Chapter 10 - Malachi

“Well, that could have gone better,” Alec said as I walked back into the office.

         “Shut up.” I was fuming. My mate just fucking pulled a gun on me. She didn’t even give me a chance to explain. She just went off like it was nothing. “Fuck!” I yanked the computer that was on my desk and chucked it across the room.

         “Feel better?” Alec said, bored on the couch.

         “No.”

         “Throwing your computer won’t fix the situation.”

         “Alec, seriously, not now.” I glared at him. He averted his eyes. Sometimes being the Alpha had its perks, and this was one of them. If I told a pack member to do something, they had to do it. But Alec loved to push the boundaries.

         “What’s the plan, Mal?”

         I looked at the wall. I didn’t know what to do, she tried to force me to confess what we were. That was hard. I have spent my entire life trying to protect us from the outside world. To make sure that the human world was separated from the werewolf world. We were separate and I wanted to keep it like that.

         “I don’t know.” And it was true. I didn’t know. “I think I need to get ahead of this and just tell her what we are. I will wait until Joe gets back; I want to know if she said something on the drive back.”

         “That’s a good start,” Alec said with a bite.

         “What’s that supposed to mean?”

         “She wasn’t wrong when she said that this was a waste of time. You should have just told her. She was already in it, and she saw what she saw when she fought those guys from the Night Bane Pack. We can’t get around it, and trying to pull the wool over her eyes is not going to work. She’s too smart and has gone through too much…like Joe. We can’t expect her to accept a half assed explanation.” He looked at me and shrugged. “If I’m being honest.” He tacked on at the end.

         I sat down in my chair and leaned back. I pulled a hand through my hair and tried to think of a better solution. “I had to try the half assed explanation first. It’s our world on the line. You can’t expect me to just divulge all of our deepest, darkest secrets.”

         “I understand that. But from what Joe said, she probably won’t even care.”

         “That’s the problem…I want her to care. She’s my mate and there’s no way out of this unless I reject her, and she rejects me.” My heart dropped at those words. I didn’t want to reject her. But this pairing wouldn’t work, it couldn’t work. She was a human in the human world. I was the Alpha of the Mountain Creek Pack. If she were to accept being my mate, then that would make her Luna. A human being a Luna, was unheard of. It would cause more problems not only within the pack but outside as well.

         “And you don’t want to do that?” Alec asked.

         “Of course not. I’ve waited thirty-five years to find my mate. I don’t want to reject her just because of the species issue.”

         “Yeah,” Alec said, rubbing a hand against his stubble. He usually shaved every day, but the way we have been running around, he occasionally skipped a day or two. “Just tell her. What’s the worst that could happen? She doesn’t believe you. I don’t know if you know this, but you can be very charming and persuasive when you want to be.” Alec gave me a smirk.

         I rolled my eyes at him. “We will see.”

         Joe took about twenty minutes to get back. I was convinced he sped through the streets to deliver her, to get her out of his truck. He walked into my office as if everything was fine. Alec and I stared at him as he sat in front of my desk and looked at me.

         “So?” I said to him.

         “So, what?”

         “Did she say anything? Did you say anything?” I hated how cryptic Joe could be sometimes. He would always play dumb when it suited him.

         “She’s just pissed off that she got stabbed fighting against something she doesn’t know what it is. She hates wasting her time, even though she doesn’t have anything going on. She wants to know what she is up against if she has to fight again. And as it stands, she thinks we are a cult.”

         A smile spread across my face; I bit back a laugh. “She thinks we are a cult?” I let the laugh fall from my lips.

         Alec started to laugh from the sofa.

         “Yeah. The information she gathered can point to a cult. And honestly, we kinda are.” Joe shrugged from his chair.

         I continued to laugh as I rubbed my eyes. “On a scale from one to ten, one being least likely and ten being most likely, how likely is she to shoot me?”

         Joe snorted. “Now this isn’t against you, this is an across-the-board kind of thing. But she’s always at a seven. Today, she was just trying to prove a point. I don’t think she would have shot you. But if you prevented her from leaving then, yeah, she would have shot you.”

         “Good to know.” I stood. “Give me her address.”

         “What’s the plan?” Joe asked, and his face grew serious.

         “I’m going to go talk to her.” I let out a breath. “I think one-on-one may be better in this case.”

         Joe nodded, pulled out his phone, and texted me the address. “Just be aware, that she has a shit ton of weapons in the house. But if you go in the name of peace, she won’t use them.”

         “Good to know.” I grabbed my keys that were on the desk and made my way to my car. I didn’t know what I was walking into. She just left and was fuming. Would she shoot me as soon as she saw me on the doorstep?

         I followed the GPS out of our valley, through the town, and to another hidden driveway. If you didn’t know the area, you wouldn’t have known about this driveway. I knew about it. I knew about the house that stood at the end of this driveway, unoccupied. I ran past it more times than I can count, doing patrols.

         Joe has mentioned that the house has been upgraded entirely and has video surveillance which probably has recorded us running past it. I was more interested in looking at the videos of the wolves I didn’t know running past. Any insight would be beneficial, since Roan was trying to start something. Maybe if the talk with Harlow went well, I could see if she had any footage.

         I parked my car in front of the gray house and got out. I liked this house, even though it had an uninviting aura around it. It was different than the other houses in the town. It was like this house was plucked from the city and dropped in the middle of nowhere.

         I went up to the door and pressed the doorbell. A female, robotic voice sounds, ‘unknown visitor, unknown visitor, unknown visitor.’ If you wanted to make a guest feel unwelcome, get that doorbell. I smiled to myself. I stared at the door and waited for Harlow to answer.