Wolf and Soul (The Alaska Princesses Trilogy, Book 3) (20 page)

Eventually she couldn’t take the silence anymore.

“Say something,” she said. “Either say something or let me go. I didn’t come out here for a staring contest.”

He looked away and shook his head, a heavy frown on his face, like she was forcing his hand, making him do something he really, really didn’t want to do. And for a moment, she thought he would let her go. Unclamp his arm and allow her to return to the house.

But when he raised his eyes back to hers, they shone with stubborn determination. “I thought you had accepted this, our mating, come to terms with being pregnant. But you haven’t mentioned our pup once, and every time I bring it up, you change the subject.”

Deflect, deflect, deflect… “So you’re upset I don’t get all squishy over babies? You were hoping to get Mary Poppins when you married me, too? You want a nanny? Just like Rafe and Mag got for their kids?”

Grady kept staring at her, evenly, like she hadn’t just accused him unfairly, like her words had been completely irrelevant.

“It’s time to tell me what happened, Tu,” he said. “It’s time to tell me about your miscarriage.”

Her heart became a sick crow inside her chest, fluttering and coughing and falling out of the sky.

“I don’t talk about that.”

“I’ve heard,” he said. “Tell me anyway.”

She shook her head. “It’s an ugly story. A really fucking ugly story.”

He nodded solemnly. “Copy that. Now tell me anyway.”

And finally Tu admitted, “I can’t. I can’t talk about it. It’s too terrible.”

“Tu…” he said, his voice gentle but firm. “You’ve got to tell me. I’m your husband. You’ve got to tell me.”

Fuck that,
she thought. She didn’t have to tell him shit. She didn’t have to…

The sadness from before was back now, constricting her heart, making it feel like she was on the verge of a heart attack.

She clutched at her chest, and Grady’s voice appeared inside her head again.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Let me help you. I’m good at helping people. Just tell me the story. You’ll feel better after you do.”

Now the sadness turned into ugly, raw, pure-grade anger.

“Fuck you, Grady. You’re a male. All you do is put your dick in things. You’ve never carried life inside of you. What the hell do you think
you
know that would make
me
feel better?”

“You’re right, I’ve never carried life inside of me. Tell me what it’s like? What does it feel like to have a pup inside of you?”

“What does it feel like to have a pup inside of you?” she repeated, mocking his solemn tone. “I don’t know, I guess like a big, fucking responsibility. Like it’s been all fun and games up until you wake up the Monday after Thanksgiving with some mange prince’s kid in your womb. And you walk out of his bedroom to find him sitting there in the living room with his friends—yeah, he’s actually invited friends over. They’re passing around a bong.” Tu shook her head, remembering. Then she said to Grady, “You know how it feels? It feels stupid. Like the stupidest thing you’ve ever done. That’s how it feels.”

“All right. Being pregnant feels stupid and that’s why you ran. Because you realized you made a big mistake mating my brother.”

“No, that’s not why I ran. I ran because Luke offered me a hit from the bong. And I realized right then and there your brother wasn’t cool or hot or fun. He was just, I don’t know, an idiot. So I told him I was wrecked and I was going back to sleep and then I climbed out the window and ran to my rental car and I got out of there as fast as I could.”

“All right,” Grady said again, like he was a cop taking her statement. “Then what happened? You went back to Alaska and my brother followed you. And he ended up dead.”

“To tell you the truth, I know as much about that as you do. I started drinking when I was sixteen, Grady. Truth be told, I can’t remember the last day that passed without me having something to drink before that weekend. I thought I could just go back to Alaska, throw myself on my parents’ mercy and they’d fix everything. But I started throwing up on the plane back to Fairbanks. Then I threw up in my cousin, Vince’s, plane…”

She remembered how angry Vince had been at her for lying to him. Back before she turned twenty-one when he’d escorted her everywhere, they’d had a deal. She could have all the fun she wanted as long as he was around to protect her. But if he wasn’t, then she was supposed to stay away from illegal substances and alcohol.

She’d stuck to his rules for the most part, but toward the end of her twentieth year, he’d become such a buzzkill, like a PSA following her everywhere she went. “Tu do you really need to drink this much to have fun? Tu, why don’t you stay in this weekend, watch a movie? Tu, you know you’re going to have to settle down soon, right? You can’t keep partying like this if you want a prince to pledge you.”

Vince used to be her best friend, her partner in crime, but she’d been so glad when her twenty-first birthday had finally rolled around, allowing her to come and go as she pleased. However, his constant badgering was nothing compared to the look on his face, when she’d met up with him in the Wolf Lake hangar, pregnant with a baby he could smell didn’t belong to the Prince of Nebraska. A look of total and utter disgust had come over his face then, like she was the dumbest she-wolf on the entire planet. A look she’d soon see replicated in her parents’ eyes.

“You’ve stopped talking,” Grady said inside her head now. “Go on. Tell me the rest. What happened after you threw up on the plane?”

She continued on in a daze of awful remembrance. “By the time I got back to our kingdom town, I was in pretty bad shape. And my parents—they were pissed. They were all like ‘Janelle was right! We should have listened to Janelle!’ I guess she’d been telling them ever since I acted a fool at her Christmas wedding that they needed to send me to rehab. But they didn’t send me to rehab, because—you know—appearances. They didn’t want Wolf Lake to know their alkie daughter had come home knocked up with a mange pup. So they just locked me in my room, and the come down… it was bad. I don’t remember much, just a lot of pain, the shakes, these weird sensations—like there were insects crawling underneath my skin. I’d be freezing one minute, and burning up the next. At least I thought it was hour to hour. Later on I found out it was more like days, and Luke was dead. My mom was more upset about the scene he caused than anything, because now everyone in Wolf Lake knew I was ruined.”

She stopped, remembering how revolted her mother had looked when she spat that word at her youngest daughter. Tu had left Alaska her mother’s favorite and had returned her mother’s biggest disappointment.

“Mama said quietly getting rid of the baby wasn’t an option any more. And that was pretty much the last thing she really said to me. After that, she sent our housekeeper up to tend to my needs, and she, um… they sent a television up to my room.”

She didn’t realize a few tears had leaked out of her eyes until she felt Grady’s thumb pads on her face, wiping them away.

“The television. Why does that make you so sad?” he asked.

“Because my dad had this rule. All my life we’d only ever had one television, because he said a real family watched TV together, not apart. You wouldn’t believe some of the fights my family used to get in over what to watch when all of us were home—I used to joke my sister Alisha left early for college just so she could watch as much History Channel as she wanted. But my dad never gave in. It was like he wanted us to live on a black-and-white TV show, and it drove me crazy, because everybody I knew had more than one television in their house, and we only had one, even though we were one of the richest wolf families in America. But I guess the joke was on me because when they sent that television up to my room, it just about killed me. They were basically saying I was no longer their daughter, that they didn’t want to see me or know me or live with me.”

Her eyes filled with tears then, and though the look on Grady’s face was sympathetic, he said, “I know this hurts, Tu, but you have to keep on going. After Luke died and after your parents sent the TV up to your room, what happened?”

“I don’t know, time passed, and I stayed in my room because everyone was treating me like some kind of leper. Even the town doctor. He came to see me like once a month, because I guess he didn’t want me spreading my ruined cooties all over his office. He kept saying everything was fine, and after a few months, all my withdrawal symptoms went away. I just wanted to try to fix the mess I’d gotten into. I broke out my Kindle—Janelle had given it to me for Christmas. She said she’d found it in Alisha’s things after she left, and thought I might like to have it since she already had one. And I was so dumb, I just rolled my eyes. Like what kind of Christmas gift is this? What am I going to do with a Kindle? I don’t even like reading that much…”

Tu shook her head, getting angry at her younger self all over again.

“But I broke it out after I got pregnant. I used the alone time to read all these books about alcoholism and recovery, childcare, business—I had this idea that after I had the baby, maybe I could convince my dad to let me work at one of the kingdom companies. That way I could prove to my parents I wasn’t a complete fuck up by doing my job well and raising my pup right…”

A shadow fell over her heart.

“…but then I woke up six and a half months in, thinking I’d peed myself—that used to happen a lot back when I was drinking really hard. But it wasn’t pee, it was blood and amnio fluid, because my water had broke. I was twenty-one weeks in. And it must have been bad, because my dad actually took me to the doctor’s office himself. I wasn’t in labor long. This little baby came out of me. It was a boy, and he was so small… and maybe he would have survived if we had those incubator thingies like the humans. But you know, we can’t go to human hospitals, and even if we could, there’s no way they would have been able to get him all the way to Fairbanks in enough time.”

At least that’s what her dad had said when she’d been screaming at him to do something, anything to help her little boy.

“Keep going,” Grady said, his voice quiet inside her head. “Tell me about your pup.”

Her face crumpled, the tears spilling freely now.

“Oh God, Grady, he was so small. You don’t even understand how small he was… he had no chance. You could tell just by looking at him, but he was still breathing. The nurse gave him to me to hold, because I wouldn’t let them just take him away to die by himself. And I can see it’s hard for him. Just breathing was really hard for him. It looks like it’s taking all the strength he has. But then he just goes for it. He tries to turn, like one last shot at the gold. And I want him to make it. I don’t care who his father is or how he’s fucked up my life. I just want this little cub to live more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life. And I’m thinking, maybe he can make it. But halfway through, he just stops. He’s got all this soft black fur on his body, but his head’s still human. He can’t do the full transformation. He just not strong enough. And five minutes later he was dead. The end.”

She gave Grady the coldest, ugliest smile as she wiped at her tears and asked, “Are you happy now?”

His hand tightened around the back of her neck.

“No, of course I’m not happy you went through that. I’d never wish that on anybody. Now, tell me again.”

Tu blinked at him. “What?”
“Tell me the story again.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Tu, believe me, I would never kid about something like this. But tell me again. Please.”

“You want me to tell you the story of how I woke up bleeding, got rushed to the town clinic, delivered my baby too early, and then watched him die in my arms after he tried to transform to save his sorry life? You want me to tell you that story two times?”

“No, I want you to tell it to me three times. I’ll let that summary count as twice. Tu, tell me one more time. The whole story. All the way to end.”

“No!” she struggled against him. “What kind of sick bastard are you?”

“One more time, Tu,” he insisted. “One more time and I’ll let you go, I promise. And you know, I keep my promises, too.”

The promise of release made her stop struggling. He did keep his promises, and that was the only reason she told him the story a third time.

“Okay, last time. Your brother mated me. I ran. He got killed while I was detoxing. My parents gave me a television. I woke up bleeding. My dad took me to the clinic. I delivered a baby boy, and he tried to save himself by transforming, but he couldn’t do it, and he died anyway.”

“He died,” Grady repeated.

“Yes, he died. The end. Now let me out of here!”

“That isn’t the end of the story.”

“What?” she shook her head, confused.

“He died. And you lived on.
That’s
the end of the story. I need you to tell me the end of the story, so I can let you out of here.”

“No, he died. That’s the end of the story.”

Tears were rushing out of her eyes completely unchecked now and to her surprise, Grady’s eyes filled with tears, too.

“No, it’s not, Tu. You lived on. That’s the end of the story. You need to say it. I need to hear you say it out loud.”

“I can’t!”

“You can. Say it, Tu. Just say it.”

It was only three words, the most boring part of the story, really, yet they were the hardest. Even more difficult to push out of her mind and into Grady’s than the description of her first pup’s death. “I… I…” So hard… but then she bit down on her fear and guilt and sadness like it was a stick and said, “I lived on.”

He let her go then, his hand coming off the back of her neck, his arm sliding down from her waist like a prison cell opening. But she couldn’t leave, couldn’t even move, she was crying so hard. She felt completely destroyed… a fragile bridge that had collapsed under his tremendous weight. Truly broken. And now she couldn’t leave, because she didn’t have anywhere to go. She was bereft, floating out in space without any kind of tether.