Chapter 38: The First Real Touch

The pack went home at two in the morning and Ronan went with them and Mairéad went back up the lane with her six wolves and the whole village shut its doors. I went into the cottage and put the kettle on and sat down at the table with the weight in my pocket and the phone from Galway beside it and my sister's statement folded on the cloth, and I did not have it in me to sleep.

He knocked at half past two.

I opened the door and Declan was on the step with a coat over his shoulders and his auburn hair still damp and his face grey from the cold water, and he said, "I could not sleep in that chair with Ronan snoring and my son asleep on the floor. And I have been lying in it for an hour thinking about a thing and I have decided I am going to say it to you tonight and not on Saturday, because on Saturday there may not be a tonight."

"Come in before you fall down."

He came in and sat in the chair by the fire and I put a cup of tea in his hands and he held it without drinking it. The fire was low and the lamp was on and the wind had dropped and the cottage was quiet.

"I heard what you said in the garden," he said. "I heard the oath and the aye and the whole of it. Ronan told me when he came in to look at my hands." He turned the cup a quarter turn. "You are going to make a claim on Saturday."

"I am going to put the proof on the table and ask for a vote. The claim is the second thing."

"The claim is the thing she will answer with her teeth." He looked at me. "Niamh. I have been the Beta of this pack for twenty years. I have seen her fight. I have stood on that headland with the co-op and watched her put three wolves in the ground and she did not break a sweat. You have been a wolf for a week. If it comes to a fight on the headland you will not walk off it."

"Then it had better not come to a fight."

"It will come to a fight. It always comes to a fight, because she makes it a fight, because a fight is the one thing in this village she has never lost." He put the cup down. "And there is a thing I have not told you and I am going to tell you now and then I am going to go home and let you sleep. In December your sister rejected a bond in front of the Alpha and the whole co-op. She rejected it three times and the third time it broke. And the wolf she rejected it with was me."

The fire ticked.

"I know," I said. "Ronan told me. A broken mark and a broken heart and a collar buttoned to the throat since December."

Declan looked at the fire and did not say anything for a while.

"I have been a wolf in this village for forty five years and I have never once been ashamed of a thing until I stood in that hall in December and heard your sister say my name three times and say no." He put his hand up to his throat and touched the collar. "I did not know why she did it. She would not tell me. She said, it is not a thing I can say, and she went up to the high ground with the pain in her and she walked it off in the evenings and she died in the water in April and I have been carrying the broken mark ever since." He looked at me. "And then a woman with gold hair came into my harbor office and the mark on my throat began to hurt in a way it had not hurt since December, and I did not understand it until you put your hand on my chest in this kitchen and told me I was lying."

"The bond," I said.

"The bond does not care about a broken mark. The bond does not care about anything. It found you and it found me and it has been pulling at the both of us since the first night and I have been fighting it because I was a man with a broken mark and a dead woman on my conscience." He got up out of the chair. "And I am done fighting it. That is the thing I came to say. Your sister rejected me and I have carried it for a year and I am not going to let her rejection be the last word on what I am. So I am going to stand beside you on Saturday and I am going to say what I have done, and if the co-op gives me the ban and the territory I will take it, and if it gives me nothing I will take that too, and the one thing I am not going to do is spend another year in a collar buttoned to the throat."

He was standing in front of me with the firelight on his face and the grey eyes steady and the fear on him gone, and the bond in my chest was a rope going tight and warm between us.

"Declan," I said. "If you stand beside me on Saturday, the Alpha will know. She will hear it in your head before you say a word."

"Then she will hear it." He took a step toward me. "I have been a man who could not lie to her for twenty years and I have been the Beta who stood in a door and let a thing happen because he could not fight the voice. I am not going to be that man on Saturday. If she hears it in my head then she hears it. Let her hear it."

I stood up. The chair went back and caught the wall and neither of us looked at it.

"I have been telling myself all week that I do not want this," I said. "That it is the bond and not me. That I have a sister in the ground and a village on my hands and a thing to do on Saturday and there is no room in it for a man." I put my hand flat on his chest and the spark came up through my palm and he made a sound low in his throat. "But I have been lying to myself. I have wanted it since the first night in this kitchen when you took the weight off the table and I wanted to hit you and I wanted to put my face in your neck at the same time."

He put his hand over mine and held it there.

"Then do not tell me to go home," he said.

"I am not going to tell you to go home."

He kissed me. It was not the kiss on the pier with the wind and the salt and the howl coming off the headland. It was slow and careful and his hands came up and one of them went into my hair and the other flat on my back and he pulled me in and I went, and the bond in my chest opened up like a door.

We got up the stairs somehow. I do not remember the stairs. I remember his coat coming off and falling on the step and his hands on the buttons of my shirt and the firelight on his shoulders and the way he said my name once, quietly, against my throat, like a man checking that the word was real. I remember the bed and the cold sheets and the heat of him and the auburn hair falling across his forehead and the grey eyes very close and very steady, and the mark on his throat that was a thin white line and had not healed.

He stopped with his hand on my waist and said, "Are you sure?"

"I have been sure since the first night. I have been arguing with myself about it. I am done arguing."

He kissed the hollow of my throat and then lower and I put my head back and looked at the ceiling and the bond went through me like the tide coming in over the slip. It was not the pain of the shift and it was not the fear of the fight. It was the two of us in a cold cottage on the west coast of Ireland in the dark, and the wolf in me was quiet and settled and turned toward him like a plant toward the light, and the world outside the bed went away.

Afterward we lay in the dark with the blanket over us and his hand on my stomach and the wind in the chimney, and I could hear his heartbeat and I could feel the broken mark on his throat against my cheek.

"Your sister rejected me," he said, into the dark. "Do you know what a rejection does to the wolf who is rejected? It does not kill him. It leaves him with a hole and the hole is the shape of the other wolf and nothing fills it. Not time and not another bond and not a boat and not a bottle. And I have been walking around this village with a hole in my chest for a year and telling everyone I was a cold man."

"Do you want to know why she did it?"

He was quiet for a moment. "I have wanted to know for a year."

"I do not know," I said. "But I am going to find out. She wrote a statement in April and signed it and gave it to two men from Galway and in it she said the Alpha ordered her held and the Beta was compelled and was not to be blamed. She wrote that. She wrote it in her own hand. She did not write why she rejected you and I think she did not write it because it is the one thing that would have put you in danger." I lifted my head and looked at him. "She rejected you in front of the Alpha and the whole co-op in December and then she made a claim in March. There is a thing that happened in between. And whatever it was, it was the thing she was protecting you from."

Declan lay in the dark and did not say anything for a long time. Then he said, "There is a thing I have not told you either. In December, after the rejection, the Alpha came to me in the harbor office and she sat down and she said, Declan, a wolf with a broken mark is no good to me as a Beta unless he is loyal to the seat above everything. And I said, I have always been loyal to the seat, and she said, I know. That is why I did it." He turned his head on the pillow. "She did it. She arranged the rejection. She put your sister up to it. I do not know how and I do not know why, but she told me to my face that my broken mark was hers and that it was the best day's work she had done in twenty years."

The wind came down the chimney. The fire downstairs settled.

"Then that is the thing we put on the table on Saturday," I said. "Not a story about a boat and a rope. A woman who broke a bond to keep a Beta in a collar. The co-op will understand that faster than it will understand a forged deed."

Declan put his hand on the back of my neck and pulled me down and kissed me again, and the bond in my chest went warm and quiet and the wolf in me turned over and settled, and for the first time since I had come to that coast I slept a whole night.