The way she says it. Like she is holding a wound closed with both hands and asking me not to touch it. And I am the one who made the wound. I am the one who stood in that pack house on Christmas morning and used my Alpha command on the woman carrying my child and called her nothing in front of every person she’d ever known. I did that. And she is sitting on my desk asking me not to do it again.
“I can’t do this again,” she says. Quieter now. The anger is gone and what’s left is the fear and it’s worse. “I can’t open myself up to you and have it go wrong. It almost killed me the first time. I had nowhere to go, Nick. My father had disowned me. My mother was dead. My pack was gone. I had a baby alone in a hospital room and there was not a single person from my life in the building.” Her voi
