The Captain's Forbidden Mate

Episode 25: THREE DAYS

LENA

Three days didn't seem like nearly enough time to transform into someone else, and apparently that's what the job was.

Astra was showing me my training the next afternoon in a stretch of state forest an hour away from campus, in such a way that no one would stumble onto the trail that this actually was. "Borrowed your location from a Correll contact," she'd explained, someone who owed her family a favor from a very long time ago, and I decided not to ask much beyond that about a sort of economy of favors that clearly wasn't on my list of things I understood so far.

"Control isn't about suppressing the wolf," Astra said as she walked in a slow circle around where I'd been cross-legged in the dirt. "That's the mistake most first-shifters make if someone tries to speed things up. You can't cage the thing that's a part of you and hope it'll stay that way forever. You have to deal with it."

"Negotiate with my own instincts. That's great. Such practical advice."

"I never said this was normal." A ghost of a smile flickered across her lips just as quickly as it appeared. "Put some eyes closed. Feel your heart in the place in your chest where you felt it brewing last night, right before the real mess began. That heat. That pressure. Most people describe it as something trying to get out. I'm asking you to feel the difference. Not what's trying to get out, but what awaits you to invite it in."

I closed my eyes and tried, my heart racing as I found that same pressure building up as it had been before the change last night, but this time it was a slower, calmer warmth blooming from behind my sternum rather than the furious explosion that had shattered over me in the clearing.

"Good," Astra murmured. "Now don't let slip, and don't let take over either. Just hang tight to it. Tell him that you see it."

I held it in. My skin prickled and vision seemed to blur, gold weaving faintly through all of my peripheral vision even under my closed eyelids, and then, impossibly, it settled down to something quieter behind me before it had flooded over me.

"You did it," Astra said, something like pride flashing uncharacteristically across her usually composed face. "A first real hold. Faster progress I've seen in wolves with years of pack training."

I opened my eyes, shaking a little but whole, a strange new confidence blooming under the fatigue. "Could we try again?"

"We're going to do about two hundred more over the next three days," Astra said, already resetting the circle. "Because in three days, you're heading in for a council gathering full of wolves who are going to be testing and watching and waiting to see if you're going to c***k under the pressure. We need this reflex so ingrained in you that it doesn't matter how hard they push."

We worked for hours, the sun rolling across the sky, while I learned the skills of calling up and settling down the change over and over and over again, my control slightly better each time even as my body grew ever more exhausted. Somewhere in the third hour of this, my phone buzzed with a message from Cole, a checkup, cautious and light, meaning he was trying not to hover after everything that had been between us in recent days.

How's training going?

Better than I ever expected. Astra says I might not embarrass myself when you show up with your council of fathers at all.

You could never embarrass yourself. Ridgeview and your father's council should both be fearing what you're becoming.

I stared at the message for a while, something warm blooming in my stomach entirely unrelated to the wolf training and entirely directed at this boy who was sending the message.

Any news from your side? I texted back, my brain snapping back to the more pertinent issue. About Thorne. About what your father actually knows.

The reply took longer this time, and when it finally arrived, whatever warmth I was feeling soured imminently.

My father wants to meet you tonight. Alone, before council. He says there's something about your family he needs to talk to you about himself, something he wouldn't put in writing even to me. I don't like it, Lena. I don't like any of this. But I think you should go.

I stared at the message for a long time, my thumb hovering over the keyboard, some old fear building up in me, the fear of being managed, of being handed another piece of personal history by someone who had determined how much of it I was prepared to hear. But underneath the fear of that was something else, something I couldn't quite pin down yet. Curiosity maybe. Or hope, however wary, that this particular truth would finally be one that wasn't wrapped up in someone else's agenda.

Okay, I texted back. Tell him I'll come. But I want you there. Not present if he doesn't want you to be, but close. Somewhere I can find you if I have to.

"I'll be right outside the door," he wrote back immediately. I promise.

I set my phone down and looked up to see Astra, who'd clearly listened to my half of the conversation with growing concern. "You're training is paying off," she said eventually, nodding at me like she was sure of something. "I can tell. You held your fear for once instead of letting it peak. That's real progress, Lena. Whatever happens tonight, you're walking in stronger than you were three days ago."

I wished that she was right. I had a feeling I was about to find out either one way or the other if three days of training could stand against whatever it was she was waiting for me at the end of this countdown and whatever truth Cole's father was evidently preparing to bestow upon me tonight.