“Because I have the distinct belief you’ve never told it.” He held his hurt too close, too tightly, to have ever shared it. Pain you couldn’t let go of was a wound that poisoned you and every chance you had in life. She’d learned long ago what regrets could do, which was why, until recently, she’d worked hard to keep her tally down to one—Laurel. Now there were others—the five shifters who brought her into the Underground, unwilling to take no for an answer.
“What about you? You’re suddenly the fount of fucking openness? Stop being such a hypocrite, Lia.”
The insult stung almost as much as the tone behind it. “Has it ever occurred to you that there might be
reasons
behind my secrets? Good reasons, maybe with lives attached? Reasons that have nothing at all to do with holding a grudge against a dead woman because it makes me feel justified for being an asshole to everyone else?” She pushed past him. “Fine, stay bitter and lonely. It doesn’t matter to me, I was just trying to help.”
“Lia,” he growled, but she kept going.
She really shouldn’t be angry—he had a point, after all—but she didn’t care what she
shouldn’t
be. She just knew what she
was.
Disappointed. In him.
“Lia!” His yell was unwise, even in such a sleepy little town.
So what? She kept walking full speed.
She heard him stop, swear a couple of choice words before hearing the steady charge of his boots on the sidewalk. He caught up with her so fast it was practically a joke. At the very least, his frustration wasn’t hidden the way he tried to hide everything else from her. His tan cowboy hat sat on his head as if he’d smashed it down on his head. She couldn’t see the color of his eyes in the shadow of the bill, but the forbidding downward curve of his lips was unmistakable. “I thought it was my fault, all right?”
She nodded, speechless at his hissed tone.
“I was angry at her because she wasn’t willing to leave her enclave for me. I thought she’d chosen me, but when she said she couldn’t leave them, I didn’t listen. I just walked out on her. She never came back, never got down on her knees and begged my forgiveness. I was such a selfish shit, expecting her to come running. So when she finally did come that night, I scented her and I waited. I wanted to make her come to me. It wasn’t until the first wall exploded that I realized she wasn’t there for me. Not like I wanted her to be.”
Lia drew back. “Exploded?”
His eyes finally opened and he looked down at her. She wasn’t sure if the shadows there were from his hat or his memories. “She was a Sibile, contracted to destroy our orphanage. By the time I got out there, Pale had already ripped her throat out. She was dead before she hit the ground.”
She wanted to touch him, to comfort him as his voice grew softer, but the words seemed to come easier. She would have, if he hadn’t started walking again. All she could do then was fall in line next to him. “For years I blamed myself. I thought she’d come out of revenge. That she’d taken the assignment because it would give her some sick kind of satisfaction. I told myself she got what was coming to her, and in a lot of ways she did, but I never really believed that someone who could hold children like she loved them, hold
me
like she loved me, could kill so ruthlessly. I kept thinking, if I had just gone to her. If I had stood between her and my family, maybe no one else would have had to die.”
If I had just…
Words she’d repeated thousands of times to herself. They never changed anything, but they never stopped running through her mind.
If I had just kept her quiet. If I had just let him take me in that alley. If I had just…
“After Jade joined the pack, she did a little perspective changing of her own. Suddenly, after all those years of hating Vayere, I was supposed to believe she was trying to save us instead. That she sacrificed herself to give us a chance. Like I’m supposed to forgive her.”
“Is that what Jade asked you to do? Forgive her?”
He took a little time before turning to meet her gaze. “You know, that’s the crazy part. I keep waiting for her to tell me that’s what I need to do, but she never has.”
“Maybe you should stop waiting,” Lia said, eyes straight ahead. Nothing but sidewalks and houses in neat blocks filled the road on each side. A few cars, no one who really seemed to take much note of them.
“Maybe I should. I have to think about it.”
He didn’t say more and Lia didn’t press. She’d pushed too much. The silence was almost companionable for a while, but the farther they went, the more the quiet bothered her. Was he angry with her? Did this mean the rest of the trip would be silent? Her days were always quiet. Only her thoughts to occupy her and none of them were good, but at least before she hadn’t minded. The next twenty-four hours stretched out in miserable tension and for once, that had nothing to do with Asher.
This damn man had gotten her used to the sound of his voice.
“You look ready to jump out of your skin, Sunshine.”
“No, I’m fine.” She’d get used to silence again. She was just surprised that she’d have to. That was all.
“Feeling bad about calling me an asshole yet?”
“No.” But she couldn’t quite keep the laughter from her voice. He couldn’t be that upset if he was asking her like that. She stole a glance up at him through her lashes. He was as stoic as he’d been when they’d stopped talking. Would he be able to tell she wanted to go back to the way things had been? Or had she ruined it by letting her temper get the best of her? “I’m trying to figure out if you’re going to hold a grudge is all.”
He grunted. “Yeah, well, that depends on what you want.”
“More about Kyrios’s Queen?”
The faintest smile lifted one corner of his mouth, deepening the dimple there. He understood. “I shouldn’t, it’ll just give you ideas.”
The tease did what she knew he meant it to. She smiled at him, relief lightening the weight on her shoulders. “Now I
really
want to hear it.”
“Where were we?” He made a show of mentally finding his place while they waited for a light to change at an intersection. “Oh yeah, the women petitioning for an honorary Alpha-female challenge. Okay, so, since Alphas are arrogant asses, you can imagine their interest in flooding the house of their most revered leader with packs and packs’ worth of social-climbing, man-hunting women. I’m pretty sure half of them came along just to watch Kyrios tear his own hair out with that many underfoot.”
That certainly seemed to amuse
him.
“I wouldn’t know.”
“No, you wouldn’t. The only Alpha
I’ve
ever heard of is Pale and I’m not sure what I’d do if I had to deal with more than one of him. Even his mate has a regular urge to kick him in the face.”
“Your love for your brother is overwhelming.” Lia rolled her eyes. “Truly.”
“It is, isn’t it?” Tate lifted his eyebrow with a grin. “Listen close, this is the fun part. The challenges were many, with more than a hundred women competing for the Alpha-female’s role. There’re several versions of how these competitions were held and how many there were, but the ones that made the most sense were the skill challenges. First, they had to prove they could organize from chaos and they had one day to sort bales upon bales of hay and wool mixed together, separating the fine from the chaff. The females with the most culled moved on. Next, they had to show they could spin thread and create cloth. Only those who made the finest, softest cloth would continue. Finally, they had to prove they had strength to fight at their Alpha’s side. The battles weren’t to the death, but close enough that some of them left the battlefield maimed, never to fight again. In the end, only three were left standing.
“Niara, a warrior as deadly as she was cunning, was rumored to oil her skin with poison so that anyone who touched it without her permission—I’m assuming that’s euphemistic for the antidote—would die a long and excruciating death.”
“She sounds lovely.”
“Yeah, I bet she was. The second was Ellange, a seamstress with the face of a goddess. It’s said she wore armor encrusted with jewels to blind her opponents so she could overwhelm them in their moment of weakness.”
“Are you sure she wasn’t a blacksmith?” Why should she get credit for her armor if she didn’t make it?
“Not a lot of difference in those days,” Tate agreed, “so you never know. The final, however, was an Alpha’s daughter—”
“Of course it was.”
Tate ignored her. “—by the name of Selene. No one expected Selene to get that far in the competition. She had nothing to commend her or make her stand out more than the others. Small and plain, she was easy to underestimate, a fact she used to her advantage time and time again in the trials. Unlike the others, Selene was not tied to one field of expertise. As her father’s daughter, she’d been trained in all skills and knew how to make herself invaluable to her people. But as she had brothers upon brothers who exceeded her in age and were most likely to take their father’s place as Alpha, her only chance to become a leader was to become mate to another Alpha, which wasn’t likely. Or win the Alpha-female challenge.”
“The selection should have been perfect. The only question was what the Alpha would value most in his complement—strength, beauty or determination. The women were taken to Kyrios, who had watched them throughout the challenges. The Great Alpha stood before them all and offered the final challenge. The one who offered him her loyalty the most convincingly would be the Alpha-female.”
Lia snorted. This was more what she’d been expecting. “You mean the one who groveled the best?”
“Something like that.”
“It’s always something like that.”
“So says the unmated female.”
“Who is arguing with a considerably older unmated male.”
The frown on his face as he looked at her almost had her laughing.
“Considerably?”
She let her lips curl, ready to poke him again, until her eyes caught the sun falling slowly toward the horizon. Apprehension whistled through her. The day was moving too fast. They only had another three, maybe four hours to get through this town and far enough down the highway to reach more forestland and make camp. Then she’d have to face Asher again…only this time, he’d be beyond angry. Against her will, she flashed back to those hours of punishment he’d once meted out. Her back still told the tale of his vengeance. Three wide depressions fanning across the small of her back. Asher’s pound of flesh.
She tore her gaze from the sky.
Don’t think about it. There’s time still. Don’t think about it.
Better to think about the story. Fairy tales had happy endings, didn’t they? She dredged up a smile for him. “So what happened?”
He made her wait, something she expected after that age crack, but not very long. “Something no one could have imagined. The first to kneel before him was Niara. She lay down her sword before him and vowed that she would forsake all her weapons to prove her loyalty. Not to be outdone, Ellange offered him her armor with all its many jewels and all her earthly riches as a show of her eternal loyalty.”
When he didn’t go on, she waited as long as she could take. “What did Selene offer?”
“Nothing.”
“What do you mean nothing?”
“I mean nothing. Selene asked for a goblet of the king’s finest wine. He allowed it, and a golden goblet was brought to her at his bequest. Then all the assembly watched as Selene threw it in his face.”
Lia gaped.
“Thought you’d like that.” He shook his head. “Selene was no one’s puppet. Positive the king would have her skin flayed for such an insult, Selene threw the goblet at his feet and told him in no uncertain terms that she had come to be his partner, not his slave. ‘Take one of the others,’ she said, ‘if you desire worship. I have earned my rank, I will not beg for it.’”
So much for happy endings. “Selene died, then?”
His laughter surprised her, for a brief second taking the weight of her pack off her back completely. Her feet didn’t even seem to scuff the sidewalks as they made their way down the street, headed ever more south.
“Nope. Kyrios decided then and there that she would be the Alpha-female,
and
he vowed he would have no one other than Selene for his mate. He claimed her as his choice for all in the region to hear, thinking that she’d soften to him and submit. But for all that he’d watched her, for all that he valued her strengths and saw her beauty beneath her iron will, Kyrios didn’t truly know the woman he wanted above all else. We know this because no one was more surprised than Kyrios when she said no.”
“Oh,
that’s
when Selene died?”
Tate bumped her with his elbow. “What’s with you and all this dying? This is a love story, not ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue.’”
Her smile fell. Well, she should have known that couldn’t last very long, but she hadn’t meant to ruin the story completely. Avoiding meeting his questioning stare, she looked everywhere but at him. All she found was that the shadows around them suddenly seemed darker, longer, than just a few minutes before. She judged the sky again, her heart dropping into her stomach. She’d been wrong. The sun was so much lower than she’d realized. They only had two and a half hours of light left at most. They might not even make it back to the old highway before dark. Asher would be expecting her when the moon was above the trees, as it had been the night before. Could she make camp and get Tate to sleep before Asher lost patience?
The punishment would be worse if he decided she was late.
The tremble in her hands became an all-out quake. It was hard being torn between terror and relief. If they made it to camp in time, she might be able to keep Asher from killing Tate for another day.
Might.
But oh, she wasn’t sure she could pay the price Asher would demand.
The thought alone made her lips turn cold. All of her. Frozen.
“Lia?”
Oh God, Tate. Expecting an answer.
She licked her lips though her tongue was just as dry as the rest of her mouth. “I don’t know any love stories.” Her voice wasn’t quite steady, but at least it was the truth. “All my stories end in death.”