Page 57 of Feral Werewolves
“Griff won’t survive it,” I countered. I didn’t voice aloud the fact that they wouldn’t kill women, because they wantedto use us.
She grimaced. “This isn’t why I came to talk to you. Griff is strong and he’s capable. It’s going to be fine.”
Right.
14
kestrel
“IT’S PALADIN,” SAIDGriff to me, holding my gaze with an easy smile. “She’s mated to Paladin. Obviously, it’s Paladin.”
I shook my head at him. Griff didn’tgetPaladin, not at all. He had ideas, from when he’d come to this place after the big fight, but his ideas were all wrong. “It’s not Paladin.”
Griff turned to look at Paladin, who shrank from his gaze.
“You’re just the kind of guy who wouldn’t keep her to yourself, aren’t you?” said Griff softly.
Paladin was starting to tremble again.
“It’s not Paladin,” I said firmly. Wow, they were harping on this, weren’t they?
Lazarus appeared in the doorway to the kitchen.
Paladin got up and scurried around to pour Lazarus some tea, so that by the time Lazarus sat down, he had a glass in front of him. That was the kind of shit that Paladin had learned while being enslaved, essentially, to other wolves. They’d demand he behave that way. We didn’t demand it, but Paladin did it anyway.
And, fuck, whatever. It helped, because Paladin was shit at remembering to do his chores and stuff. It was hard to be mad at him when he acted like this, serving you voluntarily.
“Lazarus, Griff and his mate are here, and they’re pretty convinced that only one of us is mated to Clementine,” I saidconversationally.
“Oh,” said Lazarus, furrowing his brow. “Yeah, that would make sense, wouldn’t it?” He looked at me and Paladin. “It’s weird that we never considered that, right?”
“I think it just means she’s mated to all of us,” I said.
“She is,” said Lazarus with a nod. “But that is rare.”
“It happens, though, right?” I said. It was funny, wasn’t it? How far I’d come in days. I guessed I fucking believed in this mating bond shit now. I guessed I thought it was real. I sure as hell didn’t think Clementine was out here because she was a danger junkie, hot on the idea of our claws and teeth. It was sort of the only other explanation.
“Is it you?” said Griff, eyeing Lazarus.
“She belongs to all of us,” said Paladin softly. “You don’t need to worry that’ll be causing a rift with us. We don’t rift like that.”
I glanced at him.
He was still trembling. I held his gaze, and I got what he was trying to say, so I picked up for him. A rift between us made us volatile, and Griff was trying to determine whether he had to worry about in-fighting when considering us as possible allies.
“Yeah, Griff, let’s not play games here,” I said. “Whatever is going on, it’s an upset to the entire way the system works out here. You figure, we have a mate, we want to keep her, we’re on your side, and you’re not wrong. The question is, however, how many of us there are with mates, and how many there are without.”
He leaned in. “We have to assume that every single one of the tithes is a potential mate, do you understand what I’m saying? If we weren’t sending those tithes back, unfinished and unmated, they’d be here with the man they were supposed to be with. Who knows how much that’s been fucked with because the way we were gang-banging the tithes? If we can just hang in there, there will be mates for everyone.”
So, that was his plan.
“Might not be enticing to certain wolves, though,”rumbled Lazarus. “Some people spent a lot time working their way to the top parts of your little outfit, and now they have unlimited access to a whole pool of women—”
“Well, not anymore, they don’t,” said Griff. “I put a stop to that shit. If a man gets a charge out of fucking an unwilling woman, I’d say he’s dangerously deranged, anyway.”
My lips parted, because… had he been to a gathering lately? Did he remember what a gathering was like?
That was eighty percent of the wolves out here. “Thing about dangerously deranged wolves is that they cause a lot of damage,” I said.
