Page 42 of Wolf Found

Purposeless?

There was the pity Graham thought he’d no longer be getting. That was truly how Joseph saw it. He wondered what the man would have done if Ash had taken him up on his lascivious implications that night in Kismet. Gone through with it and used it to convince Graham to leave willingly?

That might have worked, but in the end, Ash was Ash.

Ash was the kind, loving, honest man Graham saw, not the thief in the night that Joseph seemed to. He wondered if it was just easiest to look back on it not as a lost opportunity, but a tragedy avoided. The very idea of having to look back on Ash, having lost him forever, was so literally gut-wrenching that Graham considered rolling to one side in case he threw up.

There was no point in arguing. The very best he could do was convince Joseph that he was wrong, and he’d thrown away his chance at happiness because it was a “purposeless kind of love.”

Why did love need to have a purpose?

It was the Martingale way. Everyone and everything had to have a purpose. Without that, they were of no value to the pack.

Gavin had told him back at the start, almost a month earlier, that he was invited, welcome, and would be so even if he couldn’t contribute to the pack. That was how love worked. How pack, how family, was supposed to work. You loved people because you loved them, not because they served a purpose.

That was what Graham had been missing his whole life without even realizing it.

Love.

Beautiful, purposeless love.

The very best kind.

“You’ve discharged your duty to Amos,” he told Joseph without looking up. “Not that he’ll thank you for it, because nothing is ever good enough for him.”

“He expects the best of me,” Joseph argued.

At that, Graham did look up. “He expects the impossible of you. He expects you to throw away your compassion and ignore your conscience for what he deems the good of the pack. Do you think this is good for the pack? Locking me up here where I don’t want to be?”

“It’s good for you,” Joseph said without missing a beat. “You’re home where you belong. Safe. You’ll get better. I did. I just needed to be away fromhim. He’s an alpha, and he’s so damned beautiful that you just... forget. You forget about your pack and your responsibilities, and you want to make him happy. But he’s not your alpha.”

Graham couldn’t help but smile at that. At the warm place in his heart that was Ash. “Yes. He is my alpha.”

There was a sharp intake of breath, and Graham glanced up to find thatHEhad joined Joseph in the doorway. Alpha Martingale. He was still frightening, in the way that large powerful men were, but for the first time, Graham felt like he was truly seeing him.

He wasn’t just old; he was ancient. Sick, Graham thought. Maybe his restrictive dietwasserving a purpose. He loomed, like a cat with its back up, trying to make himself look intimidating.

Graham had a flash of Gavin, standing in the door of the Kismet pack house, leaning in the door and smiling as he told Amos in no uncertain terms to leave his town. Ash, deciding to buy Hannah human baby formula for when she needed the help with feeding Paige. Not telling her what to do, just making what she needed available. Dez, smiling indulgently while Sawyer climbed into his lap and called him ridiculous things like sugarbear and hotpants. It was an easy, natural kind of leadership back in Kismet. Back home.

Not like this overplayed dramatic nonsense, elevating the alpha as though he deserved respect just for being born an alpha. That wasn’t how it was supposed to work. People earned respect by actions, not by accident of birth.

Graham looked him in the eye, unflinching.

“I see the outcasts taught you to disrespect your betters,” the alpha said. His voice was even, but there was strain in it. Sickness, or reining in his temper?

Graham pushed himself up on the bed without breaking eye contact. “I respect my betters. I just don’t see any such people here.”

Again, Joseph gasped. “He doesn’t mean that, alpha. The outcasts were brainwashing him, putting all these ideas in his head about independence from the pack.”

“Ah, yes. The outcasts think they have a pack.” The alpha stepped into the room and sick or no, respect or no, Graham shrank back. The man outweighed him by a good hundred pounds. He might even be bigger than Ash. The man smiled at Graham’s fear. Smiled. This man was no kind of alpha. He was a bully and a liar, and he didn’t even deserve Graham’s fear.

Graham drew himself up to his full, if not terribly impressive, height, and steeled his spine. “The Kismet pack is a pack. A strong one.”

The alpha scoffed. “A pack of what? Five? Six? A pitiful excuse for a pack. And three alphas, they say. Only rabid alphas get cast out of packs.”

“Cast out like Ash?” Graham asked. Okay, maybe he sneered a little. It felt good to give as good as he got. He knew very well that Gavin and Dez were both bitten and alpha, but he wasn’t going to share that snippet of information. “Maybe the others left their families for the same reasons.”

“Because they were traitors who didn’t want to do their duty?”

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