Claimed by the Pack

Broderick nodded. “This is what people believed,” he said. “Most lore is grounded by kernels of truth, though. That doesn’t mean the books and artwork get everything right.”

Damien, who’d been silent until now, stepped forward. “Then again, there could’ve been packs like this,” he said. “Packs that took a different direction, like ours is about to.”

My eyes scanned left to right, moving from piece to piece. I saw a painting of humans with wolf-heads, standing in a circle, performing some kind of ceremony. Another of a blue wolf attacking a priest, while another sprang up from behind.

There were wolves that breathed fire. Wolves attacking children, then being hunted. Wolves trapped in wells, by men with spears.

“Karessa took you here, didn’t she?” I asked. “She’s the one who showed you this.”

Broderick nodded again. “She thought it good to know our origins,” he said. “Even in today’s and age.”

I supposed it made sense. I tried imagining what it would be like, if I’d been ‘made’ the way Broderick and Damien were. How much I’d want to know about what I was. How bitter I’d be about my own forced ancestry.

Karessa…

I found myself hating her for the connection she had with them. The connection I felt with them even now. I wondered how much of it was instinctual, given to me by the ‘call’ or the ‘pull’ or whatever it was they’d called it.

And how much of it was just plain old me.

You love them.

The admission was powerful. Strange. Wonderful. All at the same time.

The both of them…

It shouldn’t have been possible, and yet somehow it was. I tried chalking it up to circumstance. To the closeness of being hunted and fighting a common enemy. I tried even convincing myself it was because Broderick looked so damned much like Alex! Or that Damien reminded me of a more reckless, carefree time in my life.

Or that I was just plain lonely.

In the end though, I guess none of it really mattered. I was in love with them. I loved their honesty, their impetuousness. They way they’d protected me, each of them, from harm.

And of course I loved their hard, beautiful bodies. Their warmth. Their nakedness, pressed up against me…

A soft bell sounded, followed by a recorded announcement. The museum was closing.

“Come on,” I said, pushing between them. “Xiomara might not know it yet, but she was nice enough to spring for the Executive Suite.” I looped one arm through each of theirs. “And that bitch owes me a bubble bath…”

25

KARESSA

They’d gotten away somehow. Again.

Damn.

It was the only thing I could think about. The only thing that mattered, this night, and the night before, and every time I’d called them to mind over the past several months.

Only this time they took something. This time, they actually won.

I was still seething at the news Damien’s totem had been

stolen. Or rather, stolen back. That wasn’t the point though. The point was they’d promised me it would be safe. That in keeping it on them, the three of them could protect it better than it resting in any one location.

I looked down at Christophe, sweating beneath me, my palms splayed out over his heaving chest. He writhed upward, lifting his ass from the bed. Pushing himself as far inside me as my body would allow.

“Give me more,” I ordered. “Deeper.”

And yet even he had failed me. My beautiful, beautiful Christophe. The successor. The alpha. The one I’d counted on to fill Broderick’s shoes.