Page 36 of Lycan Witch
Gideon gently lifts my chin, forcing me to meet his gaze, and it’s all I can do to not stare at the quickly healing gash gracing the side of his face. “It’s not your fault for wanting me to not be a monster,” he whispers. “But, darling, you can’t save a soul already bound to the underworld.”
I wrench my chin free from his grasp, staring down at the floor. He sighs and begins cleaning my wounds. After he bandages the last bit, he sets my hands in my lap, getting up to walk to his desk and taking a swig of whiskey straight from the bottle.
“You heal fast, so it should be fine by the morning,” he says, his voice flat and emotionless as he stares out the window. “I don’t want you working here any more.”
I want to argue. There’s other things I could be saving up for now that Jules’s tuition is covered, like paying Gideon back or getting a place of my own. But I can’t find the words or the energy to defy him.
He turns from the window, finally facing me briefly before looking down into the bottle in his hands. “I’ll have Frank drive you home.”
The last sentence breaks my heart into a million pieces, as if he doesn’t want me near him now that I openly showed his weakness to his pack. Now that I showed him I can’t support the side of him that he needs to hold on to… the monster he needs to be to survive as alpha.
The monster he needs to be to survive any attack from Monique. He can handle himself.
I shake my wolf’s voice out of my head, not wanting to hear her arguments. Tonight just shows we aren’t good for each other. I make him soft—make him hesitate in a moment of battle, and tonight, I almost cost him his life. Wendell was right—the only thing I’m going to bring this pack is more death.
Standing from the chair, I walk out of his office without a word. I don’t bother asking Frank for a ride home, the bang of the door closing behind me as I walk out into the night echoes through my soul. I bite the inside of my cheek as I avoid looking at the too-still wolf corpse lying on the ground and hear branches creak above me as Kaylus leaves his perch to fly down and settle on my shoulder.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I whisper before he can say anything. I know he saw everything. I don’t have an explanation for why I tried to stop Gideon, outside of my fear of him getting hurt, but there’s also a part of me that didn’t want to see him kill one of his own pack for me. Hushed voices drift over to me after I enter the tree line, and I slowly creep down the forest’s edge toward it. Mumbling a spell under my breath and staying upwind of the noise, I do my best to mask my scent. My throat constricts when I remember the last time I used this spell—just a few weeks ago when I’d been sneaking into the Silver Lycans bar.
I shove the thought away as I get a clear view of a brown wolf, sneaking up to the office window. I don’t recognize him as one from Gideon’s pack, and though I haven’t met all of them, the minute the wolf turns his head, his nose raised in the air for a moment, I know he isn’t one of us.
Glowing golden eyes flit across the space, huffing as he turns back to the window.
“If you came here to—” Gideon says, his silhouette framed by the window.
“I came here to warn you that if you don’t make the right choice soon, we’ll make it for you,”the brown wolf says.
I don’t understand why I can hear his voice in my head. After reading the werewolf books Gideon made me study, it should only be others in the pack that I can hear unless a wolf projects their voice to me specifically—outside of an alpha, who can hear any wolf’s voice nearby.
The sound of glass shattering makes me jump, pulling me out of my shock. Shards of glass reflect the moonlight as they spray out of the open window at the brown wolf. Gideon launches himself outside, and the brown wolf laughs.“Are you going to shift and fight me? That pretty pink wound on your face looks freshly healed, Disantollo. Did you win against some fat bastard by only a hair?”
Gideon snarls, fur rippling over his skin. His jaw muscles tick, shoulders tensing, and his eyes narrow into slits.
“Go ahead, shift! I’ve been itching for a reason to dethrone you.”
The wolf’s words make Gideon still. “Get the hell out of here.” He reaches up behind him to grasp the sill of the window, pulling himself up and inside. “And don’t come back here,Allen, unless you’re looking for your last fight.”
The wolf laughs again, the sound making goosebumps rise along my arms.“I hope she’s worth it.”He grins wickedly, backing away into the woods.
I hold my breath until he disappears, then move farther into the woods in the opposite direction, knowing exactly where I need to go.
Chapter sixteen
Gideon
You should’ve just killed him,my wolf says, seething. He paces inside me, itching to shift and track Rathmann down.
Slumping onto my chair, I rub a hand over my forehead. “And then what? Kill the entire council when they come after us for retribution?” Looking out the window, I sigh, thinking of how Adara left.
You’re a ball of fuck ups,my wolf growls.
“Damn it, Iknowthat!” I slam my fist onto the desk, cracking the wood.
Adara called me a monster just weeks ago, and tonight, I proved her right. But what choice did I have? I knew that look on Wendell’s face and how uncomfortable it was making her. His wandering fucking gaze is what landed him on my books the first time, when his wife caught him in bed with another woman—if she could even be called that. She was only seventeen.
I don’t know how that sleazeball was able to convince her that she wanted to sleep with him, but I never stopped suspecting foul play—magic specifically. It isn’t completely uncommon for a wolf to find a sympathetic witch, or even a witch so desperate for cash that she offers them an enchanted item. Sometimes it’s to be stronger just before they challenge their alpha, but other times it’s for things far worse.
I can’t say I’m sad that he’s gone. Anera begged me not to kill him, though I never understood why. They weren’t mates, so it wouldn’t harm her wolf.