Her Viking Wolves: 50 Loving States, Michigan (24 page)

F
J has never missed
his father more than he does before his official wedding. He harbors many questions about the nature of fated mates. Questions such as: are all fated mates so infuriating? So unrepentant? Furthermore, is it normal to feel such bitterness toward your fated mate while at the same time knowing you’ll stop at nothing to possess her?

Perhaps it is only the she-wolves of this time who cause their males such turmoil. FJ has heard the story of the woe that came before the great happiness of his parents’ prosperous marriage. It is a tale shared many times around their longhouse fire pit with his father never failing to give great laugh. But FJ cannot fathom now how his father ever forgave his mother when she did attempt to run after their first heating.

Mayhap because, unlike their she-wolf, she did not get very far.

These musings bring him little peace of mind as he observes his new pack.

He sits now in a great hall that is nearly twice as large as the one his kingdom uses for feasts and celebrations. And instead of a skald to provide music and stories, does this place have music that spills from magical black boxes interspersed throughout its ceiling. And what music it is. Violent chanting and dark drums.

FJ likes this music. It feels kin to him somehow, the ominous beats reflecting his true wolf’s soul in a way a lap harp never could. He also likes this pack.

He realizes this as he watches the Detroit wolves give into their revelry. Though dressed in white leathers, they are not nearly as refined as the smaller wolves of the Alaska pack. Much different from the Alaska pack, but more to FJ’s estimation like Vikings. And he does find something happily familiar in the way they call out to each other with loud voices as they tell many stories of past battles won.

Of course, everything he has agreed to has been for the purpose of securing the hand of their she-wolf. But his new pack displeases him not.

Save for their lack of red hair and the illicit wares they sell—strange medicines and weapons, according to the honored past fenrir—this place and these people remind him of his own. And despite his dark feelings toward his mate, Fenrisson believes he and his brother will fit in well with this pack of brown warriors and their dark beauties.

The Detroit fenrir, seated beside him, leans over to say, “Just got a text from Evelyn. Tiara should be coming down soon.”

The Detroit fenrir’s face is grim as he relays this news. Despite his agreement to their deal, FJ is well aware his marriage to the princess does not please the fenrir.

“How you want to do this? Burn and Fuck or Fuck and Burn? I’ve seen wolves do it either way.”

FJ considers the question for a few moments, then responds, “Fuck and Burn.”

“I’ll tell Yancey.”

If the Detroit fenrir is put off in the least by what shall soon pass, he gives no indication, FJ notes sourly.

Is this why their she-wolf so quickly betrayed them after giving her vow? He cannot help but wonder if her lack of fidelity is tied to having been raised by this man without mother. Yet she seemed so sincere… FJ thinks to the last night they all shared beneath the full moon. The promises they made to one another their seed took root within her belly.

And once again does his heart know great violence.

“Nah, fuck you, man! Fuck you! You want to go? You want to go? Because I will light a bitch up. Keep talking!”

The angry words bring FJ’s head from his morose consideration of their she-wolf’s motives. He looks in the direction of the shouting and sees the Detroit beta, the one called Yancey, insert himself into an argument between two males. But not before both have moved their hands to the hilts of the large metal weapons they, like the every other male in this pack, wear strapped at their sides. Under Yancey’s threatening stare, they eventually back down, but with a reluctance that speaks toward a later confrontation.

FJ frowns. It would seem many arguments within this pack are settled with these strange weapons. This is not good. According to FJ’s father, having wolves settle their grievances with their fists is the only way to solve arguments without losing males. And FJ remembers well, watching two quarreling wolves wrestle and beat upon each other until one or both did give in.

This is the way it shall be during his reign over their she-wolf’s pack, he decides. And once again does a feeling of absolute rightness take possession of him. He feels a sense of belonging here that he has never felt in his own time and place. This wild pack with its dark music and violent nature sings both to his human warrior’s spirit and his alpha wolf.

He also approves of the monstrous kingdom house which will soon become his. Not only because of its size—a mansion, as he has heard it called—but also because of its design. Distinguished as a home for the wealthy on the outside. But a fortress to behold on the inside.

It will be a good place to eventually raise and protect his family, he thinks.

If not for two things, he imagines he would now find himself well-content after reaching a contract with the Detroit fenrir. The need to go back in time to save his parents remains. As does the fact of his mate’s betrayal.

One of these things will be dealt with tonight.

He reaches out to his brother.
“Are you with her?”

“You know I am,”
comes the answer, short and grim.

FJ can all but see Olafr standing outside their mate’s door. Ever her protector.
“Good, then you can bring her forth. It is time.”

A slight pause, then,
“I am unsure we should participate in this ritual.”

“Would you have her run from us again?”
FJ asks his brother. “
Because she has not been properly punished?”

“I have her promise she will not run again.”

FJ resists the urge to roll his eyes within his head, as their mother oft does. He and his brother were in full agreement about what must happen when they stepped through the Alaska time gate into Michigan. However after availing himself of their she-wolf, now has Olafr suddenly become soft and decided to plead her case.

“She must be punished.”

“Must she?”
his brother asks.

“I will not have her attempt to flee again.”

Even the thought of what she’d attempted to do, marry another, give another wolf claim to their pup, is enough to send a surge of rage through his body.

“As I have said, Brother, I have her promise she will not run.”

“Her promises no longer mean anything to me,”
FJ informs his brother. Then before Olafr can irritate him further by once again coming to her defense, he says,
“If you do not wish to see her suffer, you may wait upstairs while I mete out her punishment.”

Olafr’s mind becomes very quiet, then he says,
“No, I am her protector. This have I promised. And I will not leave her unprotected. Not even with you, Brother.”

Something dark pulses inside FJ’s head. He dislikes that his brother thinks him incapable of maintaining control when it comes to their mate. He likes it even less that Olafr might be right. Even now can he feel his wolf pulsing inside him. Demanding his say. And even now does he swell below with the need to give their female punishment. To show her and every other member of this pack that he is her true fenrir—not the princeling wolf her father did choose.

Yet FJ can feel his brother’s disquiet thrumming over their mind link as if it were his own, like a lyre cord struck wrong.

In the end FJ shakes his head. Tells his brother,
“If you wish to prepare her for what is to come, do so now. Otherwise, speak to me of this no further.”

Olafr keeps their mind link open for several beats of the ominous chanting music. And then finally, their connection goes quiet.

“
T
ime to go
!” Evelyn calls across the room to me. "Tell your friend you'll call her back."

I glance over at Evelyn who stands near the door with her arms crossed. Then back at Iggle, big as life on my LED wall screen. Looking at her shoulder, I say, “I guess it’s time. I’ll try to call you back but I’m not exactly sure when.”

“Yeah, understood,” she answers, still typing notes from the short stand up we just had. I don’t think she’s smoked in a while, because she seems less relaxed than she usually is at night. Or maybe it’s just been because I haven’t been in contact in nearly a week, leaving her to basically run She-Wolf alone in my absence.

“I’d say I wish I could be there,” she says when she finishes inputting the last of her notes. “But…”

“You don’t want to lie.”

Iggle grimaces and nods. “Anyway, I can see you still have a lot going on. But no worries, I’ll deal with the Koreans. You take care of…” she glances at Evelyn waiting impatiently by the door. “Whatever it is you’ve got to do.”

“Thanks, Iggle,” I say.

Iggle’s image blinks out, sending the screen back to black.

I pick my way over to Evelyn, who’d only given me enough time to call Iggle in exchange for my agreeing to wear high heels and a traditional wedding dress. But when I catch a glimpse of myself in the screen’s dark reflection, I have to steel myself to keep this promise. The Detroit pack’s version of a traditional wedding dress is basically the tightest, tiniest white leather dress you can shove a she-wolf into without her coochie showing. And forget bending over. Even with my yarn locs twisted in an elegant bun, I look and feel ridiculous. Like I somehow landed in the middle of an 80s metal video.

But Evelyn’s face softens when I reach her.

“You look just like your mama,” she tells me. But then her lips thin. “At least you would if you did something with that hair.”

That makes me inwardly roll my eyes. According to Evelyn, black male bikers can be as edgy as they want, but a true she-wolf should never step out of her home in anything less than a flowing weave of the finest hair money can buy off some random woman in India. Seriously, sometimes it feels like I’ve been partially raised by a walking, talking rap video diva.

With another super annoyed look toward my hair, Evelyn pushes a bouquet of roses into my hand. Blood red, of course. Then she all but shoves me out the door.

Where Olafr is waiting near the top of the stairs.

I’m once again thrown by his new look. With his hands shoved into the pockets of his black leather jacket, he’d be easy to mistake for a Dark Wolf born, even with the red stubble on top of his head.

“Hey,” I say out loud.

“Hello,
Varra
,”
he answers inside my head. His hands come out of his pockets and for once, he looks as awkward as I feel, with his arms hanging artlessly at his sides.

But I’m happy to use the mind link, especially with Evelyn standing right there.
“Have you been waiting here the whole time?”

“Yes. This place is very…not like the Alaska house.”

I let out a wry chuckle. Our overblown mansion, with all its excessive 50s nouveau riche grandeur overlaid by the pack’s weird heavy-metal-meets-rap aesthetic, must seem like night to day in comparison to that ski lodge my Alaska relatives call a kingdom house.

“No, it’s not,”
I agree.

“And your dress, it is very different from any other I have seen.”

His gaze scans my dress and though male wolves don’t usually give off an arousal scent, I can tell exactly what he’s thinking by the way his expression darkens with lust. Which would be fine. He’s my mate and from a time period where most she-wolves keep themselves covered up. But then the scent of my arousal erupts between us.

I swear I can actually see his glowing eyes dilate as he takes a step toward me.

“Okay, okay,” says Evelyn, grabbing me by the arm. “None of that. We got a wedding to get to and we already kept everybody waiting long enough.”

She pulls me past Olafr toward the stairs. But he catches me by the arm before she can lead me down.

“Varra,” he says inside my head.
“No matter what comes after this, I would have you know…”

He stops, looking away from me like he’s struggling to find the right words. Then he comes back with,
“My brother does what he does not because he has no love for you, but because he wishes he had not so much.”

He takes my hand and strokes it over his fuzzy sheen as he says, “
It is hard for me, your protector, but even harder for your fenrir to love you as greatly as we do.”

I understand his words…I think. He’s afraid I won’t want to marry FJ because of the multi-hour silent treatment. But...

“This isn’t about love, this is about living. All I want is for you to live.”

I tell him this, once more trying to make him understand why I did what I did and why I don’t want to participate in this farce of a wedding. But my words only seem to bring Olafr pain. He brings my hand down and rubs it against his chest as if trying to swab out some sad emotion.

Then with a mournful look, he lets me go.

Evelyn quickly takes advantage of Olafr finally breaking our physical connection and hauls me down the stairs. The next thing I know, I’m in the open ballroom with a white leather wall of wolves on either side of me. They’re all shouting, a mix of jeering and laughing, and I can’t tell if they’re congratulating me or shouting their disapproval about my mate switchout.

In either case, the music abruptly switches to “Bag Full of Money,” letting both the haters and the friends know this wedding is happening whether they like it or not. I walk down the informal aisle with Rick Ross crowing about a bitch who looks so good, he not only compares her to a bag of money, but lets her count his cash while she’s riding his dick. Much like the wedding dress, this is the Detroit pack’s off-brand idea of romantic.

I can only wonder what FJ thinks about all this. And as I walk toward the steps at the front of the stage, my eyes bounce everywhere, trying to stay on high alert.

I know my father didn’t just cave. I know, like I know the C++ code for the dragons in
Viking Shifters,
he still has something up his sleeve. And I can smell the incoming double-cross as sure as the old blood coating the stage’s back wall.

My eyes go to FJ, standing on the stage with my father. But this time I don’t bother reaching out to him, because I can almost feel his staunch silence, resolute and surrounding him like an invisible wall, determined to keep me out.

Still, he’s a sight to behold in our traditional groom’s wear: black leather pants, a suit jacket with leather trim, and a leather tie with our insignia on it. With his crazy hair smoothed back into a neat man bun, and his sword strapped to his back, he should look out of place, but…he doesn’t. In fact, he seems totally comfortable. Like the Mad Max scene unfolding around us intimidates him zero percent.

His gray eyes meet mine and flare, like whatever he was expecting, it wasn’t me in this dress. And for a moment, his wall slips and I can tell…he likes what he sees. Likes me.

That’s when the roar of the Mad Max crowd and Rick Ross’s many bitch-drops fade into the background. Because for one chest-aching moment, it almost feels like this is real. Like we are truly mates fated to be together forever.

“A fated mate cannot be denied.”
FJ’s words from the week before whisper across the space between us.

But then FJ seems to remember what I did, and moreover how angry he still is that I did it. And his expression goes so icy, my breath catches.

I’m at the steps now. It only takes a few minutes to climb them, but it feels like a trip of a thousand miles with FJ watching me with his frosted-over eyes. He doesn’t say anything when I finally reach him. He doesn’t even acknowledge my arrival. Just turns to face my father.

So I do the same, feeling hollow down to my bones. We’re together on stage but it feels like we’ve never been so far apart. Not even when we were in two different centuries.

I find myself looking at my father, willing him to start the damn ceremony already so we can get to the part where he breaks whatever promises he made to FJ.

I don’t mean that. I really don’t mean that. But I don’t realize how much I don’t mean that, until my Dad calls out to the crowd, “I’m going to begin this wedding here today with the story of my father and the Princess of Arkansas.”

No!
I scream on the inside, my stomach freezing over with horror. Then I say it out loud. “No, Dad! Please don’t do this!”

But my protest is drowned out by the loud approving yell of the crowd.

You see, there are two versions of a Detroit pack wedding ceremony. One, based in human tradition, and one based on a tradition only our pack adheres to, because it’s based on our founder’s mating story. Also, because it’s truly fucked up.

Back in the day, my grandfather was the son of a poor Arkansas farmer, living in one of the only majority black state packs in the nation. At the time, the pack’s princess was pledged to one of the wealthier members of their pack, the son of the wolf who owned their town’s only bank. Despite his humble background, my grandfather grew up to be big and strong. Because of his size, he was given the job of protecting the princess 24/7, so no one else could claim her when she went into heat. When that time came, my grandfather did as instructed and ran to get the banker’s son. But instead of bringing him back to the princess, Granddad pulled out a shotgun, killed the banker’s son, and then claimed my grandmother as his own. Which is how they ended up mated in Detroit. Because they were hiding out from my grandmother’s father, the Arkansas alpha, who was killing mad that a farmer’s son had claimed his precious daughter.

Ugly story, right? It’s totally not cool to kill somebody’s fiancé because you want to fuck her yourself. But the Detroit pack doesn’t agree. In fact, they’ve decided to take that story one step further. In the form of a ritual called the Speak Now—as in Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Piece—pun totally intended.

Except there isn’t much speaking, just killing, with whoever is left alive claiming the bride.

Some she-wolves think this is an awesome idea. I’d even heard of girls purposefully stringing along a wolf they had no intention of marrying so others wouldn’t say they were too ugly to be desired by any other wolf.

But if a she-wolf wanted, she could ask that the ritual not be included in her ceremony, and I had asked through Clyde. So why was this happening?

My thoughts stop short when I realize what’s happened. My father agreed there wouldn’t be a Speak Now ritual for my wedding to
Kyle
. But he and my twin proxy never discussed my wedding to FJ. And now it’s too late.

Grinning, my father tells the story of the Detroit pack’s founding king. But his smile hardens as he finishes the story with, “My father believed any wolf should be able to marry whatever mamma jamma he wants so long as he’s a bad enough muthafucker to claim her. Which this wolf right here thinks he is. Only thing is…”

My father scans the crowd, seemingly connecting eyes with every unmarried male in the ballroom. “This red wolf ain’t just trying to claim my daughter, he says he want the whole damn pack! This red wolf thinks he’s so bad, he wants me to give him the Detroit title, same as if he was my son!”

There’s no mistaking how the crowd feels about that. A deafening chorus of boos rises up as I turn to FJ, shocked the hell out.

“You asked for WHAT?”
I shriek inside his mind.

But I’m once again met with a whole bunch of silence, and FJ’s eyes merely flicker up to the ceiling, as if he’s wondering where all that booing’s coming from.

“Know what I told him?” my father yells out to the crowd. “I said sure, you can marry my daughter. Have the title of
my
pack. You can have whatever you want…
as soon as you get through the ceremony
.”

And just like that, it’s all made clear. Why my father didn’t kill FJ and Olafr on the trip down here. Why he allowed it to get this far.

This was his plan all along. To
officially
kill FJ. Then whichever patsy won this fight would end up meeting an early death, easily pinned on a rival gang. Leaving me mate-free so Dad could make me do exactly as he’d planned all along. Marry the gay prince of North Dakota, with the child now growing inside me serving as an heir for Detroit if it’s a boy.

It was brilliant when you think about it. Because if I’d just married Kyle, there was always a chance what really went down in Alaska between me and the Viking brothers would get back to the pack and cause problems. This new plan allows my father to put it all out there…then get rid of it with the Speak Now ritual.

“FJ, do you consider yourself a bad enough muthafucker to marry this mamma jamma?” my father asks the man he’s turned into a pawn.

I have no idea if FJ even knows what that means, but he inclines his head and answers, “I do,” his deep authoritative voice ringing out over the crowd.