chapter 12
1151 Words
Lyra POV
“So,” I say, “how did you come to be in that cage in the first place?”
“I told you,” he says.
He’s only half paying attention to me because he’s ripping into the deer meat with his teeth.
“My alpha put me in there.”
“Because?”
He rolls his eyes.
“He’s a dumbass.”
“If that’s true, then how did he get to be alpha?”
“You were part of a pack once, weren’t you?” he asks. “You said you knew about asshole alphas.”
“Yeah, but there’s a difference between an asshole and a dumbass.”
“Now you’re splitting hairs.”
“My alpha didn’t lock me in a cage.”
No need to admit that he tried to kill me. There are all kinds of things about the night of my mating ceremony that I don’t really feel like sharing with Cassian.
He looks at the piece of meat in my hand. It’s more than I need. We cooked a bunch and split it evenly, but I’ve clearly eaten a lot more recently than he has, and my share is going to go to waste. He’s still hungry. I could share it with him. I know that’s what we’re both thinking.
“Tell me what happened with your alpha,” I suggest, holding up the meat. “You can eat this while you do.”
He rolls his eyes.
“You drive a hard bargain.”
“Take it or leave it.”
“Fine.”
He snatches the meat out of my hand. He takes a big bite and chews voraciously, then says,
“I stole food.”
“What? From the pack?”
Stealing from your own pack is a horrible crime. The pack is a family. It would be like a parent taking food away from their children. Only a monster would do it.
What kind of man is he?
“Of course not from my pack,” he says. “From another pack. Rivals of ours.”
He sizes me up.
“Maybe yours.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I think I would have heard about it if someone had stolen food from us. Nothing like that has happened recently.”
“You don’t think your alpha might have kept it a secret?”
“We don’t do things that way in our pack,” I say. “We don’t keep secrets unless we have to.”
He nods.
“That’s what my alpha’s like,” he says. “He’s so controlling that he has to be the only one who has any information about anything. And everything is done his way, or it’s not done at all. That’s why he got mad at me for stealing food, see? He had told us not to do it, and I went anyway.”
“I don’t get it,” I say. “If your alpha commanded you not to, how did you get around that?”
He grins around a mouthful of meat.
“Easy,” he says. “He said don’t go tonight, so I waited until after midnight.”
“And that worked?”
“It was a loophole. My alpha’s not so great at closing the loopholes. Was yours?”
Honestly, I have no idea.
“I’ve never tried to get through a loophole before,” I tell him. “I’ve never tried to disobey an alpha’s order.”
Except…that isn’t true, is it? I disobeyed Bruce a few days ago in the department store, when he told me I had to come out. I wish that had been a loophole. Most likely, it was Moon Caster magic.
Then there’s my mate bond with Kaely. That’s an alpha bond, and according to Bruce’s order, I’m supposed to be doing everything within my power to conceive with him. Kaely rejected me, but that was after the bond was created. It’s still there. I can still feel it working on me. It’s driving me insane. Every moment, I feel the way I did in the tent with him. I feel the way I did when he said he wanted to come before I could. That feeling has become my whole life.
And I shouldn’t be able to run away.
So maybe I have more experience with disobeying alphas than I realized.
“Anyway,” Cassian says, ripping away a chunk of meat with his teeth, “the pack chased me most of the way back home. I lost them in the end, but my alpha was pissed. He said he was going to put me in that cage for a week just to get me out of his hair. If you ask me, he just couldn’t handle even the slightest challenge to his authority. He lives in fear of the rest of the pack realizing that it’s possible for someone else to have a good idea, and that they don’t need to blindly follow his every whim.”
“Hang on,” I say. “You’re telling me the pack you stole from chased you? Almost all the way back to your pack’s territory?”
“I lost them before I went back home,” Cassian says. “I never would have led them all the way there.”
“It sounds like you could have provoked a pack war,” I say. “Honestly, no wonder your alpha was pissed about it. That sounds like a pretty reasonable reaction to me.”
“Oh, okay, sure. And was locking me in a cage a reasonable reaction?”
“I didn’t say that,” I say. “But from what I can tell, your alpha isn’t the only one who thinks he knows best.”
“Ah, what would you know about it?” he says mildly. “I’m obviously not the only one here who wasn’t cut out for pack life.”
And there’s nothing I can say to that. He’s absolutely right. I failed at belonging to a pack.
Of course, my reason is a lot more complicated than just not wanting to do what my alpha ordered me to do. But I’m definitely not getting into it. Not with this guy who I haven’t even decided whether or not to trust.
What I have learned about him, though, is that he’s reckless. Even if you think you have an idea that’s better than your alpha’s, throwing caution to the wind and taking matters into your own hands isn’t the way any reasonable pack member would behave. If I’m going to keep this Cassian guy around, I’m definitely going to have to keep one eye on him at all times.
And even if I decide he can be trusted, I don’t think he’s someone I’ll ever be able to rely on.
- Writer
