“I’m perfectly calm. I want to talk to Wolfe first.”
Killian was immovable. I let out a sigh of frustration and turned to look at the door. When I turned back, Grandmother had moved and was in my face. I yelped in surprise. “What the fuck are you doing?” I gasped as I leaned back.
She sniffed me.
“You smell odd.”
“You smell like death,” I snapped back, “but do you see me acting all weird and creepy?” I shoved the seat back and stood. “This place is batshit crazy. Killian, tell me how to get out of here, or let me call him. I want to go home.”
“You are home,” Grandfather reminded me. “We’re not batshit, you just smell wrong.” He gestured to Killian. “Killian, boy, did you search her? She’s got something foul on her.”
I was on my feet. “I’m leaving.”
I left to the sound of a pair of old shifters who should be long dead—sorry, Luna—arguing over what I smelled like.
Soap perhaps?And then I felt guilty for disrespecting my elders.
“They don’t mean any harm.”
I jumped in surprise when Killian spoke beside me. “Why are you all so fucking creepy?” I looked over my shoulder. “And they are insane. You know that, right?”
He didn’t say anything for a while, as I marched determinedly back up the hill, a lot steeper on the incline than I thought, and Killian kept an easy pace beside me.
“My mother died in childbirth,” Killian said suddenly. “Dad was already dead. Lightning hit a tree when he was out hunting. The storm was so loud he never heard it fall until it was crushing him.”
I looked at him, but he was expressionless; nevertheless, my steps slowed.
“There was an uncle, a worthless bastard, who wanted nothing to do with me. The Grumps took me in. They were like you see them now. Ancient. Old. Withered. Sharp as the smell of winter before the first snowfall. One couldn’t see, the other almost as bad, yet they fed me, changed me, raised me, taught me everything about who and what I am.”
“They’re your family,” I said with understanding. “It explains a lot.”
Killian grinned. “They’re also hundreds of years old; they have to be. No one knows of a time when they weren’t…that. Isn’t that amazing?”
“They’re…” I stopped. What they were or weren’t wasn’t my issue. “He thinks I’m a traitor, Killian. He thinks I want to hurt my pack, hurthim, why?”
“Well, you’ve not been easy on him, Rowen.”
I pushed my hands through my hair as I tried to contain my frustration while I found the right words. “He came to the Hollow; youbothcame to the Hollow as emissaries for Stonefang. He hid the fact that he was the alpha of Stonefang. He said you were there for pack alliances. We’ve never had an alliance with Stonefang. He was there because he knew I was to be married, and Wolfe, being Wolfe, decided to make it a game.”
“Wewerecoming to your pack as emissaries. You were to be the last one we visited, because Wolfe wanted to doanythingbut gobackto Blueridge Hollow. You know why, don’t you?”
I couldn’t meet his eye. “Me.”
“Yeah,you.” Killian continued, “Because you were the stuck-upprincesswho told him he wasn’t good enough for you. Who told him he’d be better off leaving your pack and finding someone better suited to his station. Was that it? It was,” he sneered. “Yeah, I know what you said to him, Rowen. We all do.”
“I was seventeen.”
“You were cruel and you were spoiled.”
I swallowed past the lump in my throat as I met his stern glare. “I don’t think this is a conversation for you and me to have.” I resumed walking. “This is between Wolfe and me.”
“Nah, you’re wrong. I think it is,” Killian said, not put off by my dismissal at all. “I think I’m the only one who will tell you. You turned him down. He got over it.”
The simplicity of that statement shouldn’t have impacted me as much as it did.
“We went to the Pack Council for Wolfe to be recognized and acknowledged as alpha of our pack, but do you know why we came to the Hollow?” He didn’t wait. “It wasn’t because you were to be married, it’s because of the way that prick from Deep Hollows spoke about you. He said, and I quote, ‘the bitch just needed rutted.’”
I winced at the terminology.
