Wolf Bargain (Wolfish 3)

Romulus bows his head to the other pack leaders in a beautiful gesture of diplomacy as they fill in around us. As if they haven’t already, the move forward to make their presence known to Remus and his attacking pack.

Let them see our numbers.

Let them see that we are not alone.

Rory, Marlowe, and Kaleb all come to stand around me, forming such a tight semi-circle that our shoulders press together.

As Remus gets close enough to see us all, he stops a few yards away and his pack stops with him. Some flank his sides, but the rest are right behind him. He looks first at me and although he tries not to show his surprise, it’s obvious.

He didn’t expect me to be standing here, brazenly before him. He expected me to be sick and weak. He expected me to be pregnant.

Vulnerable.

He looks around to see where the baby he was expecting to still be in my stomach is, and notices almost immediately that Lydia is not here.

“Clever,” he says. “Although I’m not sure which laws of nature you managed to defy in order to birth your child.”

He looks at Romulus next.

“I wouldn’t expect such a thing from you brother, sending your mate away unguarded doesn’t seem like a move that you would make.”

“She doesn’t need to be guarded,” Romulus growls at him. “Because neither you nor any of your pack will ever lay a hand on her.”

“And I suppose the fact that you have all of this muscle behind you is supposed to scare me?” Remus asks, much too arrogantly for the sudden change in odds.

This is no longer a guaranteed fight.

A swell of hope rises in me. There’s a chance we might actually win now.

Just thinking it makes me realize how futile our efforts were before. How close to death we really all were.

Sure, death is still knocking … but there’s a chance it won’t claim us today.

“It’s supposed to make you act smarter than you are,” Romulus says to his brother. “There’s no way you can attack us now and survive. You are desperately outmatched. If you try to move against me, it would be a suicide mission for both you and your entire pack. Back down and don’t make this foolish attempt again.”

Remus looks between the three boys, letting his gaze linger on Rory longer than it does on Marlowe and Kaleb.

“You had such promise,” he said to Rory. “I supposed that it was your mother’s dirty bloodline that tainted you.”

Rory starts to make a low growl and his muscles tighten beneath his shirt.

“Easy,” Romulus says to his son, surprisingly gently.

“That’s right,” Remus mocks. “Calm your mangy pack of mutts down. I suppose now that you have a new half-breed pup in the mix that will only add to your rescued herd of shifters.”

Remus looks at me with a hateful disdain in his eyes. I’ve seen eyes like his before.

They remind me of my father.

There’s no rational sense to them, nothing that I have done to deserve the hate behind them. The anger and the lacking comes from deep within themselves. There’s no reasoning with people like that.

The only way to deal with it is to remove them from your lives completely.

And I think Romulus knows that.

Yet still, he tries.

“Why do you continue to try to provoke me, brother?” Romulus asks. “Have you not done enough damage already? Look around you, there is nothing left for you here. No one here neither fears you nor respects you. None of this had to be this way, but you kept pushing and pushing … even while I tried to bury the past behind us and tried to live in peace with you. I should have known that peace was not a construct you could understand.”