Fear the Heart (Werelock Evolution Book 2) (26 page)

“His reasons are his own and not for you to judge!” I maintained. “Why can’t you get it through your thick head that I won’t give up on him? I can’t! I told you … about my mom … God, I thought you understood …”

It was the wrong time for my voice to break with emotion, diminishing what should only have been hate-filled words directed at Alex, but I knew the moment it had by how his eyes upon me softened with an infuriating mixture of concern and pity.

“I do. Baby, I
do
understand,” he conciliated, reaching for me. I smacked his hand away. “But, Milena, your mother changing from brain cancer and Raul simply never growing into the person you thought he would are hardly the same,” he stressed, his eyes pleading.

“I don’t care what you think! Your opinion of my brother doesn’t matter.
You
don’t matter!” There. That wiped the pitying look from his face.

“Milena, this phony hero role he’s playing is far from motivated by a desire to secure your happiness. How often over the years do you think he’s even considered what you want?” He threw his hands in the air in a display of exasperation. “Where the hell was he for the last year when you needed him?”

“Trying to escape persecution from you for the crime of loving your sister!”

“He was never in love with Lessa,” he seethed back at me, his eyes alight with fury.

“How dare you presume to know that?” I charged, stepping forward and jabbing my pointer finger into his pectorals. “You asshole,” I railed, “you don’t know my brother’s heart! And since when have you ever concerned yourself with what others want?” I was so over his sanctimonious bullshit. “Who the fuck made you an expert on love and selflessness?”

His fingers enveloped the wrist attached to my attacking pointer finger, and he yanked me flush against his heated chest. “You did.”

His expression was austere, yet his tone had gentled, and I was momentarily thrown off course pondering those two little words as his scent toyed with my nether regions and his long fingers began to massage my captured hand. I stood stock still like an idiot, craning up at him, trying to catch my runaway breath as his other arm wound about my waist.

I’d nearly forgotten what we were arguing about until he spoke again. “Raul is not the same brother you knew,” he stated slowly, flatly, casually tossing gasoline over my flames of anger that had just barely tempered. I ignited like a bottle rocket.

“Because you changed him!” I ripped my hand from his and pushed against his chest once more. This time, he didn’t budge. And my lungs burned. He had only the one arm around me, but it might just as well have been a steel band keeping me locked in place against him. “You and your fucked up, evil world did this to him!”

I winced as that bizarre, stabbing pain lanced my heart again. “He was just an innocent kid when Mateus took him from me.” The more I struggled to disengage, both physically and emotionally, from Alex, the breathier my voice sounded to my ears.

“I gave him exactly what he wanted, Milena. Nothing less than what he begged me for, time and again.” His words were cold, his eyes emotionless. But his body felt so hot and alive everywhere it touched me. And somehow I knew the pain that seared my heart was his. I was hurting him.

“I don’t mean just making him a werewolf, I mean this whole world. Raul never chose this—Mateus forced it on him, and you—you did nothing but make it harder for him!” Though I’d ceased struggling, I remained strangely winded as I stared up at Alex’s cruelly beautiful face. “How can you stand there and fault him for trying to make the best of his shitty circumstances?”

“I can and damned well will fault him for using my sister to try and do it.”

“Good grief, she’s hardly a child,” I sneered. “My God, how old is Alessandra? Three hundred? I doubt Raul was her first rodeo.”

Alex’s brow shot up, as did both of my own at my use of the goofy saying my mother had often annoyed me with as I realized I’d likely more or less just called his sister a slut.

He looked momentarily torn between laughter and feigned indignation as he bit the insides of his cheeks, before stowing his emotions and responding smoothly, “Three hundred and ninety-eight. Since you’re so eager to lay blame anywhere but your precious brother, at least acknowledge this world was forced upon him by that idiot of all selfish idiots, Joaquin Salvatella.”

“Joaquin?” I was perplexed, and swiftly growing dizzy.
Something was wrong with me.
It seemed harder and harder to breathe, but I tried to dismiss it as too much wine spritzer … and too much Alex in my personal space.

“You mean the blood curse?” I panted, folding my now useless noodle arms in against the immovable wall of his abdomen. Damnit, why did he constantly have to be shirtless?
And smell so edible?
“Joaquin was just trying to protect Sofia’s family.”

“By cursing the kin of the only woman he ever loved?” Alex indicted. “Alcaeus can spin that madman’s pathetic tale like he’s some kind of romantic hero, but the truth is that son of a bitch was every bit as selfish and greedy as the rest of his clan, if not more so. Not even the murder of his mate and her family was enough to make him forgo his quest to run the great game of who holds the ultimate power.”

I shut my eyes to fend off the dizziness engulfing me. My forehead slumped forward against Alex’s chest as he slandered the genesis of my doomed supernatural fate.

He paused, and his voice softened as his hand moved up to cradle the back of my head. “Even from the fucking grave. And though it meant cursing all future generations descended from his true mate.”

When I managed only a muffled wheezing noise in reply, Alex stiffened and his lips cursed against my crown, “Fuck. Fuck, I’m sorry, baby.”

I was trying to discern which part of our miserable discourse he was suddenly apologetic over, when he drew my face away from his chest. “Open your eyes, Milena.”

My eyelids snapped open to behold his frowning countenance, even as my stomach somersaulted in anxious protest. I hadn’t intended to open my heavy eyelids at all—but his words had not been phrased as a request.

“Breathe normally,” he instructed next. He looked nervous.
Or excited.
Perhaps both?

I did. I could breathe normally at last. As my dizziness abated, my stomach dropped further as it occurred to me these were Alpha commands he was issuing. And I was obediently responding to them. What the fuck? It was of little comfort that he looked equally confounded as he held my face between his hands, studying me.

“Open your mouth.”

My jaw unhinged. His scowl deepened, even as his pupils dilated with some sort of twisted approval, and I caught the briefest glimpse of thoughts that were no doubt dark and sinister lurking in their depths. His thumb traced my bottom lip as he murmured, “I’ll be damned.”

Meeting no resistance, that exploring thumb found its way inside my mouth. “You’re not fucking with me, are you?” Alex asked, more to himself than to me.

He seemed to be avidly searching my features for something only he understood as he whispered another directive in a strange language that wasn’t Portuguese. It wasn’t any language I could readily place. It sounded ancient. Yet I sensed it was a directive by the way my blood thrummed with excitement and my lips closed eagerly around his thumb in response, my tongue rejoicing in the taste of him as I drew him farther into my mouth, sucking.

His hooded eyes rolled back and he rocked slightly on his heels before steadying his balance as a growl reverberated through his chest. His jaw tightened, color flooding his face and upper torso.

“This is bullshit,” he rasped, before proceeding to unleash a wellspring of mumbled profanity interspersed with dry, almost psychotic laughter.

I was thoroughly lost as to what the deuce was happening, but I had trouble caring as my body flared to life, vibrating with renewed desire as I sucked harder on his thumb, my naughty heat-cycle mind suddenly wishing it was the turgid appendage now tenting Alex’s shorts that was in my mouth as he swayed on his feet and his eyes darkened with lust in response to my attentions.

“Fuck me,” he grumbled softly, his voice rough with pent-up need, “I’d give nearly anything not to have a conscience right now. Or to love you so much.”

I had no time to process my stupefaction at his words, because in the blink of an eye my back was slammed against the metal front of a refrigerator, anchored by one of Alex’s hands groping my breast as his other hand worked to hike the long fabric of my borrowed dress up my thighs enough to accommodate the girth of his own thigh so that it could press deliciously between my spread limbs, further securing me to the cold, hard appliance. Now we were both panting.

“Where’s your wolf, baby?”

The question was unexpected, and I shook my head in bewilderment as I realized I didn’t know. I hadn’t sensed her presence much since my last intense orgasm in the forest. I only knew I wanted his thumb back in my mouth. Or his tongue … or something else more substantial, as my aroused sex organ beat a tattoo against the muscled thigh I was straddling. I still wasn’t wearing any knickers, and the thin, rumpled silk separating my crotch from his thick, hard leg was swiftly becoming soaked.

“What’s happening?” I asked instead. “What’d you say to me in that strange language? Why couldn’t I breathe right before? Why does it seem as if I’m taking orders from you?”

Did you just say you loved me?

“I … I’m going to … fix it,” he assured, although his voice wavered. “I need to see your wolf. Let her out. Now.”

I was about to remind him that I didn’t know how, when my vision changed abruptly, and my canines extended.

“Stop. That’s far enough,” he commanded, leaving me to fear that my wolf might’ve actually come out all the way if he hadn’t.

I could feel my she-wolf’s giddy excitement, sense her desire for Alex melding with my own, but also her apprehension at having been called out. Oddly, she seemed to want to tuck tail and hide from him—which was quite a departure from her recent behavior in the forest.

“What’s happening?” I ventured tentatively again, trying to keep the panic out of my voice.

Had Alex really just said he loved me—in a roundabout way?

“My dream come true and your worst nightmare,” he replied with a wry grin. “It would seem that you’ve accepted me as your Alpha already.”

“No, no, I didn—”

“Not a question. Fact. But not to worry, I realize you didn’t intentionally choose me, and I suspect you’d rather eat glass … or something to that effect, so I’m going to let you off the hook.”

My wolf had accepted him as our Alpha? Without my say so?

“But when … how? How did it happen?”

“Don’t know, baby.”

“Really? You have no idea?” My eyes narrowed. “And it couldn’t have had anything to do with that part in the woods earlier when you professed to be my Alpha and then spanked me to orgasm?”

His eyes flew to the ceiling. “Fuck’s sake, I said I’d fix it. Can’t you at least
try
not to provoke me into changing my mind?”

When I continued to spew questions and babbled protests, he silenced me with a warning snarl so loud my ears smarted, his irises flashing amber and his own canines elongating before my eyes in an altogether frightening display of feral dominance.

My first instinct was to turn my head away—to offer him my throat as Alcaeus had taught me, but Alex’s hands held my face firmly in place, preventing it. And he only growled louder when I averted my eyes instead.

“Do
not
look away from me,” he ordered. “I will not accept your submission.”

I forced my eyes back to his.

“I am not your Alpha,” he stressed each word, speaking clearly and in his most commanding tone. And yet there was a tense, regretful quality inherent as well. My inner animal bayed in protest. “You submit to no one, Milena,” he added. “Not to me, not Alcaeus … and absolutely
never
to a Salvatella. Do you understand?”

I did. And I didn’t. My human side understood he was attempting to do the right thing by me, and for that I was immeasurably relieved. Grateful. But my animal side felt perfectly awful—hollow and bereft. My she-wolf felt … rejected. Cast out.
Defective.

“Do. You. Understand?” he insisted more sternly this time.

I sensed my she-wolf’s resignation and I nodded slowly.

“Good,” he exhaled in relief. Yet he looked devastated as the glow faded from his irises.

And I felt heartbroken
.

“Why … what does this mean? Why’d you do that?”

“So you may proceed to challenge, attack, and call me all the nasty names you want to with no ill effects.” He smiled weakly as his knuckles grazed the side of my neck in a feather light caress. “And because vessels are destined to lead, not follow.”

I swallowed the lump in my throat as my canines retracted. “I don’t understand. You … you don’t want me? I mean … as part of your pack?” I quickly clarified. “I can’t belong to a pack because I’m the vessel?” My voice nearly cracked.

Just the thought of not belonging to a pack made my inner wolf howl in agony, despite my own logical, human disinterest in ever embracing such a concept in the first place. Rationally, I knew I had no intention whatsoever of joining anyone’s pack.
I was going home, getting student loans, and going to college!

“No, no, don’t worry, you’ll belong to a pack, sweetheart,” he said, dragging his warm lips across my forehead. “We’re pack creatures. Werewolves can only survive for so long on their own. It’s unnatural for our species.”

This reminder should’ve only freaked me out more, not appeased me. Yet it did. As did his long fingers as they curved proprietarily around my neck.

“And of course I want you. Very much,” he crooned, his words a seductive, melodic susurration at my temple. “As an equal,” he underscored, “in my pack…”—his mouth burned a slow path of kisses to my ear—“in my life…”—his thigh flexed and rocked against the rising inferno between my legs—“and in my arms. For as long of an eternity as we are afforded.”