Chapter 5

Chapter 5

~ Alyssa ~

His hands settled on my waist, slow and deliberate, and drew me back against his bare chest.

I could feel his heart pounding behind me, as fast as mine. He lowered his head and pressed his mouth to the curve of my neck, right where my pulse was racing, and a shiver ran through my whole body that had nothing to do with the cold lake air.

"You smell like rain," he muttered against my skin, almost to himself. He sounded confused, almost annoyed about it. "Why the hell do you smell like rain?"

I didn't know what to say, so I said nothing. I just watched him in the dusty mirror, his dark head bent over my shoulder, his golden eyes half closed, and I wondered if I was dreaming. I had imagined this so many nights, lying awake in my narrow bed while Grandma snored softly through the wall. My imagination had never come close.

He turned me around to face him and kissed me again, harder this time, and I stopped thinking at all.

The silver dress slid from my shoulders and pooled at my feet. His hands were everywhere, my back, my hips, my hair, and mine were on his chest, tracing the sharp points of the crown of stars over his heart. I heard the foil packet tear. He lifted me onto the old wooden workbench beneath the window as if I weighed nothing, and the moonlight poured over both of us.

When he finally took me, it hurt for a moment, and I gasped against his shoulder. He went still. For one breathless second, he looked down at me with something in his face that I had never seen there before, something almost gentle.

"Alyssa," he said.

Not Bunny. Alyssa. It was the first time in three years he had ever said my real name.

Then he moved, and the pain melted into something else entirely, something that built and built until I was clinging to him and crying out into the dark, and the sound of the lake and the distant music and the whole world beyond that boathouse disappeared. There was only him. Only this.

Afterwards, we stayed tangled together for a few heartbeats, our breathing ragged, his forehead pressed against my shoulder. I could feel his heart slowing against mine. Outside, the water lapped softly at the jetty. For one foolish moment, I let myself believe this had meant something.

Then he pulled back, looked down, and froze.

"Shit," he breathed. "Shit! The condom broke!"

The words hit me like ice water.

I scrambled off the bench and grabbed my dress from the floor, holding it against my chest with shaking hands. Ditrian turned away from me, raking both hands through his hair, his bare back rigid. He snatched his trousers from the floor and pulled them on.

"Oh my goodness…" My voice was trembling. "What if..."

"Don't." He turned around, and the gentle thing I had seen in his face was gone, so completely gone that I wondered if I had imagined it. His eyes were grey again, cold and flat as a winter sky. "Don't look at me like that. Like I owe you something."

"I'm not asking you for anything. I'm just scared."

"There's nothing to be scared of." He laughed, short and ugly. "You don't have a wolf, Bunny. Wolfless girls can't carry an Alpha's pup. Everybody knows that. Your body's too weak to hold one."

I flinched like he had struck me.

He stepped closer, and his voice dropped low and hard. "And if you ever tell anyone this meant something, if you even try to spin some story about me, I will make sure no pack in Venus City ever lets you through its gates again. Do you understand me?"

My throat burned. I wanted to scream at him. I wanted to cry. Instead I lifted my chin and made myself look right into those cold grey eyes.

"I understand," I said quietly. "You were just a dare."

Something flickered across his face. Then a fist pounded on the boathouse door.

"Regulus!" Austin's voice, laughing and drunk. "You done in there or what? The moon's at its peak. The run's starting!"

Ditrian looked at me for one more second. His jaw moved like he was going to say something.

He didn't. He grabbed his shirt from the floor, yanked open the door, and walked out into the moonlight without looking back. I heard Austin whoop, heard them both laugh as they jogged down the jetty, and then, a moment later, I heard the tearing sound of bones and the long, triumphant howl of a wolf rising up from the shore.

A hundred more howls answered it. The pack ran into the forest, and the night shook with them.

I stood alone in the boathouse in the silver dress that wasn't mine, with my hair falling down and my body aching, and I listened to them go.

When the warriors finally opened the gates, I walked the whole forest road home in my bare feet with my borrowed heels in my hand. I kept my promise to Grandma. I was home before moonset.

I just wasn't the same girl who had left.

...

Two months later.

The sun had barely come up over the market, and the stalls were already crowded. Grandma's little table sat in its usual spot between the butcher and the bread seller, covered in bundles of dried herbs and jars of her famous tonics, and Rebecca and I were helping her set up the way we did most mornings now.

We had graduated. College cost money. Every coin mattered.

Grandma lifted the lid off the pot of wormwood tonic she had been brewing since dawn, and a cloud of bitter steam rolled across the table and straight into my face.

My stomach heaved.

I didn't even have time to turn around. I bent over and threw up right there on the cobblestones beside the stall, again and again, until my eyes streamed and my throat was raw.

"Alyssa!" Rebecca grabbed my shoulders. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," I gasped, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. "It's just the smell, it's so strong this morning..."

Then I heard the lid clatter onto the table.

I looked up. Grandma had gone completely still. She was staring at me, and the colour was draining out of her wrinkled face. Slowly, she stepped around the table and leaned close to me, closer than she had ever stood, and breathed in deep at the side of my neck, the way wolves did.

Her eyes went wide with horror.

"No," she whispered. "No, no, no. Alyssa, how could you?"

"Grandma, what..."

She started hitting me. Her weak, herb-stained hands beat at my arms and my shoulders, not hard enough to hurt, but every blow broke my heart. "How could you? How could you do this?"

"Grandma, stop!" Rebecca pulled her back, staring at her in shock. "Please! She's only sick from the smell of the tonic, that's all!"

"Don't you dare lie to me, either of you." Grandma's voice cracked down the middle, and tears spilled down her cheeks. "My wolf may be old, but she isn't dead. I can smell it on her."

Rebecca's face went pale. "Smell what?"

Grandma looked straight at me, her whole body trembling.

"She's carrying a pup," she said. 

The market noise faded around me. My hand moved to my stomach on its own, and I felt the ground tilt beneath my feet.

"Who is responsible, Alyssa?" Grandma demanded. "Whose pup is it?"

I couldn't breathe.

Wolfless girls can't carry an Alpha's pup. Everybody knows that.

Ditrian Regulus had been wrong.