Nan’s house… I felt a pang as I realised I’d need to leave much of what was in there. People would sort through it, clear it out. That filled me with shame, leaving that for someone else to do, but it also hurt. My whole childhood was in that place. There were framed pictures of faded drawings of mine, old toys, albums groaning with photos. Everything I was, that Mum and Nan had been was contained in that house.
I shook my head though. No place was worth that though, drugging animals, helping what I assumed was a frigging maniac stockpile shifter genetic material. If they were cloning, they wouldn’t just be using sperm, would they? Would they be cutting into the shifters? Taking chunks to build new ones? And how did that work? Was the place full of little babies, crying somewhere? Been raised up to…? I shook my head, trying to eradicate the vision of the pack kids from my mind, because it was them I saw, being fed and looked after, but never loved.
And why? That was the big question my mind shied away from, what the alphas had been pointing us to. What did this place want from us? Why were they going to all this trouble and expense? The place they’d built, the equipment, the capture and transportation of all these shifters… They had to have spent millions upon millions of dollars.
And then I felt the strangest thing. A flash of red-hot anger at Nan. She’d drummed into me how to use our abilities safely and ethically, how to stay under the radar, but never why. Where did this power come from? How did it fit with shifters? She’d told me to be careful of them, but she’d moved onto their land and lived cheek by jowl with them. My fingers went limp as I considered this, and then I heard the sound.
I turned to see Jai pulling an old suitcase down from the top of his cupboard and laying it on the bed, then frowned when he started sorting through his clothes and packing them away.
“What are you doing?”
He didn’t answer, just grabbing shirts and folding them neatly.
“Jai?”
When he looked up, I took a step backwards, slapped in the face by everything I could see in his eyes. There was pain and anger, sadness and resignation. Somehow, he’d ended up exactly where he thought he’d be, and he wasn’t happy about it. I looked down at the bag, at his clothes…
“You can’t come,” I said. “You belong here, with the pack.”
He just kept folding his clothes, staring back at me, the movements done on automatic.
“This is your place, your people. The pack—”
“Don’t tell me about my connection to the pack,” he snapped. He shook his head. “We’ve talked about it often enough. The old fellas made a point of telling me when I knew you were my mate. I think they were trying to warn me. You, your nan, you walk so lightly yet so heavily on the land. Ready to up and go, run, run, run. Nothing holds you to a place or people, but the decisions you make from one day to the next. Us? We stay, we stick together no matter what, endure every bloody thing that’s done, and now these bastards come.”
He dropped the shirt he was folding badly onto his bed and walked around the bed to me.
“I told the alphas when I was eighteen that you were my mate, and they said no, not that one. Do you know how often they say that? I can’t remember the last time. That one's a rabbit, she runs, was what they said. They were trying to help me, stop me from feeling…this.” His fingers flexed, as if they could help him find the words. “I know it's different for you, that you wouldn’t have felt it like I did when we…when I made love to you. For you, it's a slow process, finding your mate, but for us, it's instant. I knew, the moment I first shifted, you were it for me, that I’d only love you.”
“It didn’t stop you from fucking a whole lot of other women,” I snapped. “Maybe I’m not pack, maybe I don’t feel like you did, but I thought we had something. I… You’re right, you did make love to me and I felt that, and then it was all ripped away.”