“When we win,” she says, drawing out each word. “We eat. That’s not incentive enough?”
I huff a sigh. I want to tap the mat. She only sees things from her perspective. Sure, the reality of rank is harsh. But without discipline, without direction and motivation, you get Declan Kelly’s pack—the strong feed, and the weak are food.
She should inherently understand this.
And I can hear myself explaining it, and pissing her off even more. That’s not what I want.
I want my mate to respect me.
To stop fighting me, for fuck’s sake.
I guess there’s one way to make that happen. I can concede. My lips curl. Oh, yeah. I don’t think my scrappy mate would know what to do with a win.
I flash her a wide smile, and then I do something I’ve never done before.
I bare my throat.
Behind me, the grunts and idle conversation stop.
“What are you doing?” Una hisses under her breath.
I don’t answer. She knows.
“Get up.” She squirms in her chair, her gaze darting over my shoulder. “They’re staring.”
I bend my neck a little further. I’ve only ever done this before in nightmares when I was a pup. Feels strange.
It’s not humiliating, though. In fact, my cock is hard as hell.
“Una,” I say gently. I can hear her heartbeat. It’s tripping double time.
Her fingers reach out, tentative, trembling. She touches the place where my neck and shoulder meet, the place where—on her—my bite mark brands her smooth skin. My balls swell.
“You’re moon mad,” she whispers.
I twist to drop a kiss on the palm of the hand that touches me. “Want to go back to your nest?” I raise an eyebrow and wink.
She huffs and snatches her hand back to her lap. I laugh and hop to my feet. “That’s a ‘later’?”
“That’s a ‘no.’”
“Okay. Later.” I wink again just so the pink on her cheeks blossoms bigger. My mate is so beautiful. So delicate, and so ornery.
I stride off to the ring, chuckling.
“Who’s first?” I’m gonna drop every male in this gym to the mat in five seconds flat, settle their wolves, and then we can proceed with training.
It’s a bit embarrassing that I’m gonna do it with a huge hard on, but at least it’ll make it clear who’s highest ranked in this pack.
It’s the female stewing in the corner who can’t help but watch as I dispatch five males, including my beta, in quick succession in tented frickin’ pants.
She owns me, and that makes her the most powerful wolf in the five packs.
And I don’t think she has a clue.
I do convince Una to go back to our cabin before dinner, but she won’t get in her nest. She insists on sitting on the sofa like a guest.
It’s probably for the best. Her heat seems to have eased for the time being, and I need to feed her as much as possible before it comes on in full. It’s true that I don’t know much about a female’s heat, but I do know some. Males brag about how much weight their females lose in three or four days. Sometimes as much as ten or fifteen pounds.
Una’s healthy. She’s got decent padding on her thighs and belly, but because of her leg, she doesn’t have the best musculature. Muscle burns first, and I don’t want her to lose more than necessary.
She’d rip my head off if she knew what I was thinking. She’s real private. When she pisses, she turns on the sink so I can’t hear.
She wasn’t shy last night. She flung her arms wide and arched her back like pleasure was her due as a goddess on earth.
I can’t wait to watch her come on my cock. Fill her up until my seed drips from her sweet pink pussy. Put my pups in her belly.
Rut is riding me, but I’m not so weak a male that I’m gonna give into it. It helped beating the shit out of B-roster. It’s also good that Una isn’t like Haisley or Rowan—she doesn’t look for male attention. If she did, this pack would be in a heap of trouble.
Fate picked well for me.
She’s got that leg, though, and that small ass wolf. It’s not a problem. She’s never gonna not have protection from this moment on. Still.
“Stand up.”
She blinks at me.
“Put the book down and stand up.” We’ve got some time before dinner. I want to see how bad the leg really is.
“Why?”
“I want to check out your leg.”
She flushes and tucks the book to her chest. “No.”
“Come on.” I’m not the kind that’s good at convincing people. I’m more of a doer. I cross the room and grab the book, setting it open and upside down on the end table so she doesn’t lose her place. I don’t know where she found it. I honestly didn’t know I had any. I asked why she wasn’t on her phone, and she said she doesn’t have unlimited data.
Who doesn’t have unlimited data? I’ve gotta put that on the list of shit to fix. I don’t need to be up in the middle of the night worrying that lone females are gonna run out of minutes while they’re off sneaking into town.
I draw Una to the center of the room and kneel, keeping a hold of her hands so she can’t scurry away. She’s got on a long flowy skirt like the crone wears and no shoes. Her top is loose around the neck so I can see my bite. When she blushes, it darkens. I like that.
“What are you doing?” Una bats at my hands as I raise her skirt.
“Hold these.” I shove it into her arms and sit back on my heels. She’s got her weight on the good leg, propping herself up on the ball of the other foot. The scars are awful. I skim my fingers over them as gently as I can. She sucks in a breath. “Do they hurt?”
“The scars? No.”
“But the leg hurts.” You can tell. If she’s been standing or walking awhile, her face gets real serious and strained.
“Sometimes.”
“Does it hurt now?”
“A little.”
“Where?”
She huffs a small sigh. “My hip. My thigh. My knee. My calf. The joints are the worst, but sometimes, the bones ache.”
“Why didn’t it heal?”
“Abertha thinks because it was so bad, and it got infected right away, it just couldn’t. Not all the way.”
I want to kill Thomas Fane all over again.
Or I want to have been the one to kill him. Beat him to death with his own thigh bone.
Una half-steps backward, and I realize my wolf is growling. I cup her knee, stroke up, and try to give her a reassuring smile. “Don’t mind him.”
“It’s hard not to.”
“He’s harmless.”
She barks a laugh. “Now that’s a lie.”
I grin. It is.
“Okay, let’s get started.” I rest my hand on the outside of her knee. “Lift your leg to the side. I’m gonna apply pressure. Press against my hand as hard as you can.”
“Why?”
“I wanna see what this leg can do. Then we’ll see what we can do to make it stronger.”
She’s quiet for a second. I look up. There’s pain in her eyes, and it’s echoed in our bond. I scrub my chest. Shit. I thought since she’s so active, she could take a little more.
I’m about to sit her back down when she says, “It’s not going to get any better.” She lifts her wobbling chin. “You just have to accept it.”