57. Wild

Wild

"So ye just left without explaining the Wild King Curse?" Lorcan asked as we approached the fating stones near Ballygally Forest for the Winter Solstice. We'd be setting up camp there until it was time to journey to the fating stones in Beltany for Imbolc in early February.

Yule was usually my favorite ritual of the year, but a dark cloud hung over my head less than three days into the journey through the below, as we called the expanse of the secret kingdom that stretched out beneath Ireland.

Maybe that was why Lorcan, Ronan, and their yellow-haired mate had decided to risk their lives, falling in beside me to ask many pesky questions.

"It's better this way," I explained to them and myself. "It took her weeks and a heat cycle to accept the prophecy. How d'ye think she'd respond to hearing that I couldn't be with her because my ancestor killed the Sea King nearly five hundred years ago? The W?lfennites aren't like us," I added, glancing at Lorcan and Ronan. "They cry easily. "

"Sure, they do," Ronan agreed with a cheeky side glance at his mate. "Especially when ye take an extra serving of their pie."

"Ronan!" Their mate flushed red before scolding him. "This isn't the time. Can't you see how upset your king is?"

She leaned past her shorter mate to say, "In fact, if you need a few more days, we could take back over commanding the Wild Wolves until you're ready to —"

"I'm fine," I insisted through gritted teeth. They meant well, but they didn't understand. They couldn't. There was no helping me with this.

"But if ye're looking to be the boss of someone, go tell those W?lfennites still sobbing over being parted from their Sea Wolf mates to quiet down. Bad enough, we had to leave so many worthy males behind in the secret kingdom. Don't need to hear about it from them, too."

There was a tense silence. I could almost sense the furious conversation between the three of them before the yellow-haired W?lfennite finally said, "Fine, I will go talk to the heartbroken, pregnant she-wolves who were ripped out of their tents this morning and told they had to leave their Sea-born males behind with zero notice that they needed to get over it."

Now she sounded miserable and angry, too.

Grand .

To borrow a word Naomi had used to scold me the couple of times I pulled her off the Dublin King before he was done. I was feeling mighty petty when it came to the happiness of anyone who wasn't bound by a centuries-old vow not to be able to stay with a shared queen beyond our heat moon.

In my case, it was even embedded in the prophecy .

She will unite the three kingdoms, and then the Wild King will leave.

The yellow-haired she-wolf, who had gotten a bit too comfortable serving as the Queen of the Wild Wolves while Lorcan and Ronan ruled in my stead, stomped off.

And, of course, her mates followed behind her.

"This is why I chose an unshared wolf-mating," my father once spat while we sat by the campfire, watching two heated males trailing apologies after their upset she-wolf because she'd taken offense to a joke they'd made to the Wild King about her poor cooking skills. "Imagine me sniveling after your mother that way! Pathetic."

He didn't understand pathetic, though.

Pathetic was knowing you could only have someone for a short time but losing your heart to them anyway.

Pathetic was having to shut down your side of the mate bond lest she heard the way your soul howled at every smile, every whimpering moan, every word out of her mouth about a future that wouldn't include you.

My chest tightened, the pain of the memories near unbearable. It hurt to even think on an entire lifetime without Naomi. But I had to stay strong. For her. For me. For the child I'd never meet.

I looked to the sky and sent up another prayer to the three gods. Please make the babe growing in her womb a girl. One who looked like all of her and none of me.

The clouds chose that moment to move in front of the sun, a sure sign that the gods had heard my plea.

That omen should have made me feel better. But instead, my chest welled up with an anger and sadness like none I'd ever known .

What would it have been like, I wondered bitterly, to watch my son or daughter take their first steps? To see them stumble over their first words? Call me Da? Would they have her laugh? Her smile?

As it turned out, it didn't matter whether it was a girl or a boy like the one Wild King who was raised in the secret kingdom away from his sire as punishment for the Killing King's crime.

I'd never get to meet them.

I'd never…

"Naomi! What are you doing here?" the yellow-haired she-wolf's voice asked behind me.

That was all the warning I got before I was suddenly tackled from behind.

But that was all the warning I needed. On instinct, my wolf turned me around, reversing our hold and pushing up so that the maximum impact would reverberate through me as we landed on the ground with her above me.

This explained why my anger and sadness suddenly felt so amplified. I had unknowingly been feeling her emotions, too.

"Naomi!" the yellow-haired she-wolf shrieked somewhere above us. "What are you doing?"

"Are ye crazy, then?" I asked, my voice pitched just as high. "Ye could have hurt yerself. Where's —"

"Right behind you in a golf cart," Sea pushed into my head. "Remember that bit about her being fast? Apparently, a wee bit of triple pregnancy hasn't slowed her down any. We're still puttering to catch up."

"She told us she needed to hear your explanation for breaking up with her before she could move on," Dublin explained further. "But she jumped out of the cart as soon as she felt you ahead."

Of course, they'd brought her here. I could already feel the explanation forming over our shared bond: two days of her tearfully insisting she had to hear it from me before Sea finally gave in and brought out the golf cart to catch up with the Wild Wolves pack.

"Did you really think you were going to get away with running away?" she asked with a merciless smile that put mine to shame. "I guess I should have told you what would happen if you ran. I will hunt you down. And then you, Eoin, and Aidan will take turns fucking me. Imagine how devastated your self-righteous ego will be when you beg me to let you go next."

"Naomi!" the yellow-haired she-wolf shrieked again, her tone even more aghast.

Meanwhile, my cock stood up like a fating stone at the mental picture she'd put in my head.

But…

"They shouldn't have brought ye here," I growled between clenched teeth.

"Like I would've let them rest until they did," she growled back.

"Did Sea and Dublin tell ye about the prophecy, then?" I asked. "The part where…"

"Yes, awesome, you left ." She waved a dismissive hand. "Prophecy fulfilled. Now come back."

Her logic wasn't exactly unsound. But…

"That's… that's not how it works."

"Wild, do you know how sick I am of the three of you telling me what I have to do? Listen, I had a life all planned out, and you took that away from me because of some ancient prophecy. Then you let me fall in love with you without telling me you'd disappear because of this Cursed King stuff right after our heat moon."

When she put it that way, even more shame and guilt coursed through me. "Naomi, I'm sorry."

"No, sorry isn't good enough!" She glared down at me. "I'm done putting up with your bullhockey — and I'm especially, especially done with you deciding how my life's going to play out."

"I was only trying to leave without hurting ye any more than I already had," I began to explain.

But Naomi kept going as if she hadn't heard my miserable excuse for leaving. "So here's our new deal. I'm designing one of my own, and it's your turn to get cursed. By me."

She bared her teeth at me and let me feel the brunt of her rage over our bond as she declared, "I will not go to Dublin and split myself between the city and the secret kingdom like Eoin and Aidan planned."

"Naomi, hold on," I tried to sit up, but she grabbed my wrists and slammed them back into the cushiony stuff the secret kingdom called grass.

"New plan. I'm going to stay here in the secret kingdom and study all this sci-fi-level tech you've somehow acquired. You and Aidan are going to stay here with me and Eoin. Aidan can rule his company and kingdom remotely, and you can use his car to catch up with your pack whenever you need to oversee a ritual."

Her body was warm and solid as she pressed me down, her grip on my wrists firm. The grass beneath me felt cool and soft, a strange contrast to the fire in her eyes as she spoke.

"Your new curse is that you have to live happily ever after with Aidan, Eoin, and me. Your new curse is that you will have to forsake everything you've been raised to believe. You ended my life as I knew it, so now I'm ending yours as you knew it. That's my first freaking proclamation as queen of the Irish Wolves."

I stared at her. Eyes blazing with tears. Completely dismissive of our ways and the nearly five hundred years of history that preceded her.

And the one answer — the only answer to her insane proclamation — became clear.

"Alright," I said.

I both felt and saw her surprise. "Alright? You'll come back to the secret kingdom with us?"

The question hung in the air between us, heavy and final. And in that moment, I realized there was no fight left in me. Just love. Just her.

"Yeah… yeah… alright," I repeated, tears welling up in my own eyes.

Guess the Wild Wolves weren't as hard as I thought.

After all, their king ended up crying like a babe in front of the lot of them.

Even harder when his Wild Queen leaned down to seal her curse with a kiss.