Wolver's Reward (28 page)

"You made everyone believe their Alpha would
be fine, but you didn't know that, did you? You didn't know for
sure what you would find. You must have wondered what would happen
if your hand shook or the knife slipped. You had to wonder what
would happen if my father died."

River didn't wonder. He knew. Roland's face
would have joined the long line of others that populated his
dreams, others that he'd failed.

River hung his head as her hands worked their
way to his shoulders, fingers digging in with surprising strength,
thumbs at the base of his neck demanding he relax.

"Tonight, when you fought, I only saw your
strength, your fierceness, and your bravery. I was afraid, but it
didn't dawn on me that you must have felt fear, too. You never
showed it, but it had to be there. That must be an awful burden, to
carry that fear and never let it show."

River didn't do fear. He gave up that emotion
the week before he ran from the rogues. Fear made you weak. Fear
made you a target. Fear told the world they could beat you down and
you'd stay there until they beat you to death. Fuck that.

Reb had no right to touch the things she knew
nothing about.

What River felt wasn't fear, but anger. He
felt it now and with it came the need to break contact with those
comforting hands. But those dangerous hands stopped him. Reb laid
her palms against his wing bones and between them, pressed her
cheek.

"I meant to tell you earlier how grateful I
am for what you did for my father. My mother said she was grateful,
too, but she told me I wasn't to use those words. I'm to tell you
something else instead. She said to say your debt is paid. Three
lives for three lives. Kindness for kindness. She said I'm to tell
you she speaks for the Mates. They taught you well."

A sharp knife couldn't have cut deeper or
caused more pain. His eyes burned with it. He managed to stand and
step away from the tenderness of Reb's warm voice, though he
couldn't face her, couldn't let her see his weakness. He didn't
need forgiveness. He didn't need comfort. He needed his anger. He
needed to run.

"I need a shower. You need to go back to
sleep."

River somehow managed a firm and steady pace
across the floor, but once the bathroom door was closed, he leaned
back against it and sucked in air as if he had indeed run to the
point of exhaustion.

When he could breathe again, he turned on the
shower, and stripped off his clothes. He didn't wait for the water
to heat. He welcomed the icy prickles against his body.

The Mate knew nothing of the debts he owed.
He needed those debts. They fed his anger. They buried his fear.
They gave him the strength to do what he had to do and do it
without regret. The debt he owed those Mates formed the foundation
for all the other debts that followed. If the foundation
collapsed...

"She has no right to speak for the dead."

Or did she? Margaret was a Mate and Mates
knew things that others didn't. Did that mean Reb knew them,
too?

River slammed his fist against the tile.

~*~

Through the crack between door and jamb, she
saw his reflection in the mirror. Beyond the palms trees that grew
up the sheer plastic curtain, River was standing in the shower, a
silhouette of strength and sorrow. One of his hands was braced
against the wall beneath the showerhead. His back was bent,
shoulders hunched and head bowed. He didn't move, not even to turn
his head when the door opened and she entered. River simply stood
and let the steaming spray pound over him as if the rush of water
could wash the pain away. It couldn't. The filth of whatever
anguish he suffered was too ingrained for mere water to reach. Reb
knew it as surely as she knew her own reflection looking back at
her from the mirror.

That didn't mean she understood it. Her
mother was never cruel, yet her words had caused River pain. Reb
saw it in the stiffening of his body when she repeated them. She
felt it in his hitch of breath when she spoke of the Mates. She
heard it in the angry words he spoke behind the bathroom door and
again when she heard his fist pound against the shower wall.

Did her mother, as the Mate, know what his
reaction would be?

Maybe Reb couldn't wash it away, either, but
she could try. Trying was better than leaving this awful feeling
hanging between them. Pulling the curtain back from the opposite
wall, she stepped into the shower, pressed her naked body against
his back, and slipped her arms around him, splaying her hands over
his chest.

He didn't speak, but his body did. His lower
back bent a little to more completely mold her body to his. It was
a good sign, so she went straight to the point.

"Who are the dead my mother has no right to
speak for, River?"

His head dipped lower, and he shook it in
disappointment. The water from his hair splattered against the
curtain and wall. "Don't play games, Reb. You know who they are.
She told you."

"You're wrong. My mother told me what to say
and I repeated it. She was speaking as the Mate. She didn't explain
it and I know better than to ask." He didn't respond, so she
pressed her lips to his back in a kiss, and continued. "What I know
is only a guess. You saved my father's life. You saved my mother's
twice. You told me that yourself. 'She didn't kill them. I did,'
you said, like you were making sure I knew she wasn't to blame for
their deaths. Not that I would care who killed them," she added
because she didn't blame him either, "as long as they were dead. My
parents' are the three lives that repaid the debt for three
others," she returned to the current subject. "Who were the other
three?"

She didn't expect him to answer, and had
already taken a breath to move on, when he did.

"Mates. All Mates."

It wasn't the answer she expected. To buy
herself time to reorganize her thoughts, Reb slid her body to the
side and reached for the washcloth and soap that were left from her
earlier shower. She spoke as she soaped the cloth and ran it over
his back. She tried her best to sound casual, conversational,
though his admission shook her.

"You've known three Mates? I've only known
one."

"No," he quietly corrected her, "I've known a
few more, but those three are the ones who died." He turned to face
her, and the soapy cloth slid to his chest where it stayed,
unmoving in her hand.

Reb no longer felt the cloth, or the warm
water from the shower, or the cold air at her back where the water
didn't reach. She only felt the pain that contorted River's
face.

"They showed me kindness and I showed them
nothing. I watched them die and I did nothing to save them, nothing
to help them escape."

His voice was flat as if he was only
repeating facts and the facts meant nothing to him, which told her
the opposite was true. She'd used the ploy on her parents on many
occasions, usually accompanied by a shrug and, "Whatever." Her
parents rarely fell for it and neither would she.

"River, how old were you?" she asked, using a
parent-like voice and tone, logical and reasonable. He wasn't that
old now. He couldn't have been more than a pup, a young cub at most
when these events occurred.

"Old enough to see their bruises. Old enough
to understand their fear."

"How old, River?"

"Old enough to hear them scream. Old enough
to be afraid of what the monsters could do."

Dear God, she wasn't prepared for that. Her
girlish inexperience skyrocketed, while her parent-like superiority
plummeted. This wasn't as easy as her mother made it seem. Still,
once the door was opened, it shouldn't be closed. She
persisted.

"How old?"

Something snapped in River. His bland
belligerence turned to anger and it poured out of him like the
poison from the wound in her father's leg. He told her of women
kidnapped and raped, of the continuous abuse they endured while he
listened and watched. Memory upon memory spilled out, all told in
graphic and minute detail. She wanted to cover her ears with her
hands and scream, "Stop, Stop!", but she knew this wound, like her
father's, needed to be drained, and the blackened flesh cut away.
So she didn't try to stop the pouring out of the anger he carried
at what had been done to those women, or his fear of the monsters
who did those things.

"How old were you, River?" she demanded
again.

"I don't know," he finally shouted. He
wouldn't meet her eyes. "I don't know anything, because I never
meant anything except to those Mates. My name is River because
that's where I was whelped, under a bridge on the bank of one.
Being nothing more than a useless dog, no one bothered to mark the
date of my birth. I should be thankful they didn't drown me. That's
what happens to unwanted dogs and I should know, I heard it often
enough. I never knew my father. I vaguely remember a female who
might be my mother, but she disappeared, too. Maybe she died, or
maybe she ran off. I didn't know her well enough to miss her. I
don't know how I survived until I was old enough to fight for the
scraps they threw on the ground. Maybe there was some older pup who
took pity on me. I don't know. All I know is that I grew and the
Mates came and the Mates died." He closed his eyes. "And I let
them."

If, as River said, she'd lived in an ivory
tower, that tower was now crumbling at her feet. This wasn't the
wolver life she knew, the one in which she'd thought all wolvers
lived. This was the world River knew, and its existence was
unthinkable to wolvers like her. The way he spit the words with so
much venom, that vicious, unconscionable world had to be real.

His eyes were open again, staring over her
head at the wall behind them. Reb pulled at his head, trying to
make him see her and not the past that had brought him so much
pain.

"River, look at me. Please, look at me." But
he wouldn't look her in the eye and so, she kept speaking to his
chin. "You were a child, a pup, a cub. Call it whatever you like.
It makes no difference. There was nothing you could do."

His wolf was so close to the surface that
when River snarled. Reb's head snapped back.

"Don't tell me there was nothing I could do.
There was. I knew the way out of every fucking place we ever dumped
our sorry asses in. Two of those Mates were human. I knew where
humans lived. I could have told them. I could have showed them the
way. I could have set them free."

Reb put her hand to his cheek and spoke as
softly as she could. "You were afraid, River, and you had reason to
be. You were afraid of the monsters, too."

"No." River closed his eyes and slowly opened
them again. He pressed his hand over hers and held it tight against
his cheek. He trapped it there as if he was afraid she'd pull it
away. "No, it wasn't fear. I didn't show them the way because I
didn't want them to go. I wanted them to stay. For me. For what
they could give to me. I wasn't afraid of the monsters, Reb. I was
the monster."

"Oh River, poor River." Tears mixed with the
water running down her face, tears for a child so desperate to be
loved that he couldn't let go of the only kindness he'd ever known.
She brought her free hand to his other cheek so he would know he
didn't have to trap it there. She came of her own free will.

"The bond between an Alpha and his Mate is
permanent," she explained. "Has no one ever told you that? It can
only be broken by death, River. You could have shown them the way
and they could have run, but they couldn't escape. They would have
come crawling back, more broken and ashamed than they were
before."

River stared at her for a moment before his
arms went around her and he buried his face in her neck. He held
her tightly as if he needed her to hold him up. And maybe he did.
She held his head against her and rubbed his back until the tension
in his body released and he was fully relaxed.

Reb was pretty sure her fearsome warrior
cried, but she would never ask and she would never tell his secret
to anyone. This moment would remain sacred to her. For the first
time in her life, she shared someone else's pain as fully as if it
was her own.

"
Mate
," her wolf whispered,
satisfied.

"I know," Reb whispered back. She would
always think of it as her first, though unofficial, act as a
Mate.

Chapter 22

In spite of the urgency of the pack to leave,
River overslept. He awakened from his dreamless sleep to the feel
of Reb's hand against his cheek and her body curled possessively
around him. Her hair, normally so smooth and softly cloudlike, was
a tangled mess, the result of going to bed with it wet. Her jaw, or
what he could see of it, was slightly reddened from the burn of his
beard, though not as red as her nose. That, like her eyes, was red
and swollen from crying, a penalty of having such fair skin.

She was beautiful. River smiled.

"Good morning to you, too," she whispered as
if she'd heard his thoughts, but then her hand slid over his belly
to his crotch where it found his jutting erection. That, and not
his thoughts, had woken her up.

"This," she told him, giving it a little
squeeze, "Is what Darla refers to as morning wood. I love morning
wood."

"You've never had morning wood." River
chuckled and the sound of it felt good.

"Then I'm going to love it." She giggled and
ducked under the covers. "And so are you." She took him in her
mouth.

"Fuck yeah," he muttered, because she was
right. He was going to like it a lot.

His erection left her full lipped and
luscious mouth with a pop. "Fudge," she corrected and went back to
work.

"Fudge," he agreed. She could call it
whatever she wanted as long as she didn't stop.