On the Prowl by Kate Rudolph
27
Em rested easily,but morning came quickly and Andre couldn't sleep anymore. They were wrapped all around each other in the bed, and he looked at her for a long while, paying attention to the curve of her jaw and the way her blonde hair fanned out over the pillow exactly as he imagined it.
This was the kind of heaven he had never dared to dream of. And if he wasn't careful, it would all slip through his fingers before he could make it his for good. He didn't want to think it, and he wouldn't let those thoughts stain their bed.
Andre slipped away, careful not to wake Em from her dreams. She worked hard and she needed the rest, especially considering how late they had stayed up the night before.
He had to turn away, to convince himself that kissing her awake and renewing their lovemaking was not the way to start the day.
They could do that after she woke up later.
But first he needed to truly consider all that he had learned the night before. He and his pack knew that magic must exist. After all, a witch, or a warlock, or a wizard of some kind had performed a spell on them in the Black Forest of Germany nearly three years before. None of them had been bitten, none of them had known what was happening.
And then one night, more than a month later, they transformed and ran through the woods as wolves.
He and the others had been stumbling through their lives ever since then. After the abduction but before the first transformation, they had all been kicked out of the military, given large payouts for their silence. Andre didn't think the military knew exactly what had happened to them. They had been dismissed to prevent an international incident with one of the country's strongest allies.
He and his pack were lucky. He shuddered to think what would've happened if they had become wolves when the military still owned them. Tests. Secret detainment facilities. A whole lot of needles. And no hope of freedom over again.
But Vi's information now gave him more than any of them had learned up to this point. They had been stumbling through, figuring out the limitations of their abilities by trial and error. But there was no way to test magic, not when none of them knew a thing about it.
Though he had seen Rowe perform a few card tricks that bordered on sorcery, not that it counted for anything.
Somehow, he was pretty sure that Vi would tell him it wasn't the same.
And then there was the mate thing.
Andre’s wolf perked up at that thought. And it wanted to insist that he should go back into the bedroom and wake Em up to claim her. There had been a point the night before where he had been almost certain that he should grow fangs and bury them in her skin, marking her as his mate for anyone to see.
He had resisted. Barely.
And he could not let his wolf rise to the surface, or he knew he would not be able to resist again.
He didn't know the full extent of what mating meant for wolves. Was it fate? Chemistry? Owen and Stasia were feeling out their own relationship, and Andre had not felt the need to pester them to try and figure things out.
But now he needed to know. Now he had Em. And he was determined to be the best mate that he could be.
Did she want that? They had gone from barely tolerating one another to bed in a matter of days, and while he knew his heart, he didn't know hers. Would she expect him to walk away when this was all done?
His wolf didn't like that, and he didn't either. He wasn't sure that he could. But it was a problem for later. He had to keep her body safe before he could claim her heart.
And hopefully he would have time to ask Vi more questions about what it meant to be a wolf, what it meant to be a mate, and about everything there was to know about magic.
Andre had a long list of notes and questions, but he knew Gibson would be happy to receive them. It was more intelligence than they'd had in a very long time. And it might finally start to unravel the mystery of what they were and why they had been turned.
Andre didn't really care about the why. He was inclined to think they had been convenient targets, as convenient of targets as people living on a secure military base could ever be. Or maybe it was their military training that made them ideal.
There was nothing special about him. His family was as normal as they came, and before he'd been turned into a werewolf. he couldn't fool himself into thinking he had been anything spectacular.
A bit broody. A bit inclined to sulking. But not the kind of person that was destined to become a werewolf.
He didn't care about destiny. It had never done anything for him. Except maybe put him in Em's path.
And he would thank it for that. But only for that.
He looked over his notes again. He would need to rewrite them and put them into a more coherent order before sending them on to Gibson.
But he could hear Em moving around in the bedroom, and he put the notebook aside. It could wait for a bit. He wanted to wish his mate a good morning.