Fated to the Alpha by Jasmine White

CHAPTER EIGHT

 

We knew we were being pursued this time. We could clearly hear multiple sets of running paws chasing behind us. We ducked and jumped and weaved about, navigating the forest in the most erratic patterns we could, trying everything we could think of to lose our pursuers.

Even after we could no longer hear them running after us, we still didn’t slow down. We knew they would still be able to follow our scent trail; we could only hope that they would decide to back off once they realized the trail was leading them straight to the Morgandorf village.

We weren’t really thinking about what would be waiting for us once we got there.

We finally emerged from the trees into Jeremy’s village—and skidded to a stop at the sight of the whole pack gathered around with heavy, angry looks, which they all lifted to look at us when we arrived. At the center of it all, looking right at us with a smug grin, was Lucius.

We assumed our two-legged shapes and stood before the crowd, exchanging serious looks with each other. Both of us knew we were in deep shit. “I can explain…” I began.

Ricardo appeared out of the crowd, stepping up to us with urgency. “Jeremy, is it true?” he demanded.

“Ricardo…” Jeremy tried weakly.

“Is it true? Have you been harboring a Caldour right in our midst this whole time?”

Jeremy didn’t say anything. Ricardo’s look and several of the others’ turned to me.

I set my jaw and told them all, “I only lied to you all about my name and where I came from. My real name is Evelyn Godfrey. And yes, I was born to the Caldour pack. Everything else you know about me is true. I was arranged to be married to my alpha, Leon Caldour. I ran away from my pack to escape that arrangement, and to be with Jeremy.”

Ricardo looked all kinds of unhappy. And looking at the faces of the pack I could see a whole rainbow of negative emotions among them. Anger. Shock. Betrayal. Hatred. Disbelief.

“What are we standing around for?” someone shouted. “She’s a Caldour! You know what we should do!”

“She turned her back on them!” someone else said. “Doesn’t that count for something?”

“Once a Caldour, always a Caldour!”

“She’s our friend!” That was Tara who said that.

“She was never our friend!” someone said. “She lied to us! She’s a stranger!”

“If she’d told us she was a Caldour from the beginning, we would’ve chased her away! What choice did she have?”

“I don’t care why she did it! I’ll never, never trust a Caldour! And this only proves we can’t trust her!”

“Everyone, enough!” Ricardo commanded. “Elena… Evelyn… whatever your name is… I understand your reasoning. Given your situation, I’m sure many of us might have done the same. But ultimately, you still belong to an enemy pack, and whether you still want to belong to them or not, your ties to them cannot be completely severed. Like it or not, you’re a beacon for trouble that I can’t ask my pack to take on.”

“But Daddy!” Andrea’s voice spoke up, as she appeared out of the crowd, approaching her father. “What has she ever done to hurt us?”

“I’m sorry, Andie. Even if she really means us no harm, the rest of her pack, who knows she’s been here now, certainly does. They’ll come looking for her.”

“Then we could protect her!” Andrea whimpered.

“And how long do you think this pack will accept her?” Ricardo said. “Knowing she’s a Caldour, who’s to say they won’t butcher her in her sleep?”

“You are!” Andrea insisted. “You’re the alpha!  You can forbid anyone from touching her!”

Ricardo sighed. “Andie, you have a big heart. And I’m proud of that. But a Caldour can never be welcome among us.”

My head hung in dismay. “We could have run away together,” I told them. “We were tempted to do that, even. To get away from all the fighting, the hate, the anger… but we came back. We wanted to put an end to this feud, before anyone else either of us cared about got hurt, or worse.”

“Big dreams,” one of the pack named Cole said. “It’s easier said than done. There’s no making peace with a pack of killers and thieves.”

“Your pack killed three of my family,” said the one named Ethan. “Including my mother!”

“The Caldours are more like hyenas than wolves!” said someone else. “They take whatever they want, they kill for fun and they laugh about it!”

“You know, a lot of the wolves in my pack say the same things about you,” I told them all. “All my life I’ve been told the Morgandorfs are bloodthirsty, slavering beasts who would steal our homes and slaughter our pups if given the chance!”

Brock suddenly lunged forward angrily, forcing someone to grab him and hold him back. “Say that again, you Caldour scum!” he spat.

“It’s just what they say,” I said. “The point is, I never cared about any of that. It never mattered to me that Jeremy was a Morgandorf, any more than it mattered to him that I was a Caldour. If we can love each other, why can’t the rest of us?”

“Yeah, Dad!” Andrea protested. “Isn’t she proof that everything we’ve ever been told about the Caldours is wrong?”

“One she-wolf doesn’t erase generations of bloodshed,” Cole argued. “There’s a mountain of Morgandorf corpses standing between us and any chance of peace.”

“Is Russell one of them?” I ventured to ask.

That gave them a moment’s pause. “Leonard thinks Russell’s going to pull through,” Ricardo said.

“Can’t we treat that as a start?” Jeremy offered.

“Oh, sure,” Regan muttered. “Let’s go thank the Caldours for only nearly killing our packmate. We’ll give them a big gift basket and invite them to barbecues so they can FINISH THE DAMN JOB!”

Ricardo looked at me levelly, tempering down whatever prejudices he might have had much better than most of the rest of the pack were doing. “Your intentions are noble, and I can certainly appreciate them. And I wish it were as easy as you want it to be. But there is too much history to overcome. And I’m afraid I can no longer afford to shelter you.” He looked to Jeremy and added, “Either of you.”

Tara turned a worried look to Ricardo. “What are you saying?”

Ricardo lifted a finger to point at Jeremy and me. “The both of you are banished from this pack!” he declared.

“Ricardo, no!” Laura protested, stepping up by her husband’s side and taking him by the shoulder. “Not both of them! Jeremy’s one of us!”

“He threw that away!” someone in the crowd spat.

“He never should’ve touched that Caldour bitch!”

“He’s a disgrace to the Morgandorf pack!”

“Everyone, calm down!” Tara spoke up. “We don’t want to condemn one of our own just for choosing to love someone, even if she is a Caldour!”

“Speak for yourself!” someone said. “He’s a fucking traitor for not killing her the moment he saw her!”

“Yeah! He brought that filth here! Among us! Shared our food, our houses with her… banishment’s too good a punishment!”

The level of hate suddenly being spewed at me was enough to make me recoil.

“Now that’s enough!” Ricardo shouted. “I have spoken!  Banishment it is!”

Jeremy and I looked about uncomfortably, before Ricardo finally said, “I suggest you leave now, while I can still hold them back.”

I exchanged another look with Jeremy, before we despondently turned and started heading back into the forest. We’d barely taken three steps when Andrea shouted, “Wait!” I turned to see her running for me, grabbing me by the wrist and looking up at me with tear-filled eyes.

“I’m sorry, Andie,” I said softly. “I’ll miss you.”

Helplessly, Andrea let my arm slip from her grasp, still holding her hands up in the position where they held me as Jeremy and I shifted to our four-legged forms and loped off into the woods.

*

We ran a short distance into the forest when I pulled up short, catching a scent on the air. Jeremy paused beside me, not sure at first what was up, until he sniffed the air and caught it too. I could clearly make out the scents of Corey, Marla, Jana and Rudy from my pack; they were on our trail, looking for us.

I turned a look to Jeremy; we knew what we needed to do. I let him lead the way, him being more familiar with this area of the woods. Before long we found a stream and turned to run through it, following along its length, letting the flowing water trickle over our paws, washing our scents downstream.

After splashing through the stream for a good distance, we continued on away from where we’d been, running aimlessly into the woods. We just kept on running with no goal in sight, until we exhausted ourselves and trotted to a stop.

We came to a rest at last on top of a hill beneath a tree, where I collapsed down in a dejected heap as I shifted to my two-legged form. My eyes squeezed shut, forcing out the tears I’d been holding in. And once I let them out, they would not stop. I was too busy crying into the dirt to even notice when Jeremy shifted form and knelt beside me and started rubbing my shoulders.

“Hey,” he said, pulling me up and into his arms. “Come on. It’s okay. I’m here.”

“We failed them,” I sobbed. “Our families. We were supposed to stop the fighting… we couldn’t stop anything!”

Jeremy leaned back against the tree, cradling me in his arms. “It’s like Ricardo said: a pack can only be led where they want to go. The two of us were never going to undo generations of hate and violence all by ourselves.”

“So there’s nothing we can do?” I choked.

Jeremy looked a little glum. “Maybe there isn’t. Maybe we’ll just have to accept that this feud is bigger than us.”

“Don’t say that!” I sobbed.

“I know it’s not easy. But we may have to get used to it. Your pack tried to lock us up; mine drove us away. What is there left for us to do for them?  They don’t want our help.”

I buried my face in his chest. I couldn’t think of anything else to say to him. So I just rested there, crying it out against him.

“So I guess we’re left with what we wanted to do before,” he said. “We run away. We put this conflict as far behind us as we can, and we never look back. We start our own life together. No pack, no alphas, no war. We get a place all our own, and we have our own pups, who never hear the names ‘Caldour’ or ‘Morgandorf. ’ Whatever we want, with no one to say no.”

I had to admit, that did sound like a good plan. It may not have been the outcome I was really hoping for, but it was something I could get behind easily. I lifted my head from his chest to look at his face. “I think I like that.”

He reached a hand up and brought his thumb to my face, wiping my tears away from my eyes. He bent his head down, and I brought mine up to accept his kiss. My hand came up to grip him by the back of his neck, holding onto him with all the passion I had as I melded into his kiss; at this point, Jeremy was all I had.

I climbed up into his lap, embracing him fully, my lips never leaving his. My breath was his, and his was mine. Our pressing flesh was as one. My hips churned back and forth in his lap, rubbing my crotch against his flaccid member, working it up and getting it nice and hard for me.

We stayed like that for a long time, just making out under that tree, my hips gyrating in his lap. I think I may have even gotten off once or twice just from rubbing against him before I even put him inside me. Ultimately, we were at that long enough that we ended up needing very little foreplay. He bent and kissed my tits a little, and felt up my butt, but that was about it before I finally lifted my hips up, angled him toward my opening, and sat back down.

At that point, I rested my head on his shoulder and just settled for humping up and down on his lap. I didn’t make any big thrashing motions or loud moans; I just moved rhythmically and breathed heavy a lot. I clutched at his back while he clutched at mine, hoping we would never have to let each other go.

I found myself thinking back to that night in his room, the night we realized that Lucius was onto us. I recalled how I’d wished we could have stayed forever in that room. I still wished that. I wanted us to be back in that room again. And I wanted us to never have to leave it. Everything he’d talked about: no packs, no alphas, no feud… if the world beyond those four walls could have just not existed, if Jeremy and I could be the only people, human or wolf in the world… nothing could have made me happier.

We both came softly like that, and then went for two more rounds, once doggy style and once with him on top. After that point, we finally tired ourselves out, and spooned up together lying in the dirt.

I fell asleep dreaming of the future Jeremy had described. We could live in town, near the edge of the forest. I could go to a local college, and pursue an actual career, without being an alpha’s trophy wife. Jeremy could work for a construction company, coming home glistening with sweat in a muscle shirt, making me want to just rip it off him and smother myself in those shiny muscles. We could have three beautiful pups; two girls and a boy, whom we could take into the woods in the back yard, and let them run around in their four-legged forms and chase rabbits and butterflies. We wouldn’t even need a pack; what good had a pack ever done for us?

It was a lovely dream. And it didn’t feel out of reach, either. It could be the simplest dream in the world to achieve, couldn’t it?

I wanted to believe. I wanted to think that Jeremy and I could be happy.

And I kept thinking we would be until the moment I awoke.

I was still sleeping peacefully in my blissful fantasy when I was roughly jerked awake by something grabbing me by the arms and pulling. My eyes snapped open, looking up to the faces of my own packmates. Marla and Corey were there, yanking me up to my feet, Marla holding my wrists together and starting to bind them, while Corey held my torso in place. Behind me, Rudy and Jana were busy tying Jeremy by his wrists to the tree.

“What are you doing?” I shouted.

“We’re taking you back where you belong,” Marla said. “And we’re leaving that Morgandorf scum here where he can’t get his filthy hands on you anymore!”

“No! Let go of me!”

“She doesn’t want to go with you!” Jeremy shouted. “Don’t you see that?”

“Hold her!” Corey called. Rudy and Jana finished what they were doing with Jeremy and came to grab me by the arms, holding me steady for Marla to finish tying me.

Once my hands were bound, Corey grabbed me by them and pulled me roughly to him, while Marla marched over to Jeremy with a look of righteous anger on her face. “I don’t think what she wants is what’s good for her anymore, Morgandorf!” she spat. “If what she wants is to run away from the pack that raised her to be with a drooling, pup-eating, sodomizing sack of shit like you, then you’d better believe we’re gonna do something to stop her! Now you just sit there while we take her home, and hope your own kind comes and gets you out of there before some rabid weasel comes along and eats your junk off. And personally, I’m gonna be rooting for the latter option.” And then she spat in Jeremy’s face, making him flinch.

“Let’s go,” Jana said, and they started back home, pulling me helplessly along behind them as I could only look back and watch as Jeremy slowly shrank in to the distance behind me, straining futilely against his bonds.

It took hours of me staggering along behind them before we finally made it back to our village; a lot longer than it would have taken us on four legs, but that would have made it a lot harder for them to drag me there. As soon as we emerged from the trees, Corey threw his head back and howled for the rest of the pack, who promptly came rushing toward us. “We got her,” Marla announced.

As a crowd gathered to meet us, Leon appeared, stepping forward to take me from Rudy. He looked at me with a heavy brow and a hard-set mouth, his disappointment with me pouring from him like smoke from a chimney. “You’ve put us through a lot of grief, Evelyn,” he grumbled. “First we thought you’d run away just to spite us. For a while we even thought the Morgandorfs had killed you.” His mouth curled into a hideous, hateful snarl as he said, “But to find out you’d abandoned us to be with one of them… you couldn’t have cut us more deeply!”

I met his gaze with a calm scowl. “I guess that means you don’t want me for your wife anymore. Maybe that was what I wanted.”

Leon’s teeth clenched in anger—and his hand came up and swatted me hard across the face. As I recoiled from the blow and blinked my eyes open again, I saw a flash of remorse running across his face, and he took a step back. “I’m sorry I had to do that,” he said. “I suggest you don’t make me do it again.”

“I didn’t know I could make my alpha do anything he didn’t want to,” I said, undeterred.

I could see I’d ruffled him again, but he held himself back from hitting me this time. “You’ve picked up some sass. Something your Morgandorf hosts must have taught you, I’m betting. I’m going to make sure to fix that.”

I didn’t reply this time, except to continue giving him a defiant glare.

“Where is she?” I heard Dad’s voice then. He appeared pushing his way through the crowd, stopping short when he found me. And he didn’t look any happier than Leon.

“Hi, Dad,” I muttered, sounding bitter.

Without another word, he grabbed me by the arm and began pulling me back toward our house. “No! Dad, let go of me!”

He still said nothing, continuing to yank me roughly along, past the horrified face of my mother, in through our front door and down into the basement, where he shoved me forward, forcing me to descend the stairs. At that point he finally unbound my hands, and shoved me down against the wall.

“I’ve been disappointed with you before, Evelyn,” he said. “And I’ve been mad at you plenty of times. But now… I’m actually ashamed of you! You turned your back on everything your mother and I taught you, everything you were brought up to believe in… for a filthy, scum-sucking Morgandorf!”

“It’s not like that, Dad!” I protested. “Jeremy’s a good man! He’s never done anything to hurt me, and he—”

“Now that’s enough!” Dad snapped at me. “You are going to stay down here until you learn a lesson, missy.”

“Dad, please!”

“Don’t force me to chain you to the wall!”

I stopped talking after that.

Dad started marching up the stairs, while I stepped up to the bottom of them, with him blocking the only way I had of getting out. “I’ll bring you something to eat later. You’ll be cared for. But until you remember what it means to be a Caldour, you’re not going anywhere.”

And with that, he stepped out, shutting the door behind him, and I heard the lock latch. In spite of myself, I ran up the stairs to grab the doorknob, already knowing it was useless. I fiddled helplessly with the stubborn knob, and pounded once on the door, before I collapsed to my knees and began to cry.