lust, but not all of it at once.
Oh, this was bad. He wouldn’t need to try to break out of the room when he went crazy, which looked like it was happening any second; I’d be conveniently right there, and he could just break me.
And fuck, but this was ruining my half-formed plans. I’d had an idea of how to manage him if he was stuck in poor-Arik — well, poor-Jonah, since he still had my fake name — mode. I’d milk it for all it was worth. And if he was furious and finally convinced that he hated me but also wanted me, I’d have let him fuck me through the mattress, while appearing to resist, and then used either his remorse or his afterglow against him.
But now both of those ideas were out the window.
Speaking of. I eyed the two windows in the room, both of them regular old-fashioned sash windows just large enough for a full-grown man to climb in and out of. I’d have given a lot to be able to do that right about then.
But no, that could wait until I’d had a chance to lull Matthew a little bit — and then there was the problem of getting the cuffs off. I was short on allies outside of this house, not that I had any here, either.
And I had to work on that.
Change of tactics. I needed to reconcile his competing feelings, stat.
“Look, I cast this spell on you because I was afraid for my life,” I said, a little breathily and a little ruefully. The role of victim didn’t come naturally to me, but I could play one on TV. “I know I’ve done bad things. But — you know what Kimball was like. He threatened me. I didn’t have a choice.”
“You always have a choice,” Matthew growled, gravelly and low. The wolf was pretty close to the surface, it sounded like. “You always — fuck. You did have a choice. You did.” He sounded like he was trying to convince himself as much as me.
“Putting the spell on you didn’t hurt or kill you,” I said. “But if I hadn’t — do you have any idea what he was going to do to me?”
In an instant Matthew was right in my face, his hands planted on the wall on either side of me and his eyes glowing.
“Four of my pack died the other night, Jonah. Four. Because I was —” His jaw worked. “Because I was thinking about you instead of my family. Because I betrayed them to Kimball. Because I told the council, and all my betas, that Kimball wasn’t a threat and I was negotiating with him privately to form an alliance. No one was on their guard. No one was ready.”
I tried not to have a conscience; it was an inconvenient burden I couldn’t afford. But that shook me. I hadn’t known the death toll on either side; no one had bothered to tell me. I was sure the Kimballs must have lost a few more than that, but then, they were a bigger pack.
The thing was, it took a lot to kill werewolves. Fatalities were usually pretty low, even in a pack war. Wounded enemies would be left to live or die while the mobile combatants moved on to another fight, and they often lived. I’d been counting on that when I turned Kimball into a monster. He looked fucking horrifying, but that was more for shock and awe. And because I wanted to. I’d assumed most of his victims would live to tell the tale.
No wonder Ian wanted me dead. Those were his friends, people he’d known all his life. It was a weird thing for me, to try to put myself in the place of someone with real connections to other people. But for a moment, I almost saw it from the Armitages’ perspective.
Nope, twinging conscience or not, I couldn’t afford to worry about it.
“Kimball didn’t want me to put that particular spell on you, Matthew. He wanted me to tie you to him directly. If I had, you’d have been his puppet, and it would’ve worked out even worse for your pack in the —”
“You could’ve not done what that son of a bitch and his fucking psychopath of a warlock told you to at all!” Matthew roared. “You could’ve said no!”
“He would have killed me!”
“No, the fuck he would’ve. A shaman’s too valuable. Don’t give me that fucking bullshit, you —”
With a wordless snarl