her and sought out her own seed. His line would continue. As would hers.
And for Chloe, the most romantic thing about the entire situation truly was the moonlight.
Shining down on her uncle’s bloodied hardwood floor.