Wolf Queen (Wolves of New York #3) Read online

  “Aw,” Colette says, sniffing and swiping at her cheeks. “You two are going to be just fine. I don’t know what kind of hell you’ve been through, but as long as you keep loving each other and looking out for each other, there’s nothing you can’t do. I truly believe that.”

  “So do I,” Felicia says, kissing Colette’s temple.

  “Me, three,” Fern says, stretching out her arms and enveloping both Maxim and me in a rosemary-scented embrace. “Be careful. Be quick. And don’t be afraid to stop by if you’re ever in the area again. I’d love to take you on a moonshine hike and have a firepit under the stars.”

  “That sounds amazing,” I say, hugging her with my free arm. “And you be careful, too. And hopefully, if we do our job, pretty soon there won’t be anything to be afraid of in your neck of the woods.”

  “I intend to make sure of that,” Maxim says, a hint of the old bossy Alpha in his tone as Fern pulls away. But almost immediately he amends, “We intend to make sure of it.”

  I nod. “We do.”

  Which reminds me…

  There’s so much to tell Maxim, so much he needs to be caught up on before we get back to the city.

  We really have to get going, no matter how nice it feels to stand here surrounded by good people and feel safe for a little while.

  The truth is, we aren’t safe, and neither are our new friends. No one will be truly safe until Bane and Kelley and all their various twisted schemes are put out of commission. Permanently.

  With a wave goodbye, Maxim and I load into the station wagon, and I drive east, toward our people and hopefully, a chance at salvation.

  For a brief moment, I allow myself to indulge in the hope rising in my chest, and then Maxim says, “I’m not sure it’s safe to go back to the tower. Cam’s working for Bane. He’s been using his pack gift to make our allies forget their promises and my dad forget things that happened between him and Bane. The stars only know what he’ll do if we confront him.”

  My hope shrivels like a grape left out in the sun, and I suddenly feel even wearier than I did before.

  I glance Maxim’s way across the car to see my exhaustion reflected in his shadowed eyes. “Well, we didn’t really expect anything to be easy, did we?”

  His lips twitch again. “Would have been nice, though. For once.”

  “Yeah,” I agree, dividing my attention between him and the road. “Let’s drive for a couple of hours, get far enough off the path to make it hard for anyone following us to track us down, and get a room. We can eat some food, grab a few hours’ sleep, and wake up ready to make a plan.”

  “Sounds good,” he says, resting one big hand on my thigh. “And so does what Colette said. And what Maggie said, too, before she died. If you’ll give me another chance to be on your team, little wolf, I won’t betray your trust again. I swear it. I’m not the man I was before. I know those are just words right now, but…I’ll work as long as it takes to prove they’re true.”

  I place my hand over his. “I believe you mean that. And I still care about you, Maxim. I probably always will. There’s something here. Between us. Something I can’t deny and…I don’t want to.”

  When I glance back at him again, his eyes are shining. “I dreamed about you down there. You and only you. My life was yours even before you carried me out of that pit.”

  Fighting tears, I whisper, “I’ll take good care of it, big bad. I promise.”

  “Of that, I have no doubt,” he says, threading his fingers through mine.

  And then we fall silent, watching the sun set outside as we race into the uncertain future.

  But his hand is still in mine, and right now that feels like a lot.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Maxim

  We grab cheeseburgers in a small town off the highway and then drive south on a country road and backtrack west for twenty minutes, hoping to throw any pursuers off our path.

  By the time we reach an even smaller town with nothing but a gas station, an ancient post office, and a tiny motel that advertises “free cable” on a flickering sign, the sun has set and I’m wishing we’d ordered extra burgers—even though they would have been cold by now.

  As we carry our few belongings into our clean, but faded room, my stomach snarls like a cat trapped in a corner.

  Willow turns to me with a half-smile and an arched brow. “Guess your first solid food in a couple days went down okay, then?”

  I shake my head, still struggling to come to terms with the fact that my torture probably lasted no more than twenty-four hours total. Thank the stars Willow got me out when she did, or I seriously doubt my sanity would have survived even a week with Gray. “I feel like I could eat the station wagon,” I reply, “stained upholstery and all.”

  She sets the duffel bag the women at the halfway house gave us on the small table by the windows and unzips the top. “Then I guess it’s a good thing I grabbed a few things at the gas station when we stopped to brush our teeth, huh?” She pulls out a bag of crinkle-cut potato chips, a couple of browning bananas, a tin of mixed nuts, and a package of those pink, plastic-looking snack cakes I haven’t had since I was a kid.

  Immediately, I want to kiss her.

  But that isn’t anything new, I’ve wanted to kiss her since the moment I woke up to find her standing over my torture bed and even more so since we bought toothbrushes at the gas station, and I was allowed to scrub the taste of fear and pain from my mouth.

  But I don’t know if Willow is open to that at this point.

  So, instead, I say, “You are the smartest and best woman I’ve ever met.”

  She laughs. “That’s quite a compliment, considering some of the women on your team.” Her smile fades as she sits down in one of the table’s chairs.

  I settle into the other and reach for the bag of potato chips.

  “Speaking of the women on your team,” she adds. “Do you think Cam’s gotten to Hermione?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t think so.” I pause, then amend, “At least he hadn’t before I was taken. At our council meeting, she seemed as confused by the other packs’ lack of response as the rest of us. She has family in Boston and even they were icing her out.” I devour a giant handful of chips and swallow before adding, “That should have set off alarm bells that this was something more than just shifting alliances. I should have realized there was something supernatural going on.”

  Willow opens the tin of nuts. “Don’t be too hard on yourself. Everything’s clearer in hindsight. Like with Kelley. I should have guessed what she was up to the second I saw you strapped to that table, but it took a while to connect the dots.”

  My jaw clenches. “I had a horrible thought, actually. About that.” My stomach cramps, but I don’t stop eating. My body is working hard to heal all the damage it sustained, and it demands food—now—no matter what my emotions have to say about it. “You don’t think they can use Diana for the ritual, do you? To become their queen?”

  Willow’s face pales, but after a moment she shakes her head. “No, I don’t think so. I don’t think just any old mate locked in a basement would do. I think it has to be one of the brothers from the prophecy. And Bane’s already mated to Kelley, and Diana is his sister. Even if Kelley managed to get Bane locked up in the pit, she’d never be able to force Diana to marry him or work the ritual. From what I overheard, it sounds like they need the sacred items I took, as well as the sword, to make that happen and conception is probably involved so…”

  I keep eating, even as my throat squeezes tight. “Like the story Maggie told us, about the queen who fed on her unborn baby and her tortured mate for two hundred years.”

  “Yes.” Willow shivers. “I’m pretty sure we’d already be living in that reality if Kelley were able to conceive. She said it was because I would make a better queen than she would, but…”

  “And you would have,” I say, correcting myself as I catch Willow’s gaze across our junk food feast. “You will. If we can’t find an
other way, then we will take control and rule, Willow. And we’ll do a damned good job of it.”

  Her brow furrows, and her gaze falls to the table. “But I…” She picks at the top of the package of snack cakes. “I don’t think we’re pregnant, Maxim. As soon as I left the tower, I went to a pharmacy and bought the morning after pill. And I took it.”

  “Good,” I say stiffly, hating the reminder of that dark night, when I crossed lines that I never should have crossed. “That wasn’t my decision to make for you. It was yours and… Again, I’m so sorry. If I could go back and undo it, I would. It is…the greatest regret of my life.”

  She’s quiet for a moment before she says. “And I wish I’d told you the truth about Pax before you found out the way you did. He did try to rape me, that was the truth, but I managed to fight him off and get away. I lied about it because it seemed like the only way to convince you to let me stay in the tower where I had a shot at safety.”

  I sigh. “You were right. It was. After the poisoning, I was so afraid of someone hurting my father, or someone else under my protection, that I was becoming just like them.”

  “Like who?” she asks.

  I push the bag of chips away and swipe the back of my hand across my salt-stung lips. “All those men I had such disdain for when I first started attending Alpha meetings with Dad to negotiate territory and alliances. They were such smug, narrow-minded bullies. They never seemed to listen when anyone else talked. Their own voice was the only one they cared about. They thought they fucking knew it all, just because they’d scared their subordinates into silence.”

  Willow pulls out one of the pink cakes, sets it on the plastic the treat came in, and slides it in front of me. “I know you feel like shit right now, but it really is okay. We all have learning curves in life. What matters is that you see where you were going wrong and correct course.”

  I swallow hard, fighting tears for who knows what time today.

  My eyes are broken and I’m not sure my soul is up to the challenge ahead. I’m really honestly fucking not. “But what if I can’t, Willow?” I ask softly. “What if I’m just like them? What if I’m the kind of man that power corrupts, no matter how hard I try to fight it?”

  “Eat your snack cake,” she says. “It’s scientifically proven that men who eat pink snack cakes are incapable of becoming evil Alpha bully warlords.”

  My lips try to lift, but the fear rampaging through me won’t tolerate a smile right now. “I’m serious. The council could remove me as Alpha, but they won’t. They’ve never recalled a pack leader, not in thousands of years of North Star history. There are basically no checks on my power except those I impose on myself.”

  “Then we revise pack law to put more meaningful checks and balances in place,” she says, lifting her snack cake. “But first we have to make sure there’s still a pack around to reform. Which means figuring out if Cam has warped the memories of our people, too, or if we still have a chance to root him out before his cancer grows. Now seriously, eat your cake. I want to watch you eat something pink. I’m easily amused.”

  I take the soft, almost sickeningly-sweet-smelling confection and pop it into my mouth in one bite, then chew soberly, holding her gaze until I swallow. “How was that? All you imagined and more?”

  Her lips twitch. “Not quite, but pretty good. Next time I’ll bring you a pink cupcake with a unicorn horn on it covered in sprinkles and make it so big you won’t be able to eat it in one bite. That will be even better.” She nods and takes a bite of her cake, only to pull a face and immediately set the thing back down on the square of cardboard in front of her. “Oh. God. That’s awful. It tastes like poison.”

  The thought spurs something in me. “We could try poison. Not enough to kill Cam, but enough to knock him out long enough to get him locked in a cell with something covering his mouth so he can’t confuse anyone else. But…”

  She arches a brow as she reaches for her water bottle. “But?”

  “But you’d have to do it. Not only will he be less suspicious of you than me, but Bane said something when I was in the pit. About you and Kelley probably being immune to the Forgetting Gift because your mother has it.”

  Willow shakes her head. “But I wasn’t, remember? My mom did make me forget, until…”

  I wince again, wondering if I’ll ever be able to do enough good for this woman to make up for all the pain I’ve inflicted.

  Fuck, I hope so. I’m certainly going to try.

  “But it wasn’t easy, right?” I ask. “You said she had to work with you for a long time to make the memory disappear.”

  Her lips press together as she nods. “Yes. Several months. At least. I know I had nightmares for a long time. I kept getting in trouble at school for falling asleep in class because I wasn’t sleeping well at night.”

  Misery flashes through my chest, and I want to travel back in time and comfort that little girl so much it shocks me. I’ve never had feelings like this about a lover before.

  But with Willow…

  I reach under the table to rest a hand on her knee. “I’m sorry about that, too.”

  She cocks her head and lifts a shoulder. “It’s actually okay. Truly. If given the option, I wouldn’t have chosen to remember, but…I’m glad I did. It’s part of my life and what shaped me into the person I am. And I always felt like there was something at the bottom of my mind, you know? Something lurking in the dark that I spent so much time and energy avoiding.” She shakes her head. “And avoiding it gave it power. Now that the truth is out, it’s not as scary as I imagined and I’m stronger than I thought. And both of those things are good.”

  “They’re very good.” I give her leg a gentle squeeze. “And I think that supports my theory, too. You never fully forgot the attack, and it took so long for your mother to suppress the memory… It makes me think that if you were only exposed to Cam’s Forgetting Gift for a short amount of time it wouldn’t have an effect on you.”

  Willow nibbles her bottom lip. “It’s at least worth a shot. Assuming he hasn’t already convinced everyone in the tower that we’re evil and they should shoot us on sight the second we walk through the door.”

  “We’ll do some scouting first. I’ll discreetly make contact with some of my most trusted people and see what I can sort out.” I rub the back of my aching neck. “Though probably not my father or Hermione.”

  “In a coup type situation, Cam would go to work on them first,” Willow agrees.

  “Exactly. But there are others, people who will probably slip past Cam’s radar, but who are loyal to the bone and will do what I ask without question.”

  She takes another drink of water, smiling as she swallows. “See? You’re not all bad. You wouldn’t have people who loved you like that if you were a big bad Alpha bully all the time.”

  Her words make me wince and shame rise inside me again. “You don’t have to try to make me feel better, Willow. You don’t have to comfort me. I hurt you. If anyone needs to be comforting and lifting someone up, it’s me.”

  Willow nods, her expression sobering. “Maybe. But my heart doesn’t work that way, Maxim. You were brutally tortured, and you still look like a flick of my fingers could shatter you into a thousand pieces.”

  “I’m fine,” I insist through a tight jaw.

  “You’ve had tears in your eyes on and off pretty much constantly since the second you woke up on that table,” she says, not backing down. “And I know you well enough to know that’s not normal for you. You are hurting and damaged, and I don’t kick people when they’re down.” She covers my hand with hers under the table as she adds in a softer voice, “And I don’t want to kick you anyway. I don’t want to hate you or resent you or resist you. I just want to let go and trust that it’s safe to finish falling in love with you, and that you won’t hurt me again.”

  The tears she called me out on stream down my cheeks as I promise, “Never. I swear on my father’s life. On Diana’s life. On the memory of my mothe
r.” I pull in a ragged breath. “Who would have loved you, by the way. Your heart and your humor and your bravery. She would have been…a big fan.”

  Willow sniffs, tears streaming down her face, too. “Then let’s do this, okay? Let’s take that big scary jump. Together. Let’s trust each other and be there for each other. Because I think Maggie was right about that, too—if we stick together, we can have peace. Not just for us, but for our people.”

  I can’t remember which of us reaches for the other first, but suddenly Willow is in my lap, in my arms, her tears mixing with mine as we kiss. And like everything with Willow, it’s different than other kisses—better, sweeter. It’s a brutally honest conversation, a confession, and by the time she finally pulls away to ask, “I’m not hurting you, am I?” I’m so full of feeling my chest is about to explode.

  “No.” I tighten my arms around her, needing her to stay right where she is. “You feel…beautiful. And terrifying. And perfect.”

  She brushes her fingers gently across my cheeks, swiping away the damp. The tenderness in her eyes makes me believe I am more man than monster, and that I can become something even better, as long as she’s here beside me.

  “I feel the same way,” she whispers. “But you don’t have to be afraid of me, Maxim. I won’t hurt you. I promise.”

  “But someone could take you away,” I say in an equally soft voice, the possibility too horrible to speak at full volume. “Maybe even forever.”

  Understanding and pain flicker in her eyes. “Yes, they could. And they could do the same to you. So, I guess we’d better make the most of every day we get, huh?” She kisses my forehead, making me feel safe in a way I can’t remember feeling since my mother died and the one person who loved me unconditionally was taken away.

  My father loves all his kids, but…it’s not the same and it never was.