Page 51 of Tamed Wolf

She's humming contentedly to herself while she picks at her food, choosing what she wants to eat first and tapping her foot as if she's listening to a song no one else can hear. Her hair is shiny and tangle free thanks to me and my brothers’ comb work, and she's wearing my shirt, Blake’s boxers, and Brooks’ tube socks that go halfway up her calves. In short, she's happy but I can also tell she’s antsy.

It takes her a few minutes to realize we're all standing here like creeps, watching her enjoy the food we gave her.

“You're pretty fucking cute, you know that?”

She waves me off. “I'm much older than you. I don't think that's something you can say.”

It's risky to bring up her past so soon after her heat, but I have questions I'm dying to know and I’m not sure I’ll get another chance like this.

Maybe if we offer some of our own truths, she’ll feel like she can share part of her story, too. “Our late mate was a bit older than us as well; I guess the goddess just knows we prefer older women.”

She takes a sip of her coffee and another bite of toast before daintily wiping her mouth and leaning back against the back of the chair. “You don't say.”

I grab her hand in mine, palm to palm, and run my other hand over the top off hers, making invisible patterns. “She was in an arranged/transactional mating when we first met her. We thought she was beautiful of course. And she was.”

“What happened? Am I allowed to ask that?”

I nod and continue my patterns, giving myself something to focus on. “We were young, and her pack was wealthy. She had a good setup. She made it seem like she’d be ready to start something with us when we got a bit older, but now we know she was just brushing us off.”

I know my brothers hate telling this story, but they also know this is part of bringing Lark’s world into ours.

“She never really wanted us,” Blake says, tone laced with venom. “She didn't appreciate the humble life we live here, didn't like the home we were able to provide, didn't want the lifestyle of being in service to the pack. She wanted money and prestige, things she already had with her chosen pack.

“Her arrangement with them was supposed to end once her or her pack found their fated, and most of this information we only found out after everything blew over, but…” Blake is right back in those moments when we were lost and desperate to form a connection with a woman who couldn't get far enough away from us to appease her.

Brooks jumps in and tells the next part of the story. “When we met Arabella, we started working so damn hard to ready ourselves to take care of her. We thought, like schmucks, that we were simply biding our time before she felt ready to be with us.

“And then one day, kind of out of the blue, she showed up, in heat and in our doorstep, begging for us to help ease her through it.”

Brooks is starting to get teary eyed, so I tag myself back in to the storytelling. “So naturally we dropped everything and were thrilled because we thought it was finally our time. It wasn't easy being patient for Arabella because we knew exactly how to get ahold of her, and we were too naïve to even think that she was playing games with us.

“So we got her through her heat, expecting her to move in right after so we could make everything official. She never let us bite her, but we wanted to go at her pace.

“After the heat, she basically told us she had no further need for us, and we didn't hear from her again until other shit started going down.”

“Turns out her heat was manufactured because she wanted to trick the pack she was desperately trying to cling to. Her plan was to trap them into a real mating by making them think they were the ones that got her pregnant through some miracle of the goddess; they never even knew about us, of course she didn't tell them she found her mates. That was a real slap in the face,” I admit, sick to my stomach over past me’s mistakes.

“They had found their mate as well, but Arabella was interfering there too; she was basically some sort of evil genius, developing what she called ‘cure-alls’ to relieve shifters of unwanted bonds. She completely fucked up countless lives in her games, and very nearly cost her pack their fated mate and child they didn't know about.

“For her role in everything, and because raids revealed how truly horrific her experiments were, she was sentenced to death once our baby was born. So, we became single fathers, which has been exhausting, but also sort of the best thing that's ever happened to us.”

Chapter Twenty-One

Lark, Now

My eyes ping between the three of them when they finally run out of words, my mouth opening and closing a few times because at first, I don’t know what to say in return.

It seems to shock the hell out of Beckett when I grab each of their hands as best as I can between my two, connecting us all. “Nobody deserves to be treated like that. I guess not everybody gets that fairy tale magic mating we all grew up learning about. Thank you for taking such good care of me during my heat. I've never experienced something like that before. They've always been something I dreaded, because I never really had a good option for them.”

“Why do I feel as if you're trying to brush us off, Lark?” Blake’s eyes turn accusatory, but they need to hear me out.

“You’re all… incredible. I love your ideas and hopes for a brighter future for this pack, and how kind you are to me. You're good, honorable men with a baby, and I'm, well, I'm astripper. That's the extent of my worth.” I can already feel my heart breaking, because doing the right thing is hardly ever easy. “You can't bring somebody like me into your life, because I'm no good for you. You deserve to have somebody wholesome and good, somebody without all this baggage I have. Someone that can take your word at face value and believe you, instead of mistrusting and dissecting everything you're going to say. I don't know how to fight for myself anymore, I've been tamed for years, unable to break away from the bonds inflicted on me.”

I can read the room, and I know that they're upset, as they should be. They dropped everything to help me through my heat and this is how I repay them? It's not fair to them, but I couldn’t control what my body needed or how they responded to it broadcasting that need.

Blake is nearly shaking, and he smacks his hand hard on the table as he stands, commanding my attention. “That is unacceptable, Lark. Would you like to try that again?”

I bring my hands back to myself, tucking them into my body so that I don't do anything embarrassing with them. “I don't understand.”

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