Page 22 of Legally Mated
I grinned, but shamelessly grabbed two cookies and pulled Quin's henscratch list of thoughts toward me. “I hope this goes easierthanthat.”
“You get us through this without any bumps, and I’ll make sure you’re supplied with cookies for life,” Quin promised solemnly, but with a gleam of humor inhiseyes.
“You do know how to motivate staff, don’t you?” I told him with a grin. “Let’s start with the travel restrictions and the curfew. I was thinking it might be useful to come at it from a purely economic pointofview.”
“Yeah?” He leaned back and draped an arm over Holland’s shoulders and pulled him close. “Keepgoing.”
About fifteen minutes later, one of the ushers discreetly approached us. "Alpha Mercy Hills?" he said in a lowrespectfultone.
"Yes?" Quin replied, looking up with a blandly friendly smile onhisface.
"There's a gentleman here to see you and your mate, a Mr. Jesse Mutch. If you'd like, I can show him up here, or you can meet with him in one of the offices downstairs." His eyes took in the baby, now sitting on Holland’s lap squealing and grabbing for anything that got too close, and then scanned the papers scattered over the table. I glanced up at Quin and, at his nod, began to gather up our plans and hopes into a relativelyorganizedpile.
"I think we're fine here. Thank you, ...?" Quin stood and held out a hand to helpHollandup.
"Gorvey, sir. I'll have Security bring him right up. Excuse me a moment." Gorvey's eyes rested once more on the baby, and he smiled. "He's a cute littlefellow."
Holland laughed and brought the baby closer to the human. I watched with interest as Holland turned on the charm for the usher. "He is. His name is Zane. Only two months old, but he's already turning over onto his belly." He turned the baby so Zane could look at the human too. The baby made a noise and flailed his arms, then stared wide-eyed at thehuman.
Gorvey laughed. "I have a grandson a few months older. He'll keep you busy, though I suppose you know that, since you've got the twoolderones."
"They do seem to think it's their job," Holland agreed, and then we watched the usher disappear down the hall to get this strange newvisitor.
Chapter17
When Gorvey came back,he was followed by an older gentleman, tall and lean with a bit of wolf about him, in the same way that Laine had a bit of wolf about him too. Behind them came two more ushers, carrying between them a wooden trunk so old the hinges were blackened leather and the wood had darkened to nearly the same shade. It wasn't large, maybe one by two feet, and another foot tall, but from the way they were carrying it, it had some heft. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Quin put Holland behind him and felt the roll of energy spilling from his skin as he watched, not the man, but the trunk being carriedtowardus.
"Alpha," the stranger said, and held out a hand. Quin started to reach for it, then froze. I glanced around, wondering what had startled the Alpha so, and then my eyes fell again upon the human, who had tipped his head to the side and leaned forward, as humans sometimes did when they greeted each other, offering cheeks for kisses. But this was different--it wasn't his cheek he was offering, but his scent rising from the pulse at his throat and the warm skin hidden behind his ear. An Alpha'sgreeting.
Carefully, Quin leaned him forward, accepting the scent offering, allowing his own to flow to the human's nostrils. Then he released the man and stepped back. "Whoareyou?"
The human gestured to the ushers. "Just put it down beside the table, that will be fine. Thank you." He turned back to Quin. "My name is Jesse Mutch. I have something of a story to tell you and, I think, some things that belong to your people. Starting with this trunk, though I tend to think of this as shared property. My family is…was…deeply involved in this." He waved a hand at the old trunk that now had all our attention riveted. Well, everyone except Quin--he was so focused on the human I wondered if he was going to spontaneouslyshift.
"Sit, please," Quin said, and moved to take his place back on the couch. Holland sat beside him, his entire body focused on that trunk, the baby held tight enough against his chest they almost seemed like one being. For once, the baby didn’t protest this constraint, but watched us all with wide eyes, one hand tangling in the long strands of Holland’s dark hair. I sat beside the human and unobtrusively hid our paperwork and planning underneath the couch, where I could retrieve it easilylater.
"A story?" Quin asked smoothly, but his hand went to Holland's knee, making Holland glance briefly up at him before returning his gaze to the trunk sitting solidly on the floorbetweenus.
The human nodded and sat upright, like he had an iron rod through his spine. His hands lay palm down over his knees, as if preparing for something. "You know Mercy Hills didn't alwaysexist?"
Quin nodded. "Until the Enclosure, we were many more, many smaller packs scattered about the country. Thetrunk?"
He must have felt it too, that strange energy coming from Holland--not tension, but the alertness of someone on the hunt, as if they know the rabbit is up ahead somewhere, just not exactly where, and they're waiting for it to break cover to give chase. I snuck a look under my eyelids at the human, and realized he was watching Holland more closely than he was watching Quin, which wasn't usual at all. Maybe he felt the strangeness pouring off Holland too, even with his weaker humansenses.
Or maybe he just knew what was in thattrunk.
I caught Quin's eye and casually brushed my fingertips over my phone, though what good I thought calling security would do when security had let him through with whatever was in that increasingly ominous box. Quin blinked solemnly at me, and I shifted away from the human on the couch beside me, under the guise of turning to look more directly at the rest of them, but really to give myself time and space to tackle him if Ineededto.
"Ah, the trunk. I'll get to that, but it won't make as much sense without the story as it will with it. May Icontinue?"
Quin nodded, and his knuckles whitened on Holland's knee, because his mate had begun to lean toward the trunk, like a cartoon. This man was an Alpha in human form, and he held the information we wanted, with the weight of societal expectations on his side to keep us from simply wresting the thing from him. The smell of the old wood and something like paper drifted into the air and it hit me that this was our heritage, hidden away in this trunk. There was shifter...something...inthere.
Mutch took a deep breath and settled himself, in much the same manner as the best of the pack's storytellers, andbegan.
"In eighteen seventy-six, a boy was born to a poor family, somewhere in the middle of what is now Jersey City. His name was Jesse and he was the youngest of nine at that point. There should have, given the era, been more to come after him, but his mother died of a childbed fever and his father later remarried, to have someone to look after the children. Your typical stepmother story—she preferred her own offspring and made servants of the older ones. And one by one, they all escaped, starting with the oldest, until the hero of our story was the only one left living on the farmstead. He was about seven at the time, though he was never certain ofhisage.
"One day, some men came through selling horses and barrels of beer. He was hiding from his stepmother again because of some slight, real or imagined, and when they left, he left too, crammed under the loose canvas covering the beer barrels. It was only once they'd arrived at their home that they realized they had one more body than they'd started out with, and by then it was too late. That boy was my great-great-grandfather, and the others were yours." He reached to one side and put a hand on the trunk. "They raised him as one of their own, made him a part of the pack as much as he was able to participate. He grew up, learned a trade, and fell in love." Mutch smiled and his gaze grew unfocused, as if he had gone back in time to relive his ancestor's story. "In eighteen ninety-five, during that small recession they had, word came that his adopted family, the pack, were to be forced from their homes, their belongings confiscated, their lives torn apart. Pack Dolnakol would lose everything and, even if they were to win their freedom again, there would be nothing to come back to, because their property was set to be divided among humans, sold to the highest bidder to keep tempers cool. So, he made a deal with the Alpha at the time to preserve at least something of it, and ownership of the property was turned over to him. All their lovely houses, all the furniture that they couldn't take with them. The horses, the forge, the library and all its books. Anentiretown."
"And what was this deal?" Holland asked, in a voice so low I almost couldn'thearhim.
