Chapter 26: Aria

Chapter 26: Aria

“Scout on ahead. You guys, head back home to tell Scott what happened. The Grey Creek Pack has put our alliance in jeopardy. The Council of Seven needs to know. I’m going to tell them myself.” Lucas spoke to his packmates, his voice heavy with the weight of the fight. I stood back and waited, anxiety biting at my stomach, realizing that his assignments would disperse all of our packmates and leave us traveling alone. I hadn’t said anything to him since we left Oswald behind.

As our packmates took off in various directions, Lucas watched until all traces of them had vanished into the night. Then he turned to me, and my stomach twisted.

His expression softened. “Seems you can’t go a day without gaining a new wound. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yes, I’m fine.” He was right. These wounds were nothing new to me now. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize my old pack had followed me.”

Lucas shook his head. “You couldn’t have known they’d be nearby. It’s almost as if Oswald was hanging around our territory, waiting for a moment you would be vulnerable...”

I hadn’t even considered that. Was he so desperate to get me back that he would neglect his duties just to stalk me? “He was never like this before.”

“I know. It’s strange; I can’t figure out what’s come over him. Losing one’s mate can cause madness sometimes, but he lost you by his own choice,” said Lucas.

That was right. Oswald disdained me the entire time I was his fated mate, and then he rejected me. Whatever compelled him to want me back now wasn’t natural.

“You shouldn’t have gone out alone,” he added.

There it was. I’d been waiting for him to admonish me for my foolish mistake. The shame was eating me alive, so I dropped my head, unable to look him in the eye. “I have to speak with the Council, Lucas. I’m sorry.”

“No, this is my fault too. I should have expected you’d do this.”

The words stung, and they hurt worse coming from Lucas. It was enough to make my throat swell and my eyes gloss over.

“I always knew you were headstrong. I should have prepared to send someone with you to keep you safe. Hell, I should have just sucked it up and gone with you from the start.”

I blinked in surprise. “Aren’t you angry?”

“At myself, sure.”

“But at me, too, right?”

Lucas inadvertently chuckled. “I can’t be mad at you for being who you are.”

Words escaped me. I wasn’t sure I ever recalled a moment when somebody appreciated me for who I was instead of jabbing at me or criticizing me for what I couldn’t be. My mouth hung open as I marveled at Lucas, seeing only sincerity on his face.

Catching my eye, he tilted his head. “What?”

“Nothing,” I said quickly, pushing forward to keep walking.

Lucas slowed his pace so that he could walk alongside me. “Can I tell you something, Aria?”

Curiosity had my heart doubling over. It was a struggle just to keep my cool, but I slowly nodded and stole a look at him, showing him that I was offering my full attention.

He stared on ahead. “You may not believe it, but I know you better than you think.”

“That is pretty hard to believe.”

“You’d be inclined to think that because we’ve only just started spending time together. But I’ve had my eye on you for a long time.” He smiled in a flutter of embarrassment but just as quickly sobered. “I know you’ve felt alone for most of your life. You envy your sisters for the connections they’ve made. You buried yourself in your work, hoping it would pay off, but instead, people just pushed you away because of their own preconceived ideas about you. Now, you find it hard to think anyone would genuinely like you, even me. Especially me.”

My stunned silence expressed exactly how accurate he was. Hearing Lucas peel me open and identify all the traits that defined these last few years of my life made me feel so vulnerable I wanted to curl up and hide. If it were anyone but Lucas, it would have felt invasive, but somehow when he told me these things he knew about me, I just felt like I was finally understood. Like somebody really, truly saw me for the first time in my life, and all the terrible experiences and loneliness could be justified. “How do you know all this...?”

“You didn’t think you could spend four years training to become the Alpha Female of the Grey Creek Pack without your superior Alpha keeping tabs on you, did you?” He laughed.

“But I just met you a couple of months ago!”

“Well, that was part of training, too. It wasn’t just Oswald testing you. So was I. I needed to see how you’d behave, meeting another political figure for the first time.”

My eyes widened. I was glad for the fur of my wolf form. Otherwise, Lucas would have caught me blushing. “I didn’t even recognize you were the Silent Shadows’ Alpha.”

Lucas laughed again, leaning closer to me. “You thought I was a low-ranked IT tech. But you still treated me with respect and decorum, which says a lot about you.”

“Yeah...” And now that he’d brought it up, I couldn’t help the million questions buzzing around my head. “So, when did you decide you wanted me to be your Alpha Female?”

“Oh.” Lucas broke eye contact with me, retreating into his thoughts. The strange well of emotions that connected us blossomed with embarrassment again. “Not long after I started monitoring you.”

“Really? That long?” Then it must have been years he’d had these feelings about me.

“I know, it’s weird. I wish I could have known that Oswald planned to reject you. All along, I wished you could have been mine. I could have saved you all the heartache. I could have helped build you up. I kick myself for it, but...”

“No, don’t,” I told him. “You have a duty to your pack and the subsidiary packs. Lucas, it’s good enough just knowing how you feel now.”

“The moment I first saw you those few months ago, I wanted to make you mine.”

The intensity of his words made my heart hammer, my chest tightening like all of a sudden, and my blood was too hot. His candidness made my brain short-circuit. Lucas didn’t even wait for me to fumble through a response. When he stopped walking, his body immediately underwent the change, buckling, and bending, and losing all his fur until it began to take its human shape. I had to stop gawking so I could follow suit, knowing that he was transforming for a reason.

As soon as he stood on two feet, Lucas clutched my arms, waiting for me to finish shifting too. I panted, fighting back the pain of my freshly opened wounds to stare up at him.

“You have to know how serious I am about you,” said Lucas. In human form, all his emotions manifested more clearly than ever before. His eyebrows pinched together, his dark eyes transfixed on mine. His firm lips pursed into a deliberate line. Lucas pulled me closer until I felt the heat glowing off his body, his hands sliding down my arms, touching my bare hips. We were both naked after the transformation, and while I wanted to feel shy and shield myself from his eyes, he made me feel so safe that instead, I hungered for contact. He took one of my hands and brought it to his chest, satiating that desire.

“How does it feel?” he asked, his voice barely above a whisper, achieving such softness that I melted inside.

It was hard to keep my breathing steady. “It’s nice, Lucas.”

“Do you like it? Do you want it?”

“I...” I would be stupid to say no. The only reason I hesitated was that ever-present fear of rejection, but he knew that existed in me.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” said Lucas. “I never ever want to hurt you. I want to give you everything, Aria. I promise. Whatever conflicts we have, we can talk them out. I’ll listen to you. I’ll compromise. I’ll try my hardest to understand you, and I hope you’ll do the same. Please trust me enough to tell me how you feel.”

He pulled me close enough that our bodies were pressed together. My chest against his, the skin of my stomach lost in the forest of hair on his abdomen. His groin tickled my thigh and scattered my thoughts. “I want this, Lucas,” I managed to say. “Whatever you want to give me, I want it.”

Lucas smiled. “I want to give you all of me.” His hands wandered up my spine, his chin tilting to plant a kiss on my cheek. But where I expected him to pull away, instead, he kept kissing along my jaw, then down my neck, eliciting a tingle everywhere his lips touched. He clutched me tightly against himself and breathed in with drunken reverie. “Let me claim you.”

The satisfaction of his touch was so addicting I would let him do anything he wanted. “Okay, Lucas.”

His breath caught in his throat. Lucas crouched, picking me up under my butt and lifting me in his arms. The sudden rise made me laugh, or maybe it was the series of kisses he gave my neck, gradually lowering us both down to the grass until I was reclined on my back and he had wedged himself between my legs. Lucas smothered me in affection, pinning me between his arms and chest and the ground. I wanted to be nowhere else but there with him. Feeling his stomach as he breathed between kisses, running my fingers through his hair, growing hot and excited at the hardness nuzzling between my thighs. It was scary, too; I’d never been intimate with someone, but Lucas made it feel so natural that I didn’t want it to stop. I didn’t have to tell him to go slow or be gentle. He already knew. “Is this okay?” he’d ask often, “Does it feel good? Am I touching you right?”

Even the clumsiest of touches felt like bliss to me. The moment he pushed inside me and our bodies aligned as one, I was lost in the sensation, to him. Nothing else mattered except for the pleasure and happiness that Lucas and I brought to one another.

I wanted our first time to last forever, but my body could only take so much. We were left sweating and clinging to one another, bathing in the afterglow of our union, savoring each other’s smells and touches. His fingertips trailed through my hair while I watched his muscles flex. “I never knew it would feel like that,” I told him.

“It only feels that good for true soulmates,” he murmured.

“Really?”

Lucas snickered. “I don’t know. You tell me.”

Laughter came easily now. Maybe he was right. We seemed to complete each other as physically as we have emotionally.

My eyelids hung heavy, but I didn’t want to sleep. We were exposed out in the middle of the forest. Even with Lucas’ powerful arms wrapped around me, I knew that falling asleep here would endanger us both, so finally, we both picked ourselves up and returned to our wolf forms. “We can rest when we reach Hale Stone,” said Lucas.

Fatigue fought me the entire way. I wracked my brain, trying to stay awake, revisiting the torrent of questions Lucas had woken in me. “Did you ever have a fated mate?”

Only after I asked it did I realize it might be a sensitive subject for him, but Lucas simply smiled at me, unfazed. “I did.”

Who was she? Was she still around? Was it one of our packmates? The questions only intensified. “Why didn’t you pick her?”

“I would have, but...” Lucas sighed. “You know, it’s been a long time since I’ve talked about this.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. We don’t have to.”

“No,” Lucas shook his head. “You should know. She died when we were young. It was only a couple of weeks that we knew we were fated mates, and then she was attacked by a bear. She was too young to defend herself, too far away from the pack to be saved. I felt it... every moment of her death. It scared me. I didn’t know if I would ever be able to connect with someone again.”

Listening to his story, my heart ached with sympathy for him. “Oh, Lucas. I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright. I guess that’s why I felt so strongly for you so quickly. I didn’t realize how lonely I was, and then you turned up, and you made me realize how badly I wanted that connection.” Lucas pressed closer to me, kissing my cheek. “I have that connection now. The mate bond... I can feel it.”

My heart pounded. “You can feel a mate bond? A real one?”

“A mate bond can only form if both shifters feel the connection.”

A flurry of butterflies erupted in my chest, once more tying up my tongue. It was futile denying it now. After the moment we shared earlier and after all the time we’ve spent together, I knew I had feelings for Lucas. “This is real, then.”

“I’m glad it is.”

I wished we were back in our human forms so I could kiss him, hold his hand, anything. All I could do was meet his eyes, but doing so was enough to open my soul to him. We stopped walking for a moment just to revel in the truth of our new bond. I couldn’t put into words the magnitude of joy it woke in me.

Lucas Black wanted to be my mate, and I wanted to be his. This night was ours, and ours alone. It was a dream.

But all dreams were destined to end eventually.

We walked side-by-side, touching each other as much as we could, laughing, joking, and forgetting why we were here in the first place. And then we woke from our dream when the air turned sour with the stench of death, and we remembered the heavy cloud hanging over our heads, threatening to burst into a downpour.