Bound to the Billionaire

Chapter Seventeen: Ready to Rumble

 A scream, low and desperate, tore like a whistle from my throat. Tore from a snout and through long, sharp teeth. The shift happened less like a shift should and like something taking over my body, no gradual unfolding of fur and muscle, no gentle stretch of skin. No whisper of his consciousness becoming a roar, instead, a sharpness. Pain. A sudden spark of it and I had become my wolf. I had become all fur and lanky, disproportioned legs. I was the skinny, tall thing. The nightmare creature that spooked kids from their beds. A werewolf.

The handle on my neck became around my scruff, loose skin and fur in his mouth. I whipped my head up and around to meet his eyes, those gold eyes. This close, I could see black specks swimming in them. And in this moment, he wasn't rich and I wasn't poor. He wasn't powerful and I wasn't weak. No, in this moment, we were equal. 

 He was an alpha and I was an alpha.

And my wolf had to make a choice, the worst kind of choice an alpha could make. 

Our mate or our pack. The Moon Goddess's chosen one, the person who was supposed to spend the rest of an immortal life at his-- my-- side. He had always wanted that. Instinctively, coded down into his DNA. He couldn't fight that, he wasn't made to fight that. Rejected wolves and wolves who lost their mate often lived at the old pack house, when Dad was there.They lived there, sad and quiet. They often reminded me of a loveless lovebird.. It was pitiful. My parents had never met their fated mates, something that wasn't supposed to happen. And my dad said they were better for it. 

But despited that, despite the genetic wiring for a mate, my wolf and I could not ignore our pack. It was the only family we had left. The last promise my dad asked me to keep, to take care of it. 

It hurt, God, how could it not? A tearing of my heart and soul from my body, that's what it felt like. My love or my whole purpose divined into me as an alpha. How the hell was I supposed to choose?

I slashed him. It happened reflexively, from oversized paws and overgrown claws. It hurt. It hurt me to hurt him, to feel the give of his flesh under my pads, the rush of warm blood, the prickle of his damp dead fur between my toes. My jaws hung open gasping breaths escaping me while Nico's wolf reeled back. A flash flared in his eyes: anger? hurt? I couldn't tell. 

He dropped  me, gentle. Lowered me softly to the cool floor while I thrashed for purchase. My heart slammed up against my ribs, and as soon as I could stand I was barreling past the remnants of the desk and through the door into the living room, a dark maw that at night looked like a nightmarish void with its black walls and furnishings. A single lamp light flickered on one of the too sharp, too geometrically perfect side tables. In that light, I saw the blue sheen off the barrel of Micah's .357 Magnum. I froze. 

Silver bullets were taboo as taboo could be. Werewolves were always a superstititous lot, they had to be, since to most people superstition was all we were. A child's tale So we mostly followed those superstitions and heeded what we were and weren't supposed to do, supposed to have. 

And being a werewolf, that's one strike against you. But being a werewolf with silver bullets, a werewolf willing to destroy rare creatures in your likeness? Well, that was unforgivable. Horrible. 

And at twelve, my dad taught me how to make them. How to mill out the casings and fill them with powder. And in a pinch, how to sprinkle a little silver into the hollow point of the bullet. He never carried them, he never shot one even, and we would never speak of it. Not to each other or to anyone else. But I thought about that, looking at the sheen off the gun in the soft lamp glow.

Micah's hand was steady, all the lightness and goofiness I'd seen in him gone, replaced by a dead-eyed seriousness and a perfect aim. In another life, I'm sure he was a cowboy, because in that moment he was the good sheriff and I was the snarling beast. 

Behind me, a growl. My ears pinned against my head, and I dropped my body close to the ground. A fighting position; I was trapped between the two of them, and as small and soft as I normally tried to be, if I had to, I'd fight my way out. I'd destroy them, or at least, I'd try. My heart pounded so quickly I couldn't hear anything over it. This was it. 

But neither of them moved to hurt me. Micah's eyes fixed behind me, the growling sharpening. Slowly, his hand dropped and slid the gun into his holster. "I see Nico has a lot of explaining to do to you," he said. In his voice, you couldn't tell he had just pulled a gun on me. All you could hear was the cowboy kindness grafted on to every word. "I will leave you two gentlemen to it."

I blinked, my mouth still curled into a snarl. The growl wasn't aimed at me, I realized dumbly, it was aimed at Micah. Nico was still trying to be nice, and somehow that made me shake with anger. I didn't want him to try to spare me. I wanted to fight off the threat. I wanted it to be simple. So my mate was bad. Simple, easy. Not this mess of questions and confusions, stresses and pains.

Micah cast me one more glance, nodded over my head at Nico, and stepped into the elevator. I turned back toward the black wolf, my heart in my paws as I stared into those gold gold eyes. Why did my life have to be like this? Complicated? I lowered my head.

I drew in a breath that smelled like cologne, cardamon room spray, and blood. I decided that Nico better have a hell of a good explanation for those letters, because a fight still wasn't far from my mind.