if I let you know what is going on.”
MacKenzie…
Whose voice was that talking to me?
I’m home, baby. We’re going to get this taken care of.
I felt like I should know that voice the way that I should have known the man who was here temporarily. Only I didn’t.
“You’ve done something to me. That much I understand. In the same way I know this place isn’t real. Nothing is this beautiful, this serene. If you want to talk to me, it should be on equal footing. Give me back what you took from me, so that I know you as well as you know me, and we can go from there. Until then? Sorry. I’m going to sit here and think about nothing… I’ll contemplate my belly button for hours. I don’t care. I’m not doing this with you anymore.”
He widened his eyes. “You shouldn’t be able to summon that kind of temper. Not here.”
“I may not know much about myself, but I do know that I’ve got a backbone, and I’m not afraid to use it. So do you want to talk, or do you want to sit here? I’m good with either. But if you want to get anywhere with me, cut the crap already.”
Anton
Sometimes, it was frustrating not knowing what was real, what I’d made up in my head, and what had been planted there in the years that Ross Morgan had fucked with my life. I shouldn’t even have been thinking of that in past tense. The man was still fucking with my life.
Now it was in the shape of taking my mate from me, stealing her mind.
I’d do anything to protect her from this.
Who in the world would have thought I’d even have a mate? Me, the broken Lejeune. The man without a voice. My mother hid me from the world, not letting me see people outside of our small inner circle, terrified every second that something would happen to me. There were days I’d considered hopping out the window, disappearing, and never coming back.
But then I’d thought of Preston and how he’d always had my back, always seen to it that I was treated like everyone else, how it would hurt him if I did that, and I’d stayed. Jarret had been around, too. Now that I understood he blamed himself, much of our earlier relationship made sense. And Rainer? Well, I’d worshiped him. Not that he’d known it. He’d always seemed larger than life to me, like our fathers.
I’d never thought I’d have a mate, let alone that she would be the one and only Omega. Or that she would smell like springtime and understand what I wanted to say without me needing to speak. How was that possible?
The second I’d seen her, when Gus brought her into the house, I’d simply known. I’d never shifted in my life, never been a werewolf, and yet it was like all of those instincts were right where they were supposed to be. I’d scented her, then I’d seen her and boom…she was mine. Hadn’t surprised me she was theirs, too. Much as we were the most dysfunctional bunch of werewolves ever born to a family, we were always meant to be together. Who else was going to put up with us?
My beautiful mate loved us all.
I scanned through my books. I’d never in a million years have imagined that I would encode inside the pages messages to myself and others to explain this craziness. How had I even done this? How strong a connection did I have to this Loup? Could I become one myself?
Being silent meant I had lots of time to think, since I had no desire to try to make my ideas understood to those who didn’t want to take five seconds to let me get them out. My brothers, fine. They seemed to be willing to pause, but the rest of the bunch searching the Internet with Preston could all go jump in a ditch. They whispered about me and never took the time to know the man they spent all that time discussing.
It was bothersome but low on my list of things I worried about.
We needed a lake. I’d written about one. Hadn’t I? What did it mean that I couldn’t really remember? They were my books. Shouldn’t I have known them inside and out? And yet there had always been a distance I’d felt in regards to them. As though someone else had written them.
Now I sort of understood why.