Page 83 of Feral Werewolves
“Sorry,” he muttered.
“Don’t apologize.” I smiled at him. “I’m fine. It wasn’t bad like that. I just, I don’t know, I went away. I wasn’t there, exactly, and…”
“And you’re still not there,” he said. “Yeah. That’s okay. I get that, too.”
We were quiet.
“So,” he said, “about Red.”
“Yeah, how did that happen?”
“It was that night I met you,” said Noah. “He cornered me and other wolves were trying to get at me, but he stood his ground and they backed off. I’d never been with just one of them before, at any of the gatherings, so that was different. He took his time with me, like, real slow, and he did all this stuff with his tongue—sorry, maybe you don’t want to know this stuff.”
“No, I guess I see why that was important,” I said. “Like, he wasn’t just using you for himself, he was trying to please you.”
“Exactly,” said Noah. “It had never been like that before either. And then he wouldn’t let me leave. I tried, and he stopped me, and he brought me back here, put me in this room and essentially kept me prisoner, but he was also, like, waiting on me hand and foot. He’d make me tell him things I wanted, like anything I wanted. I told him I couldn’t stay out here without my T, because if I can’t take testosterone, I’ll, you know, not be myself. And he ran his hands all over my chest hair and said we could not have that, and he left and came back with… I don’t know how he got it. He must have gone over the wall. He brought me back chocolate cake and my cell phone and all the clothes from my fucking apartment and… it was confusing, you know?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I do know.”
“What the fuck is this Paladin guy like?”
“What have you heard about Paladin?” I said.
“He’s, like, the wolf boogey man,” said Noah. “Everyone’s fucking terrified of him.”
I sat up straight in the bed. “What?”
Noah arched an eyebrow at me.
“Paladin’s the sweet one,” I said. “There’s this way about him, this boyish sort of vulnerability.Theytake care ofhim, Kestrel and Lazarus. That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Apparently, Paladin led some insurrection. They slaughtered eighteen wolves, like splatter-movie slaughtered them, entrails hanging off the chandelier, blood smeared on the walls, that kind of shit.”
I blinked, shaking my head. I remembered what Paladin had told me about him and Kestrel and Lazarus. He had not made it sound that way, at all.
“Red said it was a bad place. He and Griff were just getting themselves established in the territory, and they couldn’t make a stand properly against that house of wolves. They were… Red says they were twisted psychos, and coming from Red, well, I don’t know what the fuck that evenmeans. Griff felt like Paladin did him a favor, and he let him have whatever he wanted. They let Paladin and his guys have that farm out there, and everyone just leaves them alone.”
I was remembering what Madrigal had said about Paladin, how she was sure I was mated to him, and that she seemed to know him, know about how he played people. There was no way she and Paladin had ever interacted, so it must mean that she knew him by reputation.
Shit.
How had Paladin hidden this from me? Because I believed it, actually. All those things he said sometimes, those shrewd and sly observations about human nature, those weren’t made by some sweet little boy-man who didn’t know anything about the world. No, that was Paladin’s mask, and I sometimes saw it slip.
Had he manipulated me?
He’d contacted me and brought me out here, and…
But no. I didn’t believe that either, because whatever I could say about Paladin, I also knew that he was vulnerable and he was loving and he wasn’t faking that.
Maybe the shrewd, sly man was the mask, actually. Maybe sometimes, he had to slip it on. But with me, Iknew, with me, that was real.
“The sweet one,” said Noah softly. “Wait a minute, wait. You’re not just mated to Paladin, are you? You actually did it, got one of those mating bonds to more than one man. How did you manage that?”
“I don’t know. It just happened.”
“And yet, all three of them ran off and left you,” said Noah.
“No, it wasn’t like that,” I said. “There were too many wolves, and they couldn’t fight back, and I…” I had thought they were dead, I realized. They’d said it often enough, that they’d kill themselves trying to save me, but in the end, I guess that hadn’t been true.
