Chapter 11

Chapter 11

Agnar

Emotion affects the body. It affects the mind and the heart rate. Even the greatest general is still vulnerable to making poor decisions based off how he feels. Emotion has no place in war and every aspect of life is a battlefield. One wrong move and you could be dead.

From this day forward, you will harden yourself. You are part of this pack. You're my adopted son and you will be a warrior. You will make me proud. You will forget who you were before this day. You are a Phaethon now.

You will sharpen your mind and train your body. You will not cry. You will not love. You will not hate. You will resist the temptation for anything in between. You will be an empty vessel and we will fill you with the means to survive. That is the only way you will stay alive out here. The desert is no place for peace. Mercy is a weakness that will destroy you. Our home is here because we've carved it out. This very land has tried to take our lives, but we're still here. We always will be. Above all, you will not fail me.

He remembered the words his adopted father told him the night he'd been taken, as if it were only yesterday.

The stars shone bright in Wyoming when the clouds cleared. The sky was a dark smudge of purple black above him, bruised until the sun came to banish it in a few hours. The dark was deep and so pervasive that next to nothing cast a shadow. The myriad colors of the solid trunks around him, rising tall and thick to an endless canopy of soft green needles or a host of leafless branches, the reds and grays, the striated whites of the beech trees with their black bands, all of it was painted in muted purples and raven blues in the all-pervading darkness.

He'd been taught, in a life that he told himself he couldn't recall, about the stars. About the galaxies and worlds far off. About how all of them, each living breathing soul from the tiniest beetle to a great ball of cold fire millions and millions of light-years away, were connected. The universe was a web, and it was spun around all of them.

The full weight of shame lacerated his insides as he tried to recall his father's face—his real blood father—and no longer could. Did he resemble him? He must. To know his own eyes and bones and shape was to know the ones who created him. His mother died before he was old enough to know what that even meant. He'd never known her. Only his father. Callum McDonald. Such a regular, beautiful name.

And his own. Allistair McDonald.

All things begin and all things end. Don't let this make you sad or afraid. This is the natural order of things. It can be painful, but it can also be mysterious and beautiful. Everywhere in the world, creation is living. Creation is dying.

Why could he recall now, with such startling vividness, the sound of his father's voice, but not his face?

He curled forward, setting his head on top of his useless hands. The agony welling up inside him made his throat raw. He couldn't sleep because his mind was at war with itself. He couldn't quieten it, and that was one of the earliest things he'd learned how to do as a Phaethon. They hadn't beaten the fear and anxiety out of their children. They had taught them how to breathe through it. How breathing and stillness could overcome the worst storm of emotions until they were so mastered they no longer raged like a tempest or howled like a thunderstorm.

The snow seeped into him, cold against his warmth, stealing it from his body, numbing out the places he already couldn't feel. The night was clear and frigid. No snow. No storms. No raging nature. He twisted back, still on his knees, casting his face up to the stars. He wanted so badly to rage at them. To cry out in grief, to howl like a wounded animal. Ironically, the wolf inside him was absolutely silent. The stars looked back at him, refusing to mock his tiny, meaningless existence, refusing to throw it in his face that he never should have believed he was capable of anything at all, let alone the magnitude of what he'd tried to create. They didn't mock him for being the one who had survived and despising himself for it. How many souls out there in the world were looking up at these very stars right now, pouring out hurts and regrets, making wishes, laughing, mourning, living, dying.

Another night. Another morning. An endless cycle of noticing the renewing, the beginning, the ending. Another day of surviving granted to a man who was already dead. Dead except for the black hole inside him. Dead except for the burning betrayal that still burned in him, acid and fire on flesh, robbing him of sleep and sanity.

Atreus became his father when he was ten years old. Ten was more than old enough to remember his old family, but he told himself he didn't. It only brought pain. He'd wanted to survive. He'd wanted to make his new father and mother and the rest of his pack proud. Atreus might not have been right about everything, but he was a tough man and a great warrior. He was never going to be alpha, but he loved his pack, loved his land, and he fought many times, eventually to his own death, for their freedom and their very existence. He didn't have a single ounce of kindness in him, but he hadn't been cruel either. He was just hard. Hard like the land. Like the other men. Hard like his father and his father and his father before him. Hard like a child trained into a man far too soon. He knew no other way of life. His wisdom, training, tactics, and leadership kept Agnar alive. It kept so many of them alive.

Where Atreus and so many others succeeded, he'd failed.

Atreus had warned him repeatedly that the only road peace and mercy led a man to was his own demise, and where one man suffered, so did an entire pack.

Agnar hadn't slept all night but had lain awake going over and over the slaughter of good, innocent people in his mind and everything that led up to that moment. His thoughts plagued him like that every night.

He should have never shown mercy to a man who tried to kill him outside of a challenge.

He'd picked a path that broadcasted his weakness to every pack in the country.

Peace was less than fragile. It could never last, and he knew that.

If he'd never grown a fucking conscience and believed that independent thought was right, if he'd never recalled the one thing his father made him promise that morning the raids started, before he'd been taken and ever even knew what a Phaethon wolf or man looked like, if he'd never become alpha, then his pack would still be there.

The stars shimmered up in the sky, far away, cold and distant. Would he join them soon? His ancestors? Probably not. When the end came, there wasn't anything after, no matter what ancient beliefs the pack tried to keep alive. They weren't much for religion, but they liked the idea of joining the stars somehow, as some kind of matter or spirit.

He hoped there was nothing after death. That the dark would be the last thing he ever knew. He'd have his peace then. He was only sorry that it cost so many people so much misery for him to get there.

He'd left the cabin that Prairie Rose insisted on calling his, even though he was just a stranger passing through a strange land. The land of the living wasn't for the already dead. It must have been over an hour ago. He'd walked through the woods aimlessly, until he found a spot that felt right. Their land didn't have any large trees like these ones, and he found them intriguing. They'd stood for generations, towering up to the sky, watching over the land and the people and all that life rushing beneath them. They'd stood through storms and strong winds, probably floods and droughts. He didn't call it comfort because he wasn't supposed to feel anything at all, but he felt pain and remorse, regret and guilt now, so why not admit that he felt calmed by their massive, solid presence?

"Agnar!" His head turned sharply. He was on his feet in an instant, lurching out of the snow he'd cleared to sit down and stare up at the sky. Though he called himself a man lost and condemned, his old warrior instincts told him to fight.

He let down his guard and relaxed his stance when Prairie Rose rushed out of the darkness, appearing between trees and flying through the snow like an apparition. She had a black snowsuit on, black mitts, but no hat, and her white hair streamed out like the train of a ghostly dress behind her. He swallowed thickly. It was easy to believe she wasn't real. A spirit of the night. Her beauty always had affected him more than he liked to admit. He was confused by it. He didn't understand the way she felt like a massive thorn, driven into the very depths of him, pricking him at all times.

He'd taken her to be gentle, tame, and lacking spirit the first time he'd seen her. Just because she was sweet and kind and good didn't mean that she wasn't also stubborn and brave. He was starting to learn just how tenacious she could be.

She'd come out after him into the biting cold, in the dead of night, and she was carrying his jacket. She looked stricken, which made his chest constrict like he'd just gulped down too much of the frigid air.

"What are you doing?" she barked, shaking the jacket she held out. The red on her cheeks wasn't from the cold, it was from rage.

She was angry because he'd gone out in nothing more than the fatigues he slept in. A long-sleeved black Henley and black pants. He'd slipped into the same boots that he'd always worn. All of it was completely unsuited to heavy snow, harsh wind, and the cold of Wyoming.

His mate charged at him and thrust his jacket into his chest. He thumbed it with his almost useless hands. They were frozen with cold, stiff and unworking past even the damage already healed. He felt the bulge in the sleeve and extracted a pair of warm mittens and a beanie.

"Are you an oath breaker now too?" He'd never seen Prairie Rose like this. She was practically incandescent with rage. "You gave me six months, Agnar Phaethon. Six fucking months. Why am I finding you out here trying to freeze to death?"

He couldn't answer that without sounding like a complete asshole. He deserved it, but this woman didn't. He could tell her, again, that he couldn't feel it. Dead men didn't need warmth. He was nothing. Not even a Phaethon because their pack no longer existed. He could tell her he was nothing. He could tell her to stop fighting a war she was never going to win. But he'd told her all of that, repeatedly, and she'd refused to listen or budge.

"I heard you get up. I tracked your scent." She unzipped the voluminous snowsuit and produced a small, thin thermos. "Drink this. It will warm you up." She uncapped it for him, and the rich scent of strong black coffee steamed through the dark. "We have to go back. Drink it as we walk. Sitting here in the snow in this kind of cold, you could lose fingers or toes."

He didn't take the thermos. He stared blankly at her until the fire in her eyes made him feel guilty enough to at least put on the fucking gear she'd brought.

Tears shimmered in her eyes when he was done. She stepped forward again, picked up his hand and thrust the thermos against it. "Don't you dare disrespect me by saying you don't care. How can you not understand that you harming yourself harms me? We are connected now. Your pain is my pain."

She'd said that before and it had registered, but not the way it bit into him now. Her naked sorrow was like twin axe blades sliding between his ribs.

He'd always been a stubborn, hardheaded, cold-hearted bastard at the best of times. He turned his back on her, flung the thermos into the snow and sat back down in his spot. It turned out that a woman he thought was meek and mild really had a death wish. She charged him from behind, something a grown and fully trained warrior would never have dared to do and wrapped her arms around his neck. Her knees bumped his spine as she leaned forward, her warm breath frosting his neck and ear.

"Tell me about the night Blake was born."

"Why?" he growled like a beast, barely restraining himself so he didn't shake her off. Not to hurt her physically, but because he needed to get away. Away from the heat of her, away from her intoxicatingly feminine scent, away from the sweetness of her breath and her heart slamming into his back.

His pulse had escalated. He could feel it trying to break through the skin at his neck. His chest felt too small to contain the shitstorm brewing inside of him.

"Because I want to know. I want these memories for their sake, but I want more than that. Tell me how you felt when you watched your son come into the world."

Instantly the memories came flashing back. Blake Agnar Phaethon came into the world bellowing like most babies did. He feigned disinterest, but he felt something he'd never felt before. No battle, no training, no life lived up until that point could have prepared him for the powerful surge of protectiveness that nearly knocked him over. He could have set the world on fire if it threatened to even make Blake unhappy.

He was scared to look at him, but when he was handed to his mother to put at her breast, he turned his face up to Agnar and all he saw was how perfect he was. Huge gray eyes just like his. Chestnut hair like his mother's. Even as a newborn he had the strongest jaw and the oldest, wisest expression on his tiny little face. He looked like a pinched old man. Agnar's whole body was light. He didn't know what true happiness was since he was taken from his home and family, made to stand in for the ones the Phaethon Pack lost in their many raids and wars with other wolves. He was this great warrior standing there and a tiny little newborn baby could have brought him to his knees. He was enthralled. Mesmerized. For all that he'd tried to shut it out, he felt a tremendous amount of love the moment he saw him.

He could have told Prairie Rose all this, but he didn't.

"I wasn't there." The lie burst out of him, poisoning his tongue. His voice, though, was neutral and he knew that his body gave zero evidence of his falseness. "If I had been, I would have been like any other male. I would have thanked my mate for a son and dutifully protected and raised him. That's what I have done." He had to stop. His throat ached. He wasn't used to the sensation, but in the past three weeks, he knew what that meant. It was unthinkable that a man like him, even as reduced as he was, should break down.

Prairie Rose's arms tightened around him. He exhaled steadily, slowing his pulse purposefully. "Agnar…"

"I have all our photos and files backed up online," he cut in abruptly. "You'll need them. I'll give you the password. The boys have false IDs, as most of us do. I have them in a security box. They're in Arizona and I left the keys with my lawyer. Yes, he's a shifter living in a human world. I'll leave everything to you. Any documents that have to be signed, I'll make sure they're taken care of. I wanted the boys to be warriors…" Another long inhale. He drew out the exhale, counting heartbeats. Army breathing, people called it, but he'd always thought of it as battle breaths. "But they can choose their own path. They're their own people. I have no right to choose for them. I have no right to anything anymore."

In an instant, Prairie Rose swung herself around. She landed in his lap, surprising the hell out of him even though it shouldn't have been possible. She grasped the front of his jacket, balling it up in her mittens. He could feel her fingers digging through everything. She was sensationally vicious, dazzling him with her magical windswept beauty. She had an honest beauty that needed no augmentation at all, and it could wind a man. He looked at her because he couldn't look away, a goddess that turned him to stone.

"Do I have to hurt you to make you feel anything?"

"I've been hurt many times before," he huffed. "You won't succeed where others have failed."

He was no longer so certain about that. It took all of his strength not to lean forward and taste her mouth. He wanted to taste his mate. Eat her mouth. Her beautiful, tempting breasts. Her pussy, swollen and wet and ready for him.

She pulled off her mitt and slapped him, the impact echoing through the dark, bouncing off the trees around them. It was true what he'd said. He hardly registered it.

"I know you felt that! You feel everything. You're blocking it out. You're doing it on purpose."

He was never going to let her know that half of the reason he couldn't sleep was because he was tortured by her. She was so close. She'd vowed to fight for him, or what was left of him. She was beautiful, whole, and good. She was in her element, in her own home, in her pack. She carried on like she had a backbone of steel. She got the boys up in the morning, got them to the pack's school, took care of her cabin, helped members of her pack, visited her family. She made all their meals. She tried so hard to help the boys grieve their lost packmates and adjust to having him there. He didn't participate in anything. He haunted her home, and his own sons like he was already gone a wraith slowly disintegrating as he withdrew from them all. But she tried. She tried so, so hard. He failed her over and over again, and every time he saw the sorrow and the renewed determination on her face, he wanted to make sure he never saw it again.

That soft pink flooded her cheeks again. "That's a lie. You've felt. You do. You felt and you feel."

She stood up, the slight weight of her the only thing that was anchoring him to the world.

She unzipped her snowsuit and started peeling it away. He felt something then. Panic. He was not going to ask her what she was doing. He was going to sit there and fucking not make a sound. He focused on a spot above her shoulder so that when she kicked off her boots and ripped at her clothes, he didn't see any of her nakedness.

He could no longer just sit there telling himself he didn't care. She could freeze to death trying to make a point. He was learning that she was stubborn enough to do it. "Stop! Prairie Rose!"

She shifted. His eyes were drawn to it and once again, he was captivated by the sheer beauty of her sleek, white wolf. The yellow eyes that studied him as her wolf circled, growling, were anything but serene. The wolf wasn't afraid of him, and honestly, Prairie Rose wasn't either. He'd ceased to be something that could inspire fear or respect in any living thing. Probably nature too. These trees probably looked down on him and laughed at the futility of his mortality.

Her wolf lifted her head and gave a throaty howl. She pawed the snow. She was magnificent and he sat like she'd cast a spell at him, even when she charged right for him. He didn't put up his hands to shield her or fight her off as she knocked him back and her teeth closed over his neck. One fang found his jugular. She halted like that, frozen and deadly against the very spot that gave him life. One breath. Two. Another.

She moved first. He watched her shift back above him, the motions somehow elegant in a way he'd never realized they could be. Something happened to his insides. He felt like he'd been liquified and boiled alive. She crouched above him, her hair falling around her, blocking out the world and most of her body below her chin. Her lips came back to his neck and found that same spot where her teeth had just rested. She lapped there gently, tasting him with her tongue before she pulled back.

"Why wouldn't you shift?"

If he owed her anything, and he did owe this woman so much more than he could ever repay for what her pack had done for what was left of his and for what she'd done for his sons, he owed her the truth. "The wolf is crippled. My hands, the damage in them… as a man I don't walk on my hands, but the wolf can't. They won't hold him anymore. Do you want me in the dirt, crawling? My wolf is maimed for life."

"No!" She reeled back, but not in disgust. "No!" He watched her jaw quiver and then a shiver tore through her. She retreated, grabbing her clothes up and sliding into them. He didn't watch, but he heard her struggling. She was wet and cold, and the fabric wouldn't give.

Eventually, the snowsuit zipped up. It was like a scream in the night.

He finally looked at her and found her back. She was hunched over, crouched into herself. She was still shivering. No. No, she wasn't. She was crying and she didn't want him to see.

This was it. The moment she finally realized it was hopeless and so was he. The moment she finally cut him loose and gave up. He'd waited weeks for her to come around to the truth of that and adjust accordingly. He knew it wouldn't take six months, but why did his head start throbbing so painfully? He felt himself flinch, which was more than he'd done facing down any sort of danger over the years.

She stood up and dashed away her tears. "I won't accept that."

She crouched before him and took his hands. He hadn't even gotten up out of the snow. He was just sitting there again, unable to move. He let her turn his palms and look at the object of his great shame. He'd told her he was no longer a man, but the truth was he was no longer a wolf.

"There must be some kind of braces that could be made or something that could be done."

She only looked intently and then she traced the scars that ran over his palms, wrists, and forearms. She stroked the fingers that wouldn't straighten all the way or curl back in. He could no longer make a fist. And, like his adversary predicted, he could no longer hold any sort of weapon. He couldn't even get a decent grip on an axe to chop wood. He'd hidden as much of it from the boys as he could. They didn't press him to talk to them. They didn't ask him for anything. They existed so close together, but it was like he wasn't even there. Not because they didn't want to. They were trying to give him time to come back to himself without forcing him to do it. They didn't think he was pathetic or weak or useless. He was still their father. He'd seen the way they looked at him when they thought he couldn't see.

With love shining in their eyes.

Love and longing, and he'd refused to let himself believe it or see it because how the fuck was he supposed to live with any of it?

"With all the new 3D printing technology and medical advances, they can make things for anyone, even paralyzed animals. I've seen it online. I'll find someone. Say I have a dog who needs it. I'll find the best of the best and—"

"I don't want you to bother." He wanted to bark it at her, but it came out completely exhausted.

"I want me to bother."

"Just let it go."

"No." She pressed a kiss to his palms. She held his hand when he tried to drag it away, but even he had to admit it was a fucking halfhearted effort on his part at best. "I don't care if you can't feel. I don't believe you, but even if it's true, even if you refuse, even if you keep blocking it all out, I'll feel for you. You're saying you can't love. It doesn't matter. I'll show you love anyway. I'll show you warmth. I promised you my whole family and pack would and that's the truth. Everyone deserves to be loved and you will be. I'm not letting it go and I'm not going to stop. I'm not asking you to change. Be who you want to be. Be who you are. But who you are needs to heal. You think there's no point, but there are so many reasons. Levi and Blake. They're your reasons." She kissed his other hand, her tears falling and making wet splashes against his useless fingers. "I felt the way your pulse thrummed against my arm when I asked you about the night Blake was born. You remember. You were there. You felt that love."

She tried to meet his eyes, but he refused to lift his head.

Prairie Rose continued, "They need you, your sons need you. It was always my dream to be a mother and now I have them. A mother fights for her children. A father does too, even if he's fighting himself. You're still a wolf. You're still the man who believed in peace and goodness even if he never experienced it before he had that dream. You're still that man who saw with his heart and tried to make a better world. You have a lifetime of memories and thoughts and feelings you haven't allowed yourself to process, but they're still all there. One man's betrayal was not your fault. You are never responsible for anyone else's actions. You have not failed. Not one single person here hates you. Look at the stars," she begged.

He did. Fuck, he did, turning his head up to the sky.

"Look at the snow. Look at the world around you. In this moment, we are made new."

It was too much. He couldn't just crack himself open after a lifetime of holding himself together so tightly that nothing got in or escaped out. "You can't just say that and have it be so."

"Then you can't just unmake yourself with a word either."

"I'll never be able to reciprocate," he said. Determined not to give her a way in.

"What I'm offering doesn't depend on your being able to return it."

"You've set the bar painfully low."

"It's mine to set it where I will."

"You don't want this. Me. You want the idea of it. The family. The mate. The perfect life."

She had no response to that, but her silence was a response in and of itself. She got off her knees and started searching around in the snow. She found her mittens, but she was still looking.

"What are you doing?"

"That was my favorite thermos, asshole."

Not that was my favorite thermos, poor, pitiful, crippled, emasculated, defeated, pathetic, shiftless, powerless man.

"Here it is!" She scooped it up out of the snow and twisted the cap off. Poured some of the coffee into it, which was still so hot it steamed like a cauldron up into the black surroundings. She handed him the full cap. "Drink this and let's go back to the cabin. I'm not leaving you out here anymore. If you want to come out to the woods, you go fully dressed for the weather or you go with me. If you want to just sit in silence, that's fine."

The old Agnar never would have let anyone boss him around like this. But Prairie Rose wasn't trying to command him. She was trying to help, and goddamn it, that warmed him more than the swallows of scalding coffee he dutifully drank back.

"I'm making waffles for breakfast. They're the boys' favorite. I'd like if you'd try to eat more." Her big, liquid eyes shimmered as they met his.

He needed to start sparing them while he was still here.

He didn't say anything, but he did slam back the rest of the coffee and stood up to follow her to the cabin.

When they got there, he went right to the boys' room and shut the door. He wasn't locking Prairie Rose out. He just needed a minute with his children, and he knew she'd understand.

They slept soundly in the double bed, both on their backs, shoulders touching. They didn't look troubled in their sleep. They didn't have nightmares, and he would know. He was awake most of the night, on the floor, listening to them breathing.

He just stood there at the end of the bed, the ache inside him nearly killing him, hardly able to breathe. He remembered both the nights they were born so very clearly. He'd never forget. Not even a surgeon could drill it out of his skull.