Desert Wolf (23 page)

Cassius gaped, and it took him a moment to snap his jaw shut. Of all the responses he’d expected, that wasn’t it. Her phone rang again, but she just clicked it off on the top.

“Sweetheart, I meant it… You don’t have to lie for me.”

“I know.” She sat then gave him a light push. He slid off the bed, as she pushed the sheets back before following him. “I told her that because I do have to pee. I also have to figure out what I am going to say.”

At the bathroom door, she paused and glanced at him. “You asked me if I trusted you before.”

He nodded.

“Did you want to earn my trust and become intimate before you told me what you really wanted me to do? You said seducing wasn’t the plan…That was the truth then, right? It’s still the truth?”

“I would never ask my lover to do what I asked you to come here for…it’s my right to defend you, Sovvan. In any battle you accept in the Reaping…I can intervene at any second. You are mine to defend. It’s our law.” Hope flickered in her eyes, and he hated himself, because he had to crush it. “So, no, seducing you wasn’t my plan because for it to work, I
can’t
defend you. I can’t exercise the right.”

She braced her hand on the door. “That’s why you didn’t want me to tell them what I could do in combat?”

Another slow nod. He really was a rat bastard. “Trask and his men will say nothing. They want the Reaping to end. It’s what bound their loyalty to me when Claire left.”

Her phone rang. It had been five minutes.

She hit answer and put it to her ear, saying “Sera, seriously? I have to finish going to the bathroom, and I can’t get there if you keep calling me. I’m fine. Faust is fine. I will call you back in a few minutes, and you can rip me a new one for not calling you before.”

“Sovvan, if you hang up the phone…”

“You want to listen to me pee?” Anger sparked in her tone, and she whirled away to stomp into the bathroom. Cassius didn’t move as the toilet lid hit the back of the tank. “Fine, listen to me pee.” A second later a loud splash occurred. His little Omega added, “Well, crap, I dropped the phone in the toilet. Maybe someone should have let me pee in peace.”

He really shouldn’t have laughed.

Serafina would give birth to a herd of hell cattle intent on stampeding him, and Sovvan was justifiably pissed at him.

Then her, “Oops,” floated out on the air, and he leaned against the wall, laughing until his side ached.

What a fucked up world.

“
Y
ou dropped
your phone in the toilet?” Faust sat on a lounge chair next to the pool, shaking his head.

“It’s the truth.” She stretched out in the second chair. Wearing a brand new tank top and shorts, as well as a wide-brimmed hat to shade her face and a pair of sunglasses to cover her eyes, she wanted to sleep for a week and forget everything she’d learned. Frankly, the coward’s way out. Or at least, the noncombatant’s method.

“I know it’s the truth, I just don’t think it was an accident.” The weariness in Faust’s voice nagged at her. Three days passed since someone had tried to kill him—several someones. Wolves bounced back from injuries, and while his broken bones had mended and his bruises faded, the poison left him weak and mulish. It had taken her nearly two hours to calm his wildly pissed off wolf when he’d woken twenty-four hours after the healing. Another ten to let him sleep that off before he regained his human form. “I talked to her, you know.”

“Fishing isn’t like you,
cher
. You want to ask me a question, ask it.” Over the last seventy-two hours, she had alternately danced in a waltz around the facts with her Alpha, while simultaneously challenging Cassius on his plan. He never asked her to lie. In fact, he’d made it clear that if she wanted to tell Serafina, she should.

But if she told Sera the exact nature of Cassius’ request then, best case scenario, her Alpha would order her home. Worst case? Sera would come for her personally, and the clash between Serafina and Cassius was an outcome Sovvan wanted to avoid. Not telling her the truth was a lie of omission, and it made her sick to her stomach.

What they don’t know, they can’t bitch at me about. Sometimes, you have to pick and choose the truth, Sovvan, because not every issue has a clear right and wrong or black and white. Sometimes it’s a matter of the lesser of two evils or the depths of the shade of grey.

After twisting open a bottle of water, she took a long drink. The morning sun warmed her bones and chased away the chill of apprehension. Since the first night of sharing Cassius’ bed, she’d slept nowhere else. The arrangement only added another bone of contention with Faust, but he didn’t judge her choice of bed partners so much as her silence on the subject.

“I don’t want you to lie to me.” Leaning forward, he snagged a fresh bottle from the ice bucket they’d carried out with them. Trask and his wolves were stationed around the compound. They’d gone through all the supplies she and Faust brought with them from home as well as their vehicle. Silent watchers always seemed to be in her periphery, and she guarded her words particularly with Cassius unless they were in one of his secure rooms.

When did I start sharing his paranoia?
Then again, was it really paranoid considering the last several days? Since Faust’s attack, three more brutal brawls had broken out in Summit. Innocents had been hurt. Cassius executed two wolves who’d killed a woman during their spectacular building-to-building bloody altercation. Nearly a dozen others had been expelled from Summit entirely. Tension seemed to vibrate in the air.

“The fact you aren’t telling me
I won’t lie to you, Faust
.” His brogue dipped heavily into the Irish. “That’s more disheartening than I can say, luv. What the hell happened while I was unconscious?”

Watching him from behind the relative anonymity of her sunglasses, she sighed. “I took a long, hard look at the world.”

“The world’s not a pretty place, luv.”

“No,” she agreed with him. “It’s not. Faust, I need your advice, but I can’t ask you the question directly. I’ll understand if you don’t want to play a verbal dance with me, but I won’t put you in the position of lying for me.”

“The hell you won’t.” He swung round to sit sideways on the lounge chair and squinted at her. The sun glared against his pale skin, but at least he had some color returning—even if it would end up being a sunburn. The breeze disheveled his hair. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’ll lie, cheat, steal and kill for you, Sovvan. The only bad position you can put me in is uninformed.”

“No, there’s a worse one.” She took another drink, wishing for a moment it was a hurricane and they were on the back patio of LeGrand’s waiting on a fresh serving of crawfish and red rice. At his skeptical look, she tugged her sunglasses off and met his gaze. “The worse one is knowing exactly what I intend to do and being told you are not allowed to interfere. To be ordered to stand aside and let it happen, even if it goes against everything you are and have sworn.”

“What the fuck did that bastard ask you to do?” Ruthless intensity flooded his green eyes. It was easy to forget Faust was a force to be reckoned with, or that his attack hadn’t been a case of a couple of wolves on one. He’d taken down more than a dozen before they’d felled him—and apparently only then because they’d used poison. None of those he put on the ground got back up again.

The body count in Sutter Butte continued to pile up, and she wondered how many of them would end up being blood on her hands.

“That bastard is named Cassius, and I would prefer it if you referred to him by his name or his title—instead of an insult.” She kept her tone even. Whatever else they may be to each other, she liked him. Genuinely. The man—complicated didn’t cover it—he’d never finished telling her why he became Alpha when he didn’t want to be one. She could guess, at least from what he had said, but the more she learned about him, the more she realized that so much of what the rest of the world saw was his armor. His shield against hurt.

My mother was the first person I ever killed.
No child thinks things like that; they had to be
taught
to believe it
.

The grind of his teeth preceded a long sigh before Faust nodded once. “What the bloody hell did the
Alpha bastard
ask you to do?” Well, technically his title was Alpha.

Instead of answering him, she shifted gears. “Why do you hate him?”

“Not pertinent to the discussion.” Also not an answer.

“Actually, it is…because your distaste for him is coloring your responses. It would be reckless to require you to support any action or inaction of his.” Then because
Faust
mattered to her, she crisscrossed her legs and sat forward. “I don’t want to put you in a position of acting against your conscience or doing something you really don’t want to do because you hate him.”

Their gazes locked. “I’m not here for him. I’m here for you.”

“But I’m here for him.” Saying it aloud unlocked a shackle around her she hadn’t realized weighed on her soul. “Ever since Sera came to me with the request, I knew this trip would change me. I know…I knew coming to Sutter Butte could kill me and, at the very least, could change me forever. My life in Delta Crescent verged on perfect. It’s a good life because you’re there, and you stand like a bulwark against anything the tide flings at me.”

“I’m your Guardian. I gave you my oath.” Sober intensity reflected in the depths of his eyes. “Don’t hamstring me by keeping secrets.”

“Sera is your Alpha.”

“And yours. That I have to remind you of the fact worries me.” Equal parts chastisement and bafflement collided in his statement. “What the hell, Sovvan? Are you falling for him?”

Not a discussion she could have with so many ears attuned to her. “I came here to help him. It took me months to be willing to journey this far. Everything in me warned of the danger…but I dismissed those fears as the bleed over from you and Sera about the trip. She didn’t want me to do this. She made it clear with every word, every look, and every piece of information. Still, she never ordered me to stay home.”

“That’s not her. She leads like Poppa did. She looks after us, she protects us, but she doesn’t control us. She would rather we want to be with her. If you ask her for anything, you know she’d go to the wall for you.” All true.

“She doesn’t need me.” Where had that come from? Yet as she searched her soul, she recognized a very keen truth. Sera didn’t need her. Balanced, confident and very much in love with a mate who complemented her, she surrounded herself with support from her friends to her pack mates to her family.

“Need isn’t the only reason an Omega is in a pack, Sovvan.” Faust exhaled. “I left my pack because the woman I wanted mated someone else.”

The revelation came from left field, and she gaped.

“It happens. We all like to think there’s only one wolf in the world for us, and maybe it’s true. Maybe she was my one and only, but I wasn’t hers. She and her mate, they were good together. Well-matched and she loved him. Hell of it was, he was my friend, too. They both were. They loved me, and they wanted to include me, wanted me to stay, but every day I watched them together was another knife in my gut.” He shrugged, the darkness crowding his voice diminishing to the bitter tang of regret. “They did nothing wrong, luv. Not a damn thing. But if you know anything about gut wounds, they take a while to bleed out and it’s a bloody painful way to go. The longer I stayed there, the more I brawled, and the more I knew I’d end up hating them and someday. My envy would turn to jealousy and hatred. So, rather than be responsible for the death of two people whose only crime was falling in love with each other, I left.”

In all the years she’d known him… “Why are you telling me this now?”

“Because I know what it is to not be needed. To think you’ll find something else out there, something more. Maybe you have found it with this broken pack you’re wanting to fix, but tell me this…is it the pack you want to help or the Alpha?”

Movement behind him drew her attention, and she stared across the expanse to Cassius watching her from the living room. It was sound proof, so he couldn’t hear what she and Faust discussed, but he watched them nonetheless. Was he protecting her? Or protecting his investment?

The more she considered what he’d asked her to do, the more she saw the sense in his plan.
He needs to know who he can save and who he can’t.
The divisions in his pack, sown by generations of blood, would not be so easily overthrown.
Is cutting it all out the answer, or would it simply put off change for another generation?

Hatred and bloodshed led to hatred and bloodshed. Dominoes which would fall one way or the other. Returning her attention to Faust, she said, “Helping one helps the other. You can’t separate a pack from its Alpha.”

“Sure you can…”

“No, maybe the pack thinks that, and maybe you believe he is…whatever your opinion is. But he is Alpha and he
wants
to help them. He wants to make things better.”

“Luv, I think you’re seeing a charm that isn’t there. He’s a brutal bastard. He’ll kill a wolf as soon as to look at one. He rules Sutter Butte because no one can kill him, and trust me, they’ve tried.”

“Has it occurred to you that if he wanted anything other than to help his pack, he wouldn’t have one to begin with?”

“What?”

The answer fell into place for her, the one Cassius had refused to give her and yet…it had to be true. Sliding her sunglasses into place, she smiled. Had she said complicated man? He was so much more than complicated. He was a total enigma, and she half-believed he wasn’t aware of all his motives. “What benefit does he get from leading? What wealth have you seen here?”

She’d seen his Pandora’s box—his lake valley—and it was exquisite. Perfect and undeveloped. If he could find a way to get his pack on an even keel, they’d need a new place to live outside the fortress where isolation, defense and offense had been a way of life for so long. It earned him nothing other than a place of solitude.

“Well, he has to be getting something out of it…”

“Why?” Brows raised, she spread her hands. “And what? He lives in a fortress inside his own pack. Have you seen the security? Do you see many friends coming and going? Do you see him making breakfast with a houseful of people hanging out around the table? Hell, do you even see any pictures on the walls? Anything to make this glorified prison into a home?” Every piece slotted into place.

Her Hound didn’t deny any of her charges, yet a muscle in his jaw ticked. “Let’s say I agree with you. So, why the hell is he the Alpha?”

“A wise wolf once told me that there are three kinds of Hounds in the world. There’s the kind that like to fight, the kind that are good at fighting and the kind who want to serve.” Paraphrasing him, she waited a beat and, for a split-second, shame creased his face. “He takes no joy from fighting. I’ve seen him after a battle and so have you. I may have been scatter braining by the end of that ambush, but his focus was laser. On the child, his healer, me, and even you. Protecting his people, dealing with the fallout, and cleaning it up so no one would come for them. There was no happiness or exultation for the bodies, just a weary emptiness where love for pack should bloom.”

Cassius had hollowed himself out utterly for his pack, and they might never know the extent of his sacrifice.

“Don’t make me like that bastard, Sovvan.” His grumbling pulled a reluctant smile from her.

“You don’t have to like him to want to help him.” Or love him, but she kept the thought to herself. “Helping him is helping his whole pack. It’s not one wolf or one Alpha, it’s thousands who’ve died to secure a place here…and their children and the children of those children.” Her thoughts went to the curiously silent Maddy, traumatized from the ambush, and to the faces of all those they’d fought that night. So many had been young, too young.

In her mind’s eye, she saw Cassius at eighteen entering the Reaping for the first time. Without a shadow of a doubt, she knew no senior wolf shied away from facing him. Raised by an Alpha, the blood son of a bastard leader—they would have gone after him. If he was brutal, then his upbringing and his pack made him so. They’d honed him, sharpened every edge, until he was both a blunt object and a blade. The ugliness had changed him, shaped him, and yet his heart still beat for his people. He wanted more for them than he’d ever received.

“Tell me.” Faust held out his hand to her, an olive branch and show of solidarity in one.