Because they had no happy ending, and my love for them was as pure now as it had been back then.
Love didn’t die.
It changed.
Morphed with the years.
But it stuck fast.
Even while my heart beat solely for Eli, Ethan, and Austin, the memory of what I felt for Kian and Joshua was capable of taking my breath away.
So I sobbed in my mate’s arms and let him hold me as I absorbed the grief that would always linger, knowing that I was safe and out of harm’s way and in the arms of men who’d die to protect me.
More importantly, who I’d kill to defend.
Seventeen
Eli
With her hand in mine, we walked into the diner.
Austin and Ethan flanked me with Daniel hovering just ahead, moving with a dance to his step that made me smile, because it told me that in a few short weeks, we’d managed to improve his life. As we passed through the doors, the entire place came to a standstill.
Highbanks wasn’t the biggest town, but we were densely populated and most of that population were members of my pack.
The few humans here tended to be on the outskirts of the town, and I was more than okay with that, since the cross section of our town, the Rainford area, and then Drake’s Point, one of the biggest cities and for which the county was named, was where the humans tended to congregate.
So when I walked in, quickly scanned the diner, and saw no humans, I knew I could relax some and that my reason for being here didn’t need to be put off until some trucker had finished his apple pie.
The diner was an unofficial meeting ground for the pack. My father had been too up his own ass to even consider that the pack might gather every Wednesday night at six PM to talk about shit they knew the council didn’t give a fuck about, but I wasn’t like him.
I’d known for a while how it rolled, mostly because Austin and Ethan had warned me back when we were younger, and also because I knew the pack had to have a voice.
Levers and his wife, Maggie May, were those voices.
My father—again, dumbfuck—had just thought they were trusted by the people. Me? I knew the rest of the pack leaned on them to be their speakers.
That wasn’t how I wanted my tenure as alpha to be.
I didn’t want the elite in my packhouse, eating my fucking cheese and drinking my goddamn wine.
I wanted these people.
I wanted them to be welcome, for our issues to be shared, and for us to make this pack and this area better.
So I let my wolf out. It roared in my head, echoing in my brain as the prospect of freedom enticed it, but then I felt her hand on my back. Immediately, the wolf was calmer.
Which made me calmer.
I was still uneasy about letting him loose, because if anyone knew his full strength, it was me, but I knew I had to. Showing Sabina my power, coming to see that I wasn’t terrifying, watching her rip through my domination, it gave me the courage to reveal a side of myself the people hadn’t seen before.
And I only did it because I knew, within the flash of a heartbeat, if things turned crazy, Sabina would find a way to stop me.
That was her strength. It was equal to mine. A Mother-granted gift.
The power I exuded was enough to make every person within the diner cringe and drop to their knees in submission, only, as I gradually pulled back the veil on my wolf, there were over four dozen gasps, but no one flinched or cowed.
They knew what I was doing.
I was telling them I was here as alpha.
I was here as their leader, but I wasn’t here to dominate them.
Thank fuck that had worked. It had been a hard-won thing.
The hush that had overtaken the diner at our entrance broke at that, and Maggie May, from behind the counter, declared, “You sure know how to make an entrance, Eli.”
My lips curved. The irascible old bat had never called me alpha, not once, and she was one of the few I didn’t mind that from. I appreciated her shrewdness though.
Her breaking the ice like that made things a whole helluva lot easier.
“It’s style, Maggie May. You’ve either got it or you don’t.”
She sniffed at me, but her smirk and the gleam in her eye told me she