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Something in Bran’s safe room was calling her.

It had taken her a few days to work it out. They’d had an Assembly of the East Coast Alphas – their numbers were now too big to congregate all of the North American Alphas together in their pole barn, so Bran broke them down by region.

Before that there had been some nonsense with Mercedes, like there always was, and Leah had been too irritated to put her mind to the weird sensation she kept hearing. 

Once the last Alpha had left, and soon as she’d finished cleaning and Charles had done his usual sweep to check for any accidental surveillance mementos their people may have left behind, Leah told him.  

“Calling you how?” Bran asked politely, as if she had just asked what he’d like for lunch.

“Repeatedly. It knows my name,” she added.  

He nodded, sitting back in his chair and folding his hands across his abdomen. “And you think it’s definitely coming from the safe room? For how long?”

“Two weeks. It gets stronger the closer I am to the safe room. And you’ve had other priorities to be bothered with than this,” she added, at his mild disapproving look. “Besides, it’s intermittent. It’s not doing it right now, for instance.”

“Leah,” he chastised, none-the-less. He rose from behind his desk and they went to the safe room, which was a concealed room behind the garage, only accessed by a door hidden behind a large mirror. Bran pushed this aside and held his thumb over the security pad.

The door ‘snicked’ open and he walked in. Leah stood patiently in the entrance. The room was smaller than her pantry and no more than one person was allowed in at a time. The shelves were fuller than they had been in years; Bran still had many of Jonesy’s artefacts.

The thought of Jonesy made her think of Hester. Leah rubbed her palm against her chest where it briefly hurt.

She watched her husband go through his usual motions – moving items that had moved themselves, checking that nothing had disappeared permanently or changed. The room stank uncomfortably of fae and Other magic. Of earth and burnt things, of damp and soil. A breeze tickled her hair though she knew there wasn’t one. There was a puddle of water on the floor that Bran mopped up with a cloth. She held up the crystal bowl they used for this purpose and he dropped the wet cloth in. She would put on a windowsill to dry and then she would burn it.

He surveyed the shelves. “What about now?”

Leah listened. “Nothing.”

Her husband was not pleased.  

“Nothing looks, or feels suspicious.” He adjusted something – an ornately carved box that she believed had been in his possession since before they had met. “Do you feel anything? Anything at all?”

She shook her head. Nothing in the room pulled at her. 

They left the room for the day, with the instruction that Leah had to let him know the next time it happened.

“Immediately, Leah,” Bran told her, in no uncertain terms. He was disappointed with her. She knew he would be. If she’d told him when he was ‘busy’ with the Alphas, he would have been annoyed. If she’d mentioned it when he was ‘busy’ with Mercedes, he would have thought she was exaggerating to get his attention.

Disappointed was better, overall.

*

Naturally, the next time it happened, Bran was away. She called him and he answered on the third ring. “Is it an emergency?” he asked, as he always did when she called. She had learnt not to speak first, never knowing who was with him and how well they could hear.

“No,” Leah told him, the calling from the safe room a mere whisper in the back of her mind.

“Then hold, please,” he said, then put his phone – still connected – back in his pocket and continued talking.

Leah put the phone down on the kitchen counter and continued to measure ingredients. It was Kara’s birthday the next day and she was making a cake with rainbow layers and a piñata effect – when you sliced into it, M&Ms would pour out. She had seen it in a magazine and tried out the recipe the previous week. Though it wasn’t actually complicated, she always liked to have a trial run to smooth out any kinks. Bran had seemed to enjoy it, at least, though he’d avoided the candy because he didn’t particularly like very sweet things.

She could hear Bran but the person he was talking to wasn’t known to her and she could only catch every other word. He had been more tight-lipped than normal about this trip, which told her he was meeting one of his secret government contacts.

If she pieced together an off-hand comment he had made four days ago, she was beginning to feel that the ‘secret’ of Aspen Creek that had been kept since the 1970s was becoming more challenging to control. She thought the humans involved were probably going or gone and agreements that had been made were going with them.

She didn’t want to think about what that would mean. Tourists, Bran had once told her. If that was the case, they would have to move and the logistics of that – not just moving the pack but the wildlings – were almost too overwhelming to think about.

She wondered where they could go. She and Bran had talked about it, hypothetically, once or twice but had come to no good conclusions, which didn’t mean Bran hadn’t decided in the meantime. Most of what went on in his mind, he didn’t share.   

Leah also wondered at him leaving the phone on. Not an accident, she mused. Her husband didn’t have ‘accidents’. She suspected it was another one of his determined efforts to show her how trusted she was, in non-subtle ways that even she, stupid as he thought her, would notice.

She smiled and shook her head. She had forgiven him for believing she could betray him – she knew well what a paranoid mind could convince a person and he was more paranoid than she was - but he was still a bastard for thinking it of her in the first place.

Kara’s cake would have six layers and by the time Bran came back on the phone, she had the colorful batters poured into their tins, ready to go into the oven.

“What is it?” he asked. She could hear he was in a car now. The engine turned over.

“It’s calling my name again.”

Bran swore, which he didn’t often do. He liked to set an example for the younger members of their community. She had always thought it amusing: she had been born in the era of decorum, not Bran. She swore more than he did and he glared at her every time she did. “Is it just repeating your name?”

“Yes.”

“And it’s definitely your name.”

“More and more so.”

“Explain.”

She explained how in the beginning the noise had been a murmuration of the first consonant of her name. Nothing distinct. She had first checked all the electrical appliances in the house, in fact. Then after a while it had become more defined, with definitive pauses between until it just sounded like someone whispering Leah Leah Leah Leah.

“Do you know which thing it might be?” she asked. He knew what was in his safe room, after all. “And why?”

“Whatever it is, it’s probably nothing good. It’s not telling you to do anything?”

Leah put the first of the cake tins into the oven. Her oven wasn’t a uniform temperature so she was going to be cooking them in batches to ensure an equal bake. She knew any inconsistencies would be ultimately smothered in buttercream but she strove for perfection. She set a timer. “Not that I’m aware of. I’ve kept away from the safe room, just in case.”

Bran exhaled with resignation. “I’ll be home tomorrow. If it’s still doing it, you’ll have to go into the safe room whilst I’m there and we’ll need to experiment.” She knew he didn’t want to do that. The fewer who went near those artefacts the better.

She nodded. “Do you think I’m in danger? Or a danger?” she amended. Perhaps she should lock herself into Room 1 at the motel.

“Oh, no doubt,” Bran sighed, as if this was all a little too tedious for him. Her lip curled responsively. “Let’s hope your stubborn mind can keep you out of trouble until I’m home.”

Bran called her twice more before she went to bed, the last to tell her that Charles had remotely changed the code on the safe room ‘just in case’.

“Did you tell him why?” she wanted to know, pulling a long, silk night gown over her head. It was one of her favorites; it made her feel like a star from the golden age of Hollywood, sensual and sexy. She started to brush out her hair. Her hair had always been her best feature – dark blonde, streaked with natural highlights, and thick and wavy. Most days she braided it, to be practical, but she always brushed it out at night before tying it up again. She liked the way her loose hair felt on her nearly-bare shoulders.

“I decided not to.”

“Was that wise?” she asked, careful to keep her tone neutral and not accusing. Alphas didn’t like their orders to be questioned. Charles was their Second and whilst Bran played his cards close to his chest, when it came to the pack he usually shared more with his son. Perhaps because it was her he had chosen not to. He knew Charles and she did not like each other.

“Probably not. He was suspicious, regardless, so I expect we’ll see him tomorrow anyway.”

*

Charles at least waited until Bran was home before arriving himself. Since the artefact was still calling her, she withstood the almost unbearable scrutiny of both her mate and Charles, who got up into her personal space, ‘feeling’ her with their Other magics.  

Part of the reason Leah found Charles so terrifying – beyond his actual role as their unpaid killer and that he was a significantly more dominant werewolf than she – was the press of his different magic. To her werewolf senses, it felt wrong. Unnatural. Definitely more so than Bran’s witch blood.

In some ways, Bran believed that Charles was a ‘pure’ werewolf, what their species should be if it was possible for the females to bear werewolf children. Leah didn’t agree with this. That her body couldn’t produce a living child told Leah all she needed to know – she shouldn’t. Charles was wrong.

It had nothing to do with Charles being the product of Bran’s eternal love of another woman. No sir. Nothing at all.

Bran looked at Charles. “Anything?”

His son shook his head, dark eyes still narrowed at her, as if he was looking through her. 

That decided, Bran opened the safe room and brought her inside with him. Because he didn’t want her too near to the shelves, Bran kept her close, her spine pressed to the length of him and his hands on her hips.

“Cozy,” she said, nervously quite liking it and trying to pretend otherwise. Bran didn’t often touch her in front of other members of the pack or, indeed, outside of the bedroom. He preferred to keep his distance. When there were gaps between their sexual activities – which there frequently were – she sometimes asked him to spar just so she could feel his body against hers.

This was quite pathetic. But only she knew that.

“I want you to first look at every single item and tell me if you can ‘hear’ it,” Bran told her, voice close to her ear, sending a shiver down her body that he no doubt felt. “These shelves first.”

She looked at each item as instructed, trying to ignore her physical response to his closeness. Bran knew she found him attractive, anyway; it wouldn’t come as a surprise.

Leah was familiar with some of the artefacts on these shelves, though she didn’t know what most did, if they did anything at all. Sometimes things just collected magic and what that magic did couldn’t always be anticipated. There was a gauntlet on the second row from the bottom that was like that. It had been drenched in blood so many times it had become something else – some had reported it made them stronger, some reported it made them angrier. In the hands of the werewolf Bran had torn it off, it had turned him into a violent killer, even after it had been removed, permanently destroying his mind.

When she shook her head, Bran rotated them, by wrapping his arms around her waist and lifting her up himself until they were facing the other wall. Her heart flip-flopped and she was tempted to laugh at herself. Pathetic.  

Nothing seemed like it was ‘speaking’ to her but she could still hear that whisper in the back of her mind. She frowned.

Perhaps she was doing this wrong. She flicked her eyes up and then down, relaxing them. Just letting them drift to wherever they wanted to go. Sure enough, Leah found her eyes kept drifting to the ornate box.

“What’s in there?” she asked, nodding but not pointing. She had noted the box last time but she thought that was just because she had seen it in various cubby holes and lock-boxes during their married life. But there were many other things in that room that were also familiar to her so why this box?

Bran’s nose brushed the back of her head. “Is that it?” he asked.

Leah cleared her throat. She was tempted to rub her herself against him like hormonal teenager. Being two inches taller than her, they fit together very well like this. This whole situation was very distracting in an entirely unexpected way and Charles was right there, seeing everything. She was fighting the desire to blush, of all things. “Hard to say. It has drawn my attention more than anything else. Both times.”

He was quiet for a moment and Leah could feel Charles looking at them, looking at his father. She wondered if he knew what it was. Nervously, she wondered if she had just walked into something that was very revealing about herself. Was the box calling to her because she was very susceptible?

“All right. We’re done,” Bran announced, then. He released her – and she sucked in a deep breath reflexively. He nudged her towards the door and she went, Charles stepping out of the way. She shook her hands at her side, trying to release some pent up energy.

Charles looked just as confused as she did. “Is that it? What is it?”

“I’d rather we not speak of it out loud,” Bran said, mysterious as ever, closing the safe room behind them and locking it. “But I don’t believe it will do Leah any harm.”

“You’re just going to leave it there?” Charles asked in surprise, which saved her asking and saved her, too, the cool expression of ‘I know what I’m doing’ that Bran gave his son.

Her mate looked at Leah, then, and that look seemed to take her in from the top of her head to the soles of her feet. She couldn’t explain the frisson of anticipation that gave her, she really couldn’t. They had been married for two centuries. At what point did she get a grip on this? “I’ll experiment. Best you don’t know about it.”

He walked towards his office, indicating that the conversation was over and they were both apparently dismissed. Leah found herself sharing a commiserating rare eye-roll with Charles over Bran’s ways.

Then Charles went home and she went to put the finishing touches to Kara’s cake.

*

Whatever ‘experimentation’ Bran was doing with the box seemed to be working. Leah didn’t hear anything more and Charles gave her the new code to the safe room so she could see Bran had moved it. She wondered where he’d relocated it or if he had neutralized it somehow. She trusted he had done whatever was needed, if there was anything to be concerned about.  

Oddly, Bran was noticeably more tense but that could be attributed to so many other things in their lives. He was out a great deal – getting up at strange hours of the night and not returning until morning. She often lay awake listening to him pacing his room. 

Eventually, after three weeks, she gave in and asked him if there was something she needed to be worried about. He shook his head, dismissing her concerns. “It’s nothing. I’m just working something through.”

Leah accepted this. She knew this was sometimes his way, particularly if the issue was challenging. When he was making the decision to ‘out’ some of their werewolves, he had behaved similarly, though he had at least talked to her about it, used her as a sounding board for his ideas. She was a little hurt he had chosen not to do that this time.

“Is it something you will eventually tell me about?” Leah asked, twirling her pasta on her fork. They were sharing a meal together, sitting at the breakfast bar in the kitchen. She attempted to make herself sound casual, as if her interest was academic rather than the pitiable concern of a woman whose husband shared with her only because he had to, not because he wanted to.

“This is something I need to do by myself,” Bran said. He gave her a polite smile. “But thank you for your concern.”

After dinner he left, again, and this time took his car. She watched him go, standing looking out of the window long after his tail-lights were out of sight. So distracted was she that she didn’t see the strident walk of her favorite teenager marching up the drive to her house. She opened the door before Kara could open it herself.

“Good evening to you,” she said, as Kara stomped past her and towards the kitchen. Her face was like thunder. Leah could smell the hormones. 

Entertained by these theatrics, Leah followed her. It wouldn’t do to let Kara see that, so she kept her face merely politely interested.

“Ice cream,” Kara said, pulling open the freezer drawers to Leah’s pack-sized refrigerator and rummaging around.

Leah found Kara easy. Kara had no ‘baggage’ except for the kind of baggage Leah herself could understand - that of being trapped in a cage, metaphorical or otherwise, all her childhood.  

“Second drawer, behind the peas. Would you like to tell me what’s happened?” Leah endeavored to keep her tone merely mildly curious. Sometimes Kara responded in a contrary way – again, something Leah could relate to. If someone was too interested, it always struck her as suspicious. 

Kara pulled out a carton of Chunky Monkey. “Toby broke up with me.”

Ah.

“Do you want us to kill him?” Leah asked, folding her arms across her chest.

Most of the pack had wanted to kill Toby anyway – purely for being Kara’s first boyfriend, and human, and thus not deserving of her. Leah knew where Toby lived. She and Tag had driven past his house. She had also gone to see where he worked at the weekend, braving a disgusting, low-end shopping mall to buy a hotdog from him in the most threatening manner possible. It was best that Kara didn’t know that, though. She already thought the pack were ridiculously overprotective.

Kara snorted and dug into the ice-cream viciously. “Isn’t he related to Carl?”

Carl, as one of the humans in their extended pack, was important to Bran. Less so to Leah. “Barely,” Leah said dismissively.

Resentfully, Kara sucked on her spoon. “He said we wanted different things from life.”

Unbidden, Leah’s lips twitched and she had to press them tightly together. She struggled to imagine any human teenager knowing what they wanted from ‘life’. She didn’t know what she wanted from life. “Oh dear.”

“Pretty sure the thing he wants is Kaley McDonald,” Kara said bitterly.

Leah narrowed her eyes. This was offensive. “…do you want us to kill her?”

This got her another snort. “I like how all your answers are murder. When I called Mom, she told me there’ll be other boys.” Her tone told Leah how unsatisfying that was.

Kara’s mother was human and therefore had no idea how the werewolf changed a human mind. Leah had given up talking to humans for that reason.

She avoided Kara’s parents assiduously, leaving conversations with them to Bran and Anna, both of whom unreasonably cared about what Kara’s family felt or wanted or needed. If pressed, she preferred the father – who at least had tried to do right by his daughter, using his journalist connections to get Kara to Aspen Creek, to the care of the Marrok.

The mother continued to be a problem; she was afraid of Kara and nothing Kara did convinced her otherwise. This revolted Leah. She might not be able to have children, may not even want them, but the concept of not cherishing the one you had was an anathema to her.  

Leah sighed. “It sucks. You deserve better.”

The problem was there weren’t any werewolf boys Kara’s age. Not even close. The youngest was probably in his early-thirties, if she thought about it, which whilst older werewolves like Bran and Asil might consider to be a more than appropriate age-gap, Leah knew there was a significant emotional and mental difference between a teenager and a thirty-year-old man. Particularly now in the Twenty-First Century.

Besides, Cyril was in Montreal.

Kara turned soulful, damp eyes on her. “Do I?”

The flip from angry to sad startled Leah briefly. “Yes. I am utterly confident in a few years you will struggle to remember Thomas’s name.”

Kara smiled. It was a bit wet but it was still a smile. “Toby.”

“Whatever,” Leah said decisively. She took the ice cream away from Kara. “Let’s go hit things.”

After satisfyingly beating each other up, Leah and Kara spent an enjoyable evening going through social media and dissecting Kaley McDonald. Being bitter and twisted was something Leah excelled at – she’d had a great deal of experience – and she ripped Kaley McDonald’s physical appearance to shreds, as well as her clothes, friends, accent, intelligence, everything she could think of, really. It seemed to make Kara happy, which was the point.

She then dropped Kara home, seconds before her foster parents’ curfew, and got back in time to catch Bran eating the melting remains of the ice-cream they’d left on the coffee table. He was still wearing his jacket so must have only just come in.

“What’s upset Kara?” he asked, licking a spoon. Leah supposed if he couldn’t scent the hurt, the ice cream, the tissues and the chocolate wrappers would have been enough of a clue.

She started tidying around him, explaining about Kara’s first break-up. He was distantly sympathetic, as if he had heard of the concept but it didn’t really seem that significant. She supposed if the stories were true Bran had never courted before, let alone ‘dated’.

“Isn’t he Carl’s nephew?” he asked, narrowing his eyes. Now it became interesting to him. A potential inter-pack problem.

“I really don’t know.” Or care. “Either way it was bound to happen sooner or later. She’s young.”

Bran grunted. “I suppose it’s difficult for her. It’s not as if we have anyone appropriate for her. Just Cyril in Montreal and he’s wet behind the ears.”

She often thought it was a shame that Bran didn’t like her more; when it came to their people, they frequently thought along such similar lines. “He’s all right,” Leah said, brushing out the fringe of the knitted blanket she draped across the back of the couch.

Cyril wasn’t very dominant – certainly less dominant than Kara was, which was another consideration. She didn’t yet know if Kara was the type of werewolf female who looked for a more dominant lover – like Leah had always done – or if she was more equal opportunities. Kara had plenty of time to find that out.

“Yes, I remember you were disproportionally fond of him,” Bran said drily.

By which she took to mean she had flirted with him. She didn’t recall doing so but it was always possible. Sometimes it was just enjoyable to flirt with a responsive man. Presumably, Bran knew she meant no harm by it. Not any more, at least. “I remember thinking he was very polite.”

“And young enough for you to manipulate,” her mate replied brusquely and without hesitation.

She felt no offense at his comments. It was probably true. He knew her very well.

Bran wiped ice cream from the corner of his mouth with his thumb and then sucked it. She felt a flutter, low down. He considered her, intently, and the flutter turned into something heavier, deeper, like syrup moving through her body to the very core of her. Her husband moved towards her slowly and cupped her jaw between his hands, thumbs firm on her cheeks. She held her breath as he let his full attention beat down upon her, the hum of his desire, and felt her body thrum in response. Was he going to kiss her? she wondered, hopefully.

Then like a splash of icy water, he let go of her, his eyes shuttering. Her knees wobbled and she leaned against the back of couch. “I have to go out,” he said, already walking towards the door, picking up his car keys.

Leah stayed where he had left her, the couch the only thing keeping her standing, wondering what had just happened.  

*

Bran was funny about sex.

Their mating bargain favored him, gave him the magical caging of his monster from the stability of a second magical entity, tied in partnership with him. That wasn’t to say it hadn’t also been good for her - life as a werewolf female in the 1800s had not been easy – but there was no question it was mostly for Bran. Bran and the entire world, if it came down to it.

If all that was required for that mating bond was for her to be physically present in his life, to have accepted and trusted him, she thought Bran would have been happier. But that wasn’t enough. Sex was a fundamental tenant of that bond. Even never having had a mate before, Leah had known that.

Of course, Bran knew this. But Bran had made it clear to Leah – politely but firmly, a small twist to his mouth – that he would never love her and therefore he would never make love to her. Leah, because she had been raised plain-speaking, had not understood the nuance and she had dismissed it as some kind of romantic nonsense. Flowery talk. And after all that, to solidify the mating bond, they’d had sex and it had been good. Rough, hard, and passionate, she’d thought, little realizing that the man she was mating to hadn’t touched a woman since his last mate had died – hadn’t wanted to – and any ‘passion’ she had felt was simply years of pent up energy.

This was her first lesson. Nuance, with Bran, was important.  

She had also thought – foolishly underestimating this man she had known for a short time – sex would be a way for her to manipulate Bran as she had been able to do with every man who had come before him. A woman’s body was built to pleasure a man and she had more than enough experience of that, the morals of her human upbringing not being quite up to the standards of the particular pack that she had been forced to join. Leah was a beautiful woman and she had a beautiful body. She had been used to using these assets to at least attempt to get her way. This had been her second mistake.

Because Bran could compartmentalize like no one she had ever met or would know again. He rigidly controlled their sex life. Sex for him had to be a response to a more significant need than simply desire. It was to calm his wolf’s unrest. To stymie the powerful call of the moon. If he had hurt her – intentionally or otherwise – he would use sex to placate her because their mating bond needed her compliant.

But that was it.

In the beginning, all of those things, including the pain he frequently caused her, happened with such regularity she just hadn’t noticed this manipulation. The early years of their marriage had been difficult - a steep learning curve for the both of them. Bran’s wolf had fought its new cage and Leah had fought her new role, him, everyone around her as she came to realize the trap she had walked into.

It took years before things had settled down, her adjusting more than anything and anyone else, and only then Leah had begun to notice that Bran did not feel the same way about sex that she did.

For her – before she had even loved him – sex was natural. They were werewolves, after all. They had a significantly higher libido, more so than any Other on the planet. If the female werewolf body had the ability to successfully bring a baby to full term, the world would have been overrun with them – which was perhaps why they couldn’t. She knew, oh how she knew, that most werewolf couples had sex two, three times a day. That was even more the case if they were mated. Acceptance and trust was reinforced with sex.

But when things were calm in their marriage, it was entirely possible for Bran to not come to her bed for weeks on end. Once – she had counted – it was five months. He had been travelling on and off, coinciding with each of the full moons and when he had returned, it was off the back of the battle with a fae who had sliced him open across his guts and he had been forced to call on his wolf to heal more than he would normally allow. His eyes had been solid gold when he had climbed over her, stinking of gore and fae magic, and sunk himself into her. And in the morning, he had gone, as if he had never been there in the first place.

Sex was a service. Nothing was ever spontaneous – even if she felt she had been the one to make a move, it was because he had let her, because it was always part of his parameters of when it was acceptable for their bodies to come together.

Making love – that sentimental expression, that nuance she had foolishly missed – was for a woman he liked and loved. Women who were gone now.

On this, Bran never wavered.

*

The next Assembly was held a few days later and was attended by all the West Coast Alphas. Due to proximity, these men – and their partners – were the ones Leah tended to know best. Angus she had known for a very long time, in fact, long before he had been the Seattle Alpha. He arrived the night before at her invitation.

“Mrs. Cornick,” he said, with a wry nod as she opened the door to him. He proffered her a bottle of wine and a bouquet of silk flowers, well aware of her aversion to floral arrangements that needed care and attention before dying anyway. 

“Mr Hopper,” she replied with a wide smile.

Leah didn’t make friends easily. Making friends was for the young, before power and influence mattered, when it was about testing limits and exploring everything it meant to be a werewolf. When life had been adventure and freedom.

She had friends from when she was younger. Some were even still alive, though now flung to far-out corners of the world. Angus Hopper was one of the few who still lived in America whom she saw every few years. Bran had Changed him in 1901 and they had formed a connection that had lasted a century and some change. 

They talked in the kitchen whilst she prepared dinner. She always teased him about his dating life, because he had been married five times to four different human women, one twice, and each time it had ended in divorce. He enjoyed women and there was something about him– despite his height – that really made him appealing to the opposite sex. Handsome, in a casual way, with dark, kinetic eyes. He did not suffer for lack of companionship.

“What happened to Caroline?” she asked, finally recalling the name of the last woman. They had been dating – not courting, that was what werewolves did – for three years. She had fully expected him to make Caroline his sixth wife. She even knew what dress she was going to wear to his wedding.

“Got a job in Japan.” Angus shook his head, put his fingers into the boiling water and pulled out a partially cooked carrot, ate it. “We tried the long distance thing for a while but couldn’t make it work. Time difference is hell. Phone sex is not the same.”

Leah exhaled a laugh. She had read about phone sex, of course, and could not agree more. Though, a small voice said to her, if given the choice between no sex with Bran and his voice coaxing her to orgasm down the telephone line, maybe she would.

She shook the unexpectedly heated thought away, focusing on Angus instead – a problem of not having sex as much as she would like was that she thought about it a lot, it was not something she had ever got used to.

Angus talked about work for a little while. He owned a programming company. Not being remotely technological she had absolutely no idea what that meant but she knew sometimes Charles called him for advice.

“I bought you a present, actually,” Angus remembered, suddenly.

“You did. Flowers and wine.”

Angus made an impatient noise. “Boring hostess gifts.” He left to find his bag and when he came back he was holding a white box. “For you, my technological fossil.”

Wiping her hands on a dish towel, she opened the box. “You bought me a fancy phone,” she said, a little dismayed. Not that she expected it – certainly not from Angus, that would be most inappropriate - but there had been a time in her life when men had bought her jewelry.

“I did. I recently upgraded the entire company so you can retire that Nokia brick of yours. You’re on our company contract so don’t go making lengthy international calls or I’ll be in trouble.”

Leah was technically what was called a ‘silent partner’ in Angus’s company – one of the investments Charles had made for her a long time ago and to simultaneously get Angus’s business off the ground. “That Nokia brick,” she said, defensively, “is indestructible and has served me faithfully.”

Angus ignored this. He took the phone out of the box and turned it on. “I’ve already charged it and I’ve set up your email for you so you can stop using Bran’s. Say thank you.”

She rolled her eyes, not taking offense at his tone. “Angus.”

“You’ll love it. You can take really good pictures. We could Facetime – the little girl you’ve all-but-adopted could show you. Here, let me show you WhatsApp.”

He took her on a whistle-stop tour of the features of the phone and Leah promised she would try to use it because it was a generous gift and she knew this was one of those modern things she needed to adapt to. She did thank him.

Bran walked in as Angus was demonstrating something called Portrait Mode on the roast beef that Leah had taken out to rest. 

They shook hands cordially, Angus dipping his eyes respectfully the way that everyone did when they met her husband. “Welcome to my territory,” Bran said mildly.

Angus smiled. “Thank you for the invitation,” he responded. Then, niceties out of the way, Angus explained why he had found the both of them, heads nearly touching, poised over the meat. “Marrok, I’m just bringing your wife into the Twenty-First Century.”

“Good luck with that,” Bran said slightly sharply. He looked around and gave Leah his most courteous look, however. “May I help?”

“You could carve,” she suggested, as if it mattered to her little.  

With Bran in the kitchen, the atmosphere of relaxed joviality changed slightly and Angus no longer felt he could gossip and tease her or she him. Instead, the conversation changed to more serious matters – the never-ending problems in Europe that Chastel’s death had left behind, the Hardesty witches, the agenda for the Assembly. She heard the front door open and close, announcing Charles’s and Anna’s arrival, and with resignation Leah gave up her friend to the rest of the family. 

*

Most of the Assembly was boring, particularly since it was a repeat of the previous agenda. She shared a hay bale with Bran, affecting a professional look that she didn’t feel, and rated the women who had attended with their mates in order of dominance. Then she rated them in order of fighting ability. She came out on top for both of these, of course, because of who she was married to but she wouldn’t have done too badly prior to Bran, either.

At one point, Bran leaned over her to speak to Charles and put his hand on her back as he did so. She jolted, his handprint felt like a brand, and the jolt made Bran turn to look at her, their faces only an inch or two apart. For a noticeably long moment, he looked lingeringly at her mouth, then at her eyes, and then turned deliver his message to Charles. His hand dropped away from her back.

Leah exhaled a long breath. It felt like she’d been punched in the stomach. No, lower. She pressed her thighs together tightly, squeezing the tingling sensation, reminding herself that due to scheduling clashes this Assembly had been arranged two days before full moon. This wasn’t normal for an Assembly. No one wanted to put twenty-five werewolf Alphas and their partners in a room together that close to full moon but ‘needs must’, as Bran had said. That was why Anna was there, sitting pretty on her hay bale, leaking magical marijuana.

Like all old wolves, her husband was affected by the full moon – felt its pull deep in his bones up to two days before. When it was too much, she was his succor, in effect his own personal ‘magical marijuana’.

As a consequence, Leah jealously guarded full moon, always furious if his work coincided with the one time of the month when it was almost guaranteed that Bran would spend his nights with her.

Including the wives and mates, there were nearly fifty people attending, too many for Leah to easily feed, so she had hired a catering company. She slipped out just before 1pm to check that all was on schedule and then went up to her room, closing the door behind her.

It was a weird biological quirk of the werewolf female’s body that their cycles lined up with the moon. Right now, the three days over full moon, she was at her peak fertility – if it could be called that. If she and Bran had a normal relationship, this wouldn’t be a problem. But they didn’t and, as a result, she was permanently over-stimulated and had an almost painfully heightened awareness of her mate. Anyone with a nose would be able to smell that, so she was in a tedious position of having to relieve that pressure or spend the entire day with the unmated – and some mated – men sniffing around her like dogs.

Briskly, Leah closed her curtains and shimmied out of her pants and blouse, folding them neatly on her chair. She tossed her panties into the laundry hamper and went to lie on her bed. Closing her eyes, blocking out the awareness of all the strangers milling around outside, Leah put her fingers between her legs and set to work getting herself off. It wouldn’t take very long, she knew, even though she’d already taken care of herself that morning, too. She would do this, give herself a quick wash, put a fresh pair of underwear on and be back outside before anyone noticed.

The sound of her door opening penetrated the warm haze she was building and she sat bolt upright with a gasp, thighs clamped down on her hand and mortification burning her face. Her husband made a bee-line for the bed, looking like vengeance. “Bran, what—”

It wasn’t vengeance he was looking for, though. Bran was on her in an instant, lips parting hers and stopping her words. His hands spread her rigid thighs. She could hear herself making shocked noises, which became shocked yelps when he ground the heel of a hand against her, slipping and sliding over the bundle of nerves she had just been toying with. The distinctive sound of his belt buckle being undone, then his fly lowering jolted her into action and she helped push his pants down, releasing him. He pulled her legs around him and then thrust into her in one, smooth movement.

Leah came instantly, the fist of her orgasm opening and closing inside of her and she held onto him for dear life as she kept coming, as he pounded into her over and over again. It felt like forever and no time at all, like an out of body experience, every nerve in her body centered to where they were joined until, groaning, he thrust his last, tensing above her as he came. Moments later, he dropped down on top of her heavily.

Leah found she had squeezed her eyes shut against the pleasure, almost defensively so, and now, as her heart rate slowed and the echoes of her orgasm faded, she relaxed them and opened her eyes. Her face felt taut, her lips numb from being violently kissed.

Above her, within her, his face pressed to her neck, Bran shuddered with the last of his climax. Then he lifted himself up off her, separating them with an obscene, wet noise. He did not meet her eyes, instead he rolled to sit on the edge of the bed, his back to her, and rubbed his face.

Stunned, Leah didn’t dare move. Didn’t dare say anything. She didn’t know what had just happened.

Bran stood abruptly, pulling his pants up from his ankles, which was where they had fallen. He went into the bathroom and washed his hands, then when he came out he gave her one of his politest smiles, as if she wasn’t lying well used on her bed, staring at him in astonished silence.

“You’ll miss all the food,” he said.

*

Angus winked at her and handed her a plate of food when she finally came out of the house. She had showered before realizing there was no point – her husband had simply walked straight out. Might as well have put a sign up announcing they’d fucked in the middle of the day, surrounded by what was tantamount to his employees.

“Sounded like you needed that,” Angus said because he had absolutely no filter whatsoever, something they had in common.

Leah punched his arm with the hand not holding the plate. Hard enough that he stumbled back, still grinning. “For goodness sake,” she muttered, picking up a chicken lollipop. She could feel her cheeks burning. “Could you really…?”

“No, that was a joke.” Angus nudged her. “I’m sorry for teasing. Young love still alive and well, then?” There was a flicker of doubt in his voice; he had known, something, of her marriage. Everyone who had ever lived in Aspen Creek did. 

“Ha ha,” she said, ignoring his question, face now fully burning. Of course he hadn’t heard anything. Their windows were double glazed and the buffet was by the pole barn. If she’d had any brain cells left she would have realized that he was making fun of her.

Leah sat through the rest of the afternoon in a daze, a hum of satisfaction between her legs and a flush in her cheeks. Bran was relaxed and cheerful next to her but then he had been relaxed and cheerful before, as well. He was just everyone’s favorite Marrok today.

She tried to look bored. There were a lot of smirks heading her way. Packs liked it when the Alpha couple were physical with each other – it gave everyone a splash of oxytocin, put everyone in a good mood – and these Alphas were Bran’s extended pack. None of them had ever seen him kiss her, let alone sneak off in the middle of the day like a desperate teenager. They were probably thinking this was normal for them.

This was not normal. Obviously.

Bran wrapped up at 5pm. A few were staying for a run that night, others were heading home. She did her hostess duty saying goodbye and then went to hide in the kitchen, ostensibly to start preparing snacks – just bowls of crudités, chips and dip, nothing fancy. Werewolves didn’t really do fancy.

This peace didn’t last long because Anna followed soon afterwards. She had a particularly cheeky expression on her face but knew better than to elaborate on her thoughts, which no doubt Leah would have found unpleasant. “Is it true we’re having pizza delivered from Angelos?” she asked instead, hopping onto the bar stool that framed one end of the kitchen island.

Angelos was one of the best pizza restaurants that delivered in the area but Aspen Creek was just outside of their catchment zone. Normally, if they wanted pizza, they would have to drive out and pick it up but the order she had placed had been so enormous that they had somehow found it in their hearts to make a special delivery.

“We are indeed,” Leah said, checking the clock. “In about forty-five minutes.” She would need to find some cash to tip the driver, she thought, going to find her purse, which she had hung on the back of the kitchen door. 

Angus came into the kitchen, smiled warmly. “Mrs. Cornicks,” he greeted them both, his voice booming dramatically.

Anna smiled. She liked Angus. Most people did. “That’s still weird.”

Leah counted out the cash whilst the two of them chatted. She had just enough. She folded the money and put it into her back pocket and then finished doling out the dips.

“Where’s your new phone, Madam Marrok?” Angus asked, munching his way through a bowl of chips she had carelessly left near him. At this rate, there wouldn’t be enough for the evening. She wrestled this away from him with a frown.

She put the bowl behind her with the others and pulled the device from her purse, waved it around as if it could distract him.

“Well, this is the perfect opportunity to start practicing. All these handsome faces, starting with mine of course.” Angus sucked the cheese dust from his fingers enthusiastically, dark eyes searching the counter, not fooling her in the slightest. She narrowed her eyes. She knew now he had only come into the kitchen to snack.

Anna looked between the two of them. “You know each other,” she said, with dawning realization. “I mean, know know. Not.” She waved a hand around. “Through Bran.”

Leah didn’t immediately get what Anna was talking about, which made her cross. What did she mean ‘know know’? Of course she knew Angus. She ‘knew’ everyone at the Assembly. Better than Anna, who’d only been part of the Marrok’s family for a handful of years, who now behaved as if she was integral to the business. Leah had once been integral to Bran’s business. Once she had been one of the select few people Bran had sent out to kill for him.

Angus, however, translated more easily. “She means, we’re friends,” he said calmly to Leah, giving her a speaking look that told her she was overreacting.

Why didn’t she just say that then? Leah thought, mollified.

Anna looked pleased, which mystified Leah. The younger woman smiled widely, showing all her pretty teeth. On another female werewolf it would have felt like a challenge. Because she was an Omega, it was just a happy smile. “How long have you known each other?”

“All my werewolf life,” Angus said, diving for another bowl of chips like a starving child. Wise to his ways, Leah positioned herself defensively, giving him a warning look as she slapped away his hand. “Bran Changed me. I lived here for a couple of years until I annoyed Bran enough to get rid of me.”

“You didn’t annoy him,” Leah protested, though he was annoying her now. She shoved the phone into her back pocket and started to gather the bowls, indicating with a nod of her head that Anna should do the same with the others.

Angus was grinning. “Word for word what he said. ‘Hopper, you’re annoying me, please go do something useful with your life away from here’.”

Leah laughed, helplessly, using her back to push open the door into the living room. “You’re making that up.”

“Did you sense a lie?”

She didn’t and it did sound like something Bran might have said. Leah had been sad when Angus had left – and a little disappointed. After he had gone, she’d had no friends of her own in the pack for some years. Until Sage, really. And as they all now knew, Sage had never been a friend. She had been a spy and a traitor who had used Leah to get close to Bran.

Angus followed the two women into the living area, where they deposited the snacks around the room. He then drifted over to speak to the other Washington Alpha, who was clearly flirting with the attractive human daughter of the Las Vegas Alpha. Risky. Riskier now that Angus had predatorily thrown himself into the fray. She hoped there wouldn’t be fisticuffs.

She put a few more bowls on the table outside, where they were immediately pounced upon, and then snuck off to the front so she could be prepared for the pizza delivery.

Since she was alone, Leah did take the opportunity to ‘practice’ with the phone, remembering Bran’s slightly snide comment the previous night. Without an audience, she could take some photos without doing something stupid like holding it the wrong way or something and embarrassing herself.

Her first few admittedly weren’t great and at one point she took a very unattractive picture of herself somehow but after a while, she felt she got the hang of it. She got some very good pictures of their honeysuckle and then, finding Angus’s number already programmed into her contacts list, sent it to him via text message.

She watched as three little dots appeared on screen and then he replied, ‘EXCELLENT WORK, MRS. CORNICK’.

Typical Angus, she thought. Always shouting.

*

Leah assumed the incident during the Assembly was an aberration. Some kind of strange, nearly-full-moon fluke inspired by her husband walking in on her touching herself. Possibly Bran had never known she did that, in which case he would be very shocked at what she had in the second drawer of her bedside table for when he was away.

In any case, neither of them mentioned it.

Things went back to normal. Or normal-ish. Bran was still disappearing at odd hours, frequently at night. Once, she got out of bed and watched him walk off into the woods behind their house. Was he meeting someone? she wondered, worrying. A woman?

Bran’s wolf would never let him have a physical relationship with another woman, she knew that. In a way, he had created for himself the perfect storm. He could have sex with Leah, the woman he didn’t like let alone love, or he could have no intimacy with a woman he could love who met him on the spiritual level that he apparently craved.

Leah had unfortunately come to the humiliating conclusion that despite everything she would probably have taken his love over the intimacy. That was never going to happen now, though. 

Leah stayed up all night, curled up on the window seat, waiting for him to return. At some point, she must have dozed off against the glass because when she woke, she was in her bed and he was in his room again. She assumed he had put her to bed himself. She had missed him carrying her.

The next few times she heard him leave, she seriously thought about following. Leah was unequivocally one of the best hunters in their pack and if he had been anyone else, she might have tried it. But Bran had more to him than just werewolf magic. He would know she was following and he would be furious with her.

Leah knew she had to trust that whatever was happening to him, whatever he was dealing with, would be revealed in the fullness of time. She had to trust him.

They held another Assembly – not near a full moon – and it passed peaceably. Just one more to go and then they’d have the full set, she thought, happily waving off the last Alpha from their drive.

“What did you think of your first Assembly?” she asked Kara, who she found hoovering up the remains of breakfast at the dining table. Werewolf teenagers were bottomless pits, Leah reflected admiringly.

“Was interesting. Well, some bits were super dull. But the Alpha from Idaho was smoking hot,” she said, giving Leah a cheeky grin. There was a smear of syrup on her cheek.

Leah barked out a laugh and handed her a napkin. Gideon was very dashing, that was true. “That’s true.”

“Is he indeed,” Bran said, for all intents and purposes appearing out of nowhere. 

Both Kara and Leah yelped. Neither had heard or seen him sneak up behind them.

“Must you do that,” Leah breathed, holding a hand to her chest and then started stacking sticky plates to carry into the kitchen. Bran had made piles and piles of pancakes for the Alphas who had stayed over after last night’s run.

Bran’s face was perfectly innocent, as if he couldn’t imagine what she was complaining about. He turned to tease Kara. “Any other Alphas take your fancy? Gideon is nearly old enough to be your grandfather four times removed,” he added, thoughtfully.

Kara was blushing a splotchy pink. “No one,” she said, clearly lying. She looked shiftily to the side. “Um. I’ve got school.”

“It’s Saturday,” Bran said drily.

“Detention,” she announced, ducking out of the French doors and running around the side of the house.

Leah chuckled and continued chuckling as she and Bran tidied and cleaned up. “Maybe we should invite Cyril to the last one,” she suggested, wiping down the counters in the kitchen.

“I’m not encouraging her hormones,” he said sternly. He opened the refrigerator, despite having only just finished breakfast, and pulled out a plate of leftover ham from the buffet. “Besides, do you really want her mated at her age?”

Leah grimaced. “No.” Then, “Do you think that’s even possible? That young?”

There was a great deal they were learning about young – physically young – werewolves. Kara was still growing, for instance. Most werewolves were changed when they were older and then their bodies reverted to their ‘peak’. Kara had been changed before she had reached her potential peak and Bran had quietly expressed his concern to Leah when she had first been brought to them that Kara might never grow, that the magic that changed them would assume her ‘peak’ was some other time.

Leah had measured Kara every week during the months when she lived with them and they had celebrated that first half-inch of growth quietly but with intense relief.

Bran was rolling pieces of ham and popping them into his mouth one by one. “The magic should be there but they do say the human brain isn’t fully developed until twenty-five so perhaps it’s something that might not be possible until she’s matured mentally.”

“I hadn’t heard that before.” She rinsed the cloth, thinking. She had been Changed at seventeen. Met Bran nearly three decades later. “I guess I don’t know many werewolves who mate soon after their Change anyway. Anna might be the youngest and I guess she doesn’t really count.”  

“No, she’d be an anomaly. Maybe it’s something Sam should study.”

Leah draped the cloth over the faucet, dried her hands. “Do you want me to make you something or is that plate of ham doing it for you?” she asked.

“It’s ‘doing it for me’ just fine, as you put it,” Bran said, with a smirk. “What about you? Any of our Alphas take your fancy?”

“No,” she said firmly and truthfully. Leah might strike up the occasional flirt, but the reality was she had eyes for him and him alone. She folded her arms across her chest. “Will you tell me where you’re going at night now?”

Bran put down the empty plate with a sigh. “Nowhere important,” he told her and, because it was him, she couldn’t tell if that was a lie or not.

“Are you meeting someone?”

A spark of anger flickered across his face. “Is that an accusation?”

She rolled her eyes. “No, Bran, nothing like that. Just – is it someone to do with work? That you can only see at night?”

“No, then.” Bran raised his eyebrows as if waiting for her to decide whether that was a lie or not. Again, she couldn’t tell and what was more he hadn’t answered her previous question so now she was wishing she’d pressed it. Jesus Christ. “Anything else?” he asked insufferably.

Leah clenched her teeth, feeling a muscle tick in her jaw. “Should I be worried?” she asked. There. That could cover all manner of sins.

“Absolutely not.” Now that felt like he was telling the truth, which could only mean he had made sure she couldn’t tell with his previous answers.

And if he was going off into the woods to, what, have a romance with a woman he couldn’t fuck, she still wouldn’t know either way because he could probably argue that wasn’t something she should be ‘worried’ about.   

She exhaled. He was so frustrating. “What am I to do with you?” she asked.

Bran just smiled. 

*

Because she wasn’t a masochist, the first Monday of every month Leah had a cleaning company come in and do a deep clean for eight hours. The rest of the time, she kept up with the basics – and Bran helped by doing his own bathroom and his office – but there was only so much one woman could do against a pack of werewolves who treated her home like a clubhouse.

Since the company sent four people to clean, that was precisely four more humans than Leah was willing to tolerate. She usually took herself off for the whole day - maybe for an extensive hike, sometimes shopping, occasionally she’d go and see a movie if she’d seen something advertised that caught her eye. She didn’t know what Bran did but knew he felt similarly and also made himself scarce. 

Early that Monday, Leah dressed in her hiking clothes, packed a bag of sandwiches, snacks and water, and set off in the direction she had seen Bran go countless times in the middle of the night. She figured she would follow his trail as far as it would go, just to satisfy herself. Leah wasn’t expecting to actually get any answers; he was too clever for that.

Before she left the perimeter of her home, she remembered the app Angus had messaged her about that would be useful for her ‘country bumpkin life’. She opened it, pressed the big green ‘start’ button, and the app started mapping her hike to the map.

For the first hour, it was reasonably simple and she enjoyed herself, as she always did when she was out in the natural environment she had lived in most of her life. Then she met the first of many creeks which, sighing, she realized he had done deliberately to throw her – and anyone else – off the scent. This would have been easier in wolf form, she thought, but Bran didn’t like them to Change during the day, not unless they were accompanied by a ‘human’ and wearing a collar. Leah had accomplished many feats as a wolf but having the dexterity to put her own collar on wasn’t one of them.

Patiently, crouching low and following the banks of the creek, Leah eventually scented the point where her mate had crossed. She picked up the trail and, half an hour later, met the next body of water. Then the next.

She stopped for a snack break, took some photos of light reflecting off the water, which she thought looked pretty, and sent them to Kara who tolerated her photographic efforts in a slightly patronizing ‘teenage’ way. Leah didn’t really have people she could send pictures to so she was limited with her options.

Actually, Leah had been surprised at how far her new cell phone number had managed to spread without her doing anything about it. Everyone in the pack certainly seemed to have it - and beyond. Angus had looped her into a WhatsApp group with a few of his own pack whom she knew. She rarely commented but the messages she read were amusing.

Clarabel, in Colorado, who was recently Changed, messaged her almost daily with inane questions she should really be asking her Alpha. Leah tolerated this because Clarabel had been a submissive and Bran had quite wanted her to stay in Aspen Creek before the Colorado Alpha had wooed her away.

She was also in a bizarre exchange with Horace, who was a chef in Washington D.C. and whom she also counted as a friend. He was sending her recipes to make – she made them, and then she criticized them. Apparently he was writing a book and she would get ‘credit’, whatever that meant.

Kara sent a message back: Pretty!! Where are you? There was a pause. Oh, first Monday of the month. Got it.

For an hour after lunch, Leah realized Bran had worked a ‘trap’ into his trail by adding a false scent trail that looped her around several times and distracted her. She groaned out loud. This was becoming more tedious than it was worth, she thought, as she passed the same landmarks for the second time. She seriously considered Changing and storing her bag and clothes but her stubborn, competitive streak set in and, muttering offensive comments about Bran, she reduced her speed even more, having to follow the loop twice again before finding the moment he deviated.

At 3PM, she took another break, resentfully chewing her protein bar. She looked at the App and saw that as the crow flew, she was really only eight miles from her house and yet she had been walking most of the day. Her husband was really a piece of work.

She set off again.

Finally, Leah came to a point where she really, really couldn’t work out where he had gone next. The trail just seemed to stop. She stood, turning around before looking up at the dense, young firs that surrounded her, looking for something, anything, that screamed ‘different’.

Nothing. Bran must have done something ‘witchy’ to hide what he was doing here or to cover the rest of his trail. She didn’t think he could fly but he hid a lot of his powers from her, from everyone. Much like his monster, Bran was also ashamed of his witch-blood. It was useful to him but he thought it tainted him.

Leah scuffed the ground with her boots, not caring that it would be obvious someone had disturbed the space. It was getting dark; she had been out longer than she had intended. In some senses, she had done better than she had expected, which she supposed only meant Bran hadn’t been as careful as he could have been.

Resigned, she was about to set off back home when she heard it and for a moment she really couldn’t believe it – it was that strange murmuration, again. Her name. Said over and over again. Leah Leah Leah.

“Holy shit,” she said, out loud.

*

The whole way home, in the dark, her thoughts bounced from one thought to another.

Bran had taken the box from the safe room and hidden it somewhere where the trail had ended. Why? What was so important about it that he had to hide it? Was he visiting the box, regularly? Why was he doing so? The box was still saying her name, still ‘calling’ her. Why? Was it just her? Or could it be anyone?

Of course, Leah had no answers to these questions and now, alone in the dark, miles from home, she admitted to being slightly freaked out. She couldn’t hear the box – not any more – but she kept imagining she could hear it.

Leah found herself running the last mile, only easing to a jog when she saw the lights of her house and the tension eased. She could see people in their living room, the big TV screen on. She came around the house to the side porch and unlaced her boots, hanging her bag up on the hooks, barely noticing how nice and organized the side porch was, which was normally one of the pleasures of coming home after the cleaners have done their job.

She walked into the open plan living area – which smelled fresh and lovely – and vaguely greeted the members of the pack were who congregated there. She walked down to Bran’s office. The door was slightly ajar and the light was on.

Leah eased the door open, looked inside. Bran wasn’t at his desk, was just lying on the small Chesterfield that was tucked up against the wall adjacent to the door. He was sleeping, a book open on his chest, his eyelashes like dark half-moons on his cheeks.

Bran looked, like he always did when he was asleep, young and handsome. Her heart turned over, her love for him spilling out helplessly – an infinite, unstoppable and hopeless emotion.

His eyes opened slowly, like she had woken him just by watching. He smiled sleepily at her, warm and soft, for all the world as if he was happy to see her. Transfixed, she took two steps forward and his expression changed, darkened into an invitation. His whole body tensed, as if he was going to pounce, and Leah felt that prickle of anticipation, of sexual heat pooling between her legs. It was happening again. It was going to happen again.

A loud crash from behind broke the haze they had fallen into. They both turned their heads in the direction it had come from.

“What was that?” she called.

There was a moment of nervous silence. “The vase from the mantelpiece,” came Tag’s hesitant voice. “Sorry.”

Nothing in the communal spaces had any value – sentimental or otherwise – to her. She had learnt that lesson early on. “Clean it up,” she instructed.

Bran sat up, stretching. The moment was gone. “Good walk?” he asked her.

She nodded, not looking at him. Her cheeks felt hot. “I’d better go supervise that.”

*

The next day, Leah walked to Charles’s house. Charles’s and Anna’s house, she amended.

As Second in the pack, Charles’s house should also have born the brunt of ‘entertaining’ the wolves of Aspen Creek but even amongst their own people Charles had created such a climate of fear that they left him well alone. Leah herself had been there perhaps twice, maybe three times in her life. She had never been welcome.

After bracing herself for what she was sure was going to be excruciating experience, Leah knocked on the door and, surprise already on her face, Anna opened it.

The first time Leah met Anna, it had been in Charles’s house. She had heard – not from her husband, but from Sage, which was an unhappy reflection come to think of it – that a pretty young werewolf female had been brought to live in Aspen Creek and that Charles was besotted with her and so too was Bran.

As Sage would have known, this had been a painfully familiar tale and it had come after several days where she and Bran had been arguing badly – about Carter, about the funeral, about why he insisted on going when he knew he would be exposing himself to their anger, that it would hurt him, and then he had gone anyway. She had not been at her best. Sage had known that. Sage had manipulated her.

Jealousy hadn’t always been Leah’s besetting sin. Arrogance had been. A sense of superiority. Bran had emotionally knocked that from her but jealousy grew in its place. Nothing made her behave worse than jealousy. Sage had known that. 

It would probably behoove her to think of all the things Sage had also ‘manipulated’ in her life, Leah thought suddenly. 

“Good morning, Anna,” Leah said, smiling widely despite her darkening thoughts. She had practiced her initial conversation in her head. She mustn’t demand, she must ask. Use polite words. Remain calm and don’t let Charles antagonize her. “Would Charles have a moment to speak to me?”

The surprise on Anna’s face blossomed further which told Leah she had hit the right mark. She stepped back, allowing Leah into the open-plan room. Charles himself came out of the kitchen, wiping his hands on his jeans.

Leah was in a difficult position. Bran, her husband, was her mate and her Alpha. What she was about to do felt technically like it might be a betrayal but she sincerely had no idea where else to turn. If he wouldn’t talk to her, then she had to go to someone who would.

Didn’t she?

She chewed on her bottom lip and after a while she realized she had been staring at Charles – or Charles’s chin – for a long time.

“Can I get you something to drink? Tea or…?” Anna asked, brightly, interrupting the silence.

“Yes, please, that would be lovely. Thank you,” she added, politely. Good.

Leah had to do this in a way that didn’t piss Charles off. Which meant she had to try hard not to. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, bringing her speech to the forefront of her mind.

“Bran has been behaving oddly,” she said, quickly.

Charles said nothing, then nodded as if he realized some reaction would be useful to her. She had practiced assuming he would react. “Okay.”

Leah flexed her hands at her sides. “Since that issue with the artefact, he has been disappearing, in the night. Often all night. I have asked him, repeatedly, what he’s been doing but he avoids answering me truthfully. If it was just work, he would have said so.” This was just as embarrassing as Leah had imagined, admitting that her mate lied to her. But Charles would know. Charles knew everything. She pressed on. “So yesterday, I followed his trail. It was a massive pain. You remember when he used to set trails for you as a child?”

She hadn’t practiced that last part and was pleased when Charles’s mouth flickered in the amusement of this shared memory. “I do.”

“It was like that. He built loops in and went through water over and over.” She rolled her eyes. “Honestly. I was at it all day. Finally, I got to a spot where I couldn’t work out where he had gone. And then I heard it again. The artefact from the safe room.”

This interested him. “Really.”

“Yes. And I looked everywhere but I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t find it. So, I thought, I might not be able to find it but maybe you could?”

Anna emerged from the kitchen with a cup of tea. “Oh, Leah, do come and sit down,” she said, jolting at the sight of Leah still effectively standing in the entrance-way.

Leah had never been invited to sit before. Uncomfortably, she perched at the edge of their couch and accepted the cup of tea. Charles and Anna took the other couch.

Charles was frowning. “If Da has hidden something, it’s probably for a good reason.”

“I know that,” she said testily. His eyes kindled and she quickly backed down. In his house, she had no choice. “It’s just. He— he visits it. A lot. And—” She exhaled deeply, took a sip of the tea. It was rosehip, which was one of her favorites. Anna must have noticed. If pressed, Leah couldn’t have told anyone anything that Anna liked, except for her step-son and that horse he had bought her.

She cleared her throat. “He’s behaving oddly in other ways. I can’t tell you how, it’s private, but I know my mate and for him… it’s odd.”

Leah glanced at Anna. Since she had first come here, Anna’s control over her Omega powers had improved immeasurably. She no longer felt compelled to tell her things. But the awareness that she could and the only thing stopping her from doing so was her own sense of honor was a worrying one. She had been concerned she would blurt out something deeply humiliating about her level of intimacy with Bran. Now that she couldn’t bear. She would probably have to leave the pack if that got out.

Charles looked like he wanted to ask more but Anna put her hand on his knee and that seemed to stop him. “Are you sure it’s just since the artefact?” Charles asked next.

This was a strange thing to say. “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” and her step-son looked pained. How gratifying that this conversation was as uncomfortable for him as it was for her, she thought.

“He means – since Bran thought he’d have to kill you,” Anna said bluntly.

“Oh.” She thought about it. “No, that didn’t really change anything significantly.” Leah sipped her tea and dismissed the thought. Bran had hurt her but he had hurt her many times before. “The box in the room. Had you really never seen it before? Has he given you any indication of what it was, since?”

Charles shook his head. He glanced at Anna, as if they had also talked about this. “No. I hadn’t seen it before. And he’s said nothing about it. All I could tell was that it was important to him.”

“He’s definitely had it the whole of our marriage,” Leah said. Then she clarified this. “In the old cabin, he kept it in the locked trunk at the end of our bed. But before that it was on his bedside table. And before that…” She closed her eyes. There came a point when such mundane memories became difficult to recall. She shook her head. “Maybe a cubbyhole? In the kitchen?”

“Huh,” Charles said, tilting his head to the side. “So it’s either very important to him, maybe valuable, or it became dangerous enough to lock it up.”

This was her thinking.

“Sentimental valuable?” Anna suggested, cautiously.

“It wasn’t hers,” Leah muttered immediately, her mind going straight to what Bran was most sentimental about. She did not look at Charles. “I would know that.” It wouldn’t have lasted long in their house if that was the case. Bran had made sure any mementos of his first true mate were only in his head. And in his son.

“Da doesn’t keep things for sentimental reasons, in any case,” Charles said to Anna gently, touching the hand that was still on his knee. “Or he’d probably become one of those people on that television show. Hoarders?” They smiled tenderly at each other.

Leah put down her cup, suddenly irritated. “So you won’t go and look for it.”

Charles exhaled. “I haven’t decided. I believe you,” he added, which he didn’t have to, she thought, and the fact calmed her down. “You wouldn’t have come to me if you weren’t very worried. But I also trust Da.”

Leah nodded. “That’s… fair,” she said. She did too. She stood up.

This conversation had gone about as well as it could have done, even if she hadn’t got what she wanted. At least now she had shared the burden with their Second. That felt right.

She made to leave, but Charles stopped her with a raised hand. “Do you know where it is?”

Nodding, Leah pulled the phone out of her jacket pocket. “I’ve got the co-ordinates. I can, I think I can, send them to you. Somehow,” she added, opening the App. She showed him the little map, including all the diversions she had taken.

Charles chuckled, taking the phone from her. “Now, that’s a proper trail.” He used his fingers to pinch the screen, zooming in. “Ha. He trapped you.” He showed Anna.

“So annoying,” Leah muttered.

His face had lit up as he explored the map. It was the most animated she had ever seen him. She supposed he was remembering all the tests his father had set for him as a boy. “Did you do this on two legs or four?”

“Two.”

“That’s impressive, Leah. I’m not sure I could have done that.”

Probably he was just, as the expression went, ‘blowing smoke up her ass’. Leah endeavored to be immune but likely failed. She tossed her French braid over her shoulder. “Can you send it to yourself?” she asked.

Charles nodded, pressed a button. He then looked at the phone properly, tilting it one way, then the other. “Angus gave you this?” he asked.

Leah nodded, took the phone back when he proffered it to her. “I’m on his company contract.”

“That makes sense,” Charles said obliquely. He gave her a nod. She was dismissed.

It took every inch of willpower for Leah to walk out, rather than contrarily sit back down. Every. Inch.

*

Leah rewarded herself for the conversation – for the unloading of this burden that she alone had felt – with some online shopping. Which she was now able to do on her cell phone rather than using Bran’s computer. It was a revelation.

She was scrolling through Nordstrom’s website, looking at dresses she would never have occasion to wear, when Bran left just after lunch and she was still on the couch when he returned three hours later.

“Have you really not moved?” Bran asked her, sounding amused.

She turned to focus on him and just that act of turning told her how long she had been staring at the little screen. The real world looked weird. “I guess… not.”

Warily, Leah put her phone down. She had been looking at Louboutins. She had several pairs already which she also rarely wore. Life in the backwoods of Montana didn’t really have much need for high heels. If Louboutin did hiking boots, she would have been all over them. “That’s dangerous,” Leah admitted, half to herself, blinking at him.

“I’m making dinner,” Bran said, hazel eyes twinkling charmingly, “since it appears we’re alone tonight.”

Leah nodded, still a little poleaxed by how time had passed without her realizing. After a while, she followed him into the kitchen.

Bran had a limited repertoire of cooking skills, it being a task she had taken over reasonably early on in their marriage. From the items on the counter and what he was pulling from the refrigerator, she was being treated to steak, potatoes and salad.

“You can make a sauce,” he told her, benevolently.

“I can, can I?” She looked at what they had. Pulled out some mushrooms, some heavy cream and shallots which he always put in the crisper instead of the brown bag in the pantry. Bran liked to refrigerate everything. “What did you do today?” she asked casually.

“A little of this, a little of that.” At her look, Bran grunted. “Some phone calls. I responded to half a dozen emails from my Alphas that I had put off responding to because they were, quite frankly, very boring. I had a call with Kara’s father where we painfully discussed her further education options and only halfway through I realized he was trying to tell me he didn’t have enough to pay for her to go to college.”

It was her turn to grunt. She got out a chopping board. “I could have told you that.”

“Then I lied to him and said that my charitable arm regularly put my werewolves through college and it was not a problem.”

She laughed. “Why did you lie?”

“Because he clearly feels emasculated by my paying for things.” Bran put water on to boil and she automatically salted it. “I was going to do that,” he said testily, bumping her away from the stove.

Leah went, smiling. In the other room, she heard her phone beep. She went to fetch it. It was a message from Kara with a photo of her math homework and an angry face. Leah typed: Ask Charles. All Greek to me.

Kara wrote back: But you can speak Greek.

This was true. One of Bran’s biggest surprises was discovering Leah’s aptitude for picking up languages. She could even manage some Welsh. Can’t read it!

She stuffed the phone into her back pocket, still smiling, and rejoined Bran in the kitchen. She started peeling the shallots. “Does she even want to go to college?” she said, thoughtfully. It had not been something Kara had ever discussed with her.

“Doesn’t matter. She is going. For the experience, more than anything,” Bran added in that high-handed way all Alphas had. He poured the baby potatoes into the boiling water.

She didn’t say anything in response to that. She didn’t know what the ‘experience’ college would give Kara. She minced the shallots, started sautéing them in butter whilst she sliced the mushrooms. Then she dropped them in, crushed in some fresh garlic and thyme from the pot on the windowsill, then added splash of white wine. She lowered the heat and jiggled the pan whilst it melded. In her back pocket, her phone beeped again.

“Is that Angus?” Bran asked, conversationally, pouring a bag of greens into a salad bowl.

She shook her head and turned the heat down further, very low, and poured the heavy cream in and seasoned it. “It’s Kara. Probably.”

“Ah. Do I have your new phone number?”

She raised her eyebrows. “I don’t know. Do you?” She stuck her little finger into the sauce, tasted it. Added a pinch more salt.

“I don’t think I do.” Bran patted down the steaks with paper towel and she passed him the salt.

“Well, you’re the only one. I don’t know how everyone else got it. I got a message from Corinna this morning.”

“I thought she swore never to speak to you again.”

Leah was pleased he remembered. Her ‘spats’ with the female Alphas of their acquaintance were frequent. “She did. Patronizing bitch,” she added.

“Leah,” Bran chastised, but it was half-hearted. He didn’t like Corinna, either. “What did she want?”

“To say that she wouldn’t be able to make it to the Assembly again but said that their son would be coming with Jorge and would I look out for him.” Bran bellowed a laugh. Even though she knew it was ultimately at her expense, she smiled. “I thought you’d think that was funny.”

“Her adopted human son? Isn’t he a teenager?” Bran leaned on the counter, shoulders shaking. “What… was she thinking?”

“I don’t know. I suggested she send a babysitter if she was that concerned and that perhaps a barn-full of Alphas wasn’t the place to dangle fresh meat. She sent me the emoji with the middle finger up. Rude.”

Bran had to wipe his eyes. “That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard all week.”

“I then realized it would be the summer vacation and actually maybe Kara would like to spend time with him,” she sighed. “So then I had to be gracious.” 

“Well done,” he said, genuinely.  “And that’s a good idea.”

“Kara said it sounded like I was setting her up on a playdate. Children are hard work.” Her phone beeped again and this time she took it out. Two messages from Kara. She read them, more math complaints, also Charles had apparently said helping her was ‘cheating’. She replied, He probably doesn’t know either, then.

When she looked up, Bran was looking at her. He looked away, as if she had caught him doing something he shouldn’t be doing. “Shall we watch a movie this evening?” he suggested.

*

They watched one of their preferred movie genres that they could only watch if it was just the two of them – a suspenseful horror movie. Bran found them funny. Leah found them gloriously, mind-blowingly scary, which was why they could never watch this particular type of movie with the rest of the pack. She might not have been a cherished Omega but if the Alpha’s mate freaked out, which she did, the rest of the pack would follow.

Midway through, though, Bran started to fidget enough that it was distracting even for her. She paused the movie. “Is something wrong?”

He didn’t look at her. “No, it’s fine.”

Another ten minutes – Leah was now clutching a pillow to her body, her fight or flight mode very much engaged and she was leaning towards flight – and Bran sighed. “I have to go,” he said.

Bemused, she watched him get up. “Really? Now?”

He didn’t respond, just walked behind the couch. She clambered up on her knees to watch him. It was on the very tip of her tongue to ask, to say, Is it the box? Are you going to see the box?

Only knowing how angry he would be with her stopped her from saying anything.

“Will you come back soon? And finish the movie?” she asked quietly. They’d been having what, for them, counted as a lovely evening. The companionable cooking, the time together just the two of them. She would think on the experience happily for weeks to come. Or would have, she realized, had he not left.

Bran was shrugging on his coat. “No, you can finish it.”

“I can’t watch it on my own,” she said, pouting.

“Then save it for another time, Leah, I don’t care,” he snapped, opening the door and slamming it behind him as he left.

She flinched. Then felt familiar sensation of tears burning her eyes. She let them fall, there was no one to see them, and then she turned off the TV. She put the living room to rights, sniffling piteously, then went up to bed.

As she changed into one of her night gowns, as she brushed out her hair, she gave herself a stern talking to like she did every time Bran crushed her heart. She was much better off now, she told herself. When Bran had found her, she had been a higher-than-average dominant female whose only prospect was to mate with one of the rapacious and unpleasant men of her pack.

Now here she was in a big, lovely house with a black Amex card, an unlimited allowance, driving an expensive car and wearing expensive clothes.

And her marriage was… okay. She had certainly seen worse.

Leah brushed her teeth and turned out the lights. She left the connecting door between their rooms a little ajar, like she always did, and climbed into bed. Crying always made her tired, which in a way was a relief – if she went to sleep, she would stop thinking.

She closed her eyes and woke seemingly moments later knowing Bran was in her bed. She rolled over to look at him. He was awake, his eyes blinking in the dark. He turned to look at her. “I’m sorry,” Bran said. “You haven’t done anything wrong.”

Tears burned her eyes again, falling without her being able to stop them. “Are you sure?” she whispered.

“I’m sure.” He rested his hand on her hip. He apologized again. “I’m sorry.”

Tentatively, Leah moved a little closer to him, braced for rejection, but he raised his arm in invitation. She cuddled close. She pressed her cheek to his scarred chest, knowing that he would feel her tears and wanting him to, wanting to make him feel guilt. His heartbeat was even and steady and she felt instantly better, like he was a drug she had been craving.    

Bran rested a hand on her head. “Go to sleep,” he told her.

In the morning, he made a move on her, as she had known he would. He had hurt her; so he was allowed. The small gap in the drapes cast a shard of light across his intent face as he pulled her night gown off, as he kissed her breasts, her belly and brushed his nose over the curls between her legs before kissing her there too. When he moved inside of her, he was tender and kind, his hands cupping her face as he pressed kisses to her mouth. He took his time and when they came together, it was gasping into each other’s mouths at the pleasure of it. His eyes fluttered closed and she drank down the sight of his undoing. He was so beautiful to her.

How could he not want this? Leah wondered as always did as she trembled under him, aftershocks still running through her body and his. She pressed her hands to his back, her mouth to his shoulder and memorized the feel of him right at that moment before he left her, so she could think about it later, so she could still feel him in her arms when he was gone.

Leah stood in the shower for a long time afterwards, hands on her face and water raining down on her head, rebuilding herself.

*

The final Assembly was scheduled over a weekend and being ‘last’, Leah knew for her it would be the most boring – given the topics had been repeated several times over – but it would also be vaguely celebratory. They wouldn’t be doing this for another two years.

More people were staying that night and they planned a BBQ for the evening and a big hunt, with Juste and Asil mapping out the trails using different scents. With that many wolves they couldn’t just have a free-for-all run so they would be split into groups. There would be a small prize for each winner – nothing extravagant, just a two night stay in one of Bran’s hotels, which could be used for business or pleasure. Leah expected many of the wives and mates to participate because most Alphas didn’t take vacations. Hers certainly didn’t.

This Assembly, of the Midwest Alphas, also had the added bonus of featuring not one, but two of Leah’s past lovers, if you could call them that. Long ago, she had made a point of making this obvious to Bran, taunting him with the news that two of his Alphas had been intimate with his own mate. She had thought that this might be something that would bother him, that he might be jealous. He had laughed at her, actually laughed at her. It’s not like I thought you were a virgin, Leah, he had chuckled, implying quite the opposite. 

Now, with experience on her side, Leah was embarrassed at herself. He wasn’t like her. Jealousy was her emotion, not his. 

Of the two men, only Dominic was really challenging for her. Hans, who had been mated almost as long as she had been, smiled at her politely and treated her with respect. She barely remembered their time together, thought that he hadn’t been particularly exciting. He had been a tame choice. She occasionally gave his mate a pitying look because she was petty like that.

Dominic, however. Well. He had been her first in all senses and he both knew this and relished it. The less she thought about him the better.

To her simultaneous relief and consternation, Dominic brought a female ‘friend’ with him. She shook hands with this female with an enthusiasm that got her a raised eyebrow from Dominic, who usually only received a deliberately bored reception from her. He lingered too long over her hand, kissing her wrist in a way that made the female scowl and Leah scrub her hand against her jeans when he couldn’t see that he had bothered her.

“That’s unusual,” Nora whispered to Leah at the first BBQ that evening, nodding her head in the direction of Dominic and the woman.

“I can only assume it hasn’t been very long,” Leah whispered back, hiding her mouth behind a chicken wing she was trying to eat delicately.

Dominic’s eye still wandered but he was at an event where any woman present was mated. She had seen his gaze linger curiously on Kara a time or two but had then returned to the woman he had brought with him.

“Do you know her?” Nora asked.

“Not in the slightest. She might be a migration,” she added, thoughtfully. “She’s certainly no baby, though.”

“God knows there isn’t a female in America that man hasn’t— Marrok, hello,” Nora said, swiftly changing her tune as Bran joined them. Bran disapproved of ‘gossip’.

Leah laughed silently. She and Nora weren’t friends. Sage had more than demonstrated why Leah couldn’t have female friends. However, Leah had known Nora a long time, which was almost the same thing. But she would never call Nora if she had a true crisis, not like she would do Angus.  

Nora and Bran exchanged civilities. Nora had the kind of dark good looks that Leah had always been wary of – it had not passed her by that Bran had a ‘type’. Not explicitly always Native American, but long dark hair, dark eyes, faintly mischievous in nature. But Nora was respectful of Leah and, helpfully, less dominant. And married. Obviously. 

Leah glanced behind her, checked that Kara was still with her ‘playmate’, who had turned out to be an interesting and attractive boy a few months older than she. From the way they were talking and looking at each other, Leah was actually quite confident that at the very least Kara had made a friend who knew what werewolf life was like and at very best Corinna would be quite irritated when her son returned home the next day, chattering about Leah’s sort-of foster-daughter.

Meeting her eyes, Kara bounced over. “Can we put music on?” she asked and whilst the question appeared to broadly include Bran, it was clearly aimed at Leah, not her husband. Leah looked over at the youth hovering behind her. ‘We’ clearly included him. He looked hopeful and was holding his cell phone in his hand.

“I don’t mind,” Leah said, brushing Kara’s bangs into place, “but please be mindful of our sensitive ears. Also, nothing explicit.” She had heard the kind of music Kara listened to and it horrified her. It would probably kill Bran.

Beaming, Kara ran back to her new friend and he grinned back at her. She took him inside, obviously to show him in the speaker system.

“I think we’re about to be treated to music that will make everyone’s ears bleed,” Bran murmured, to the general amusement of the werewolves around them who had overheard the conversation. He was drawn into another direction, then, leaving Leah and Nora.

“Is that Corinna’s boy?” Nora asked, sipping her coke. “Kara appears to have made a conquest.”

“It is,” Leah said, baring her teeth happily. This had worked out even better than she had hoped.

*

The evening wore on and grew dark, which means the hunt was near. Leah had made sure that Kara was with Bran’s group. He would keep an eye on her. She didn’t realize until rather too late that she was in Dominic’s group, which was tedious because it meant they would be directly competing with each other. It was already going to be tedious because Bran wouldn’t let anyone from his own pack ‘compete’ with any seriousness and she was expected to hold back.

She Changed in her bedroom, because she didn’t want her clothes to be left outside, and trotted down to wait for her group’s turn. Tag had been given the responsibility of ‘starting’ each group and she sat on her haunches to one side, pretending her wolf wasn’t itching to run.

To her surprise, Charles came and sat next to her. He was also in her group. She lowered her head, which was instinct more than comfort and she didn’t resent doing so. Strangely, things between them were easier since she had visited his house to unburden herself about Bran. She wasn’t sure why.

Anna trotted over, looking excited and happy, fidgeting the way young wolves often did. Charles regarded her affectionately and nudged his nose against hers. Anna’s tongue lolled.

Leah looked away, glanced at the classic timber wolf coloring of Dominic in his wolf form and then looked away again. She briefly considered ducking out of the hunt entirely.

Tag checked his watch one more time and then stood from the bench. “All right, our final group.” He tossed a sack onto the ground and as a one, the wolves merged on it, sniffing frantically to get the scent. Leah, Anna and Charles hung back until all the group had shot off into the trees, then they all gave the sack a cursory sniff before doing the same.

The trail wasn’t an easy one. Asil had set theirs, which was something she would complain about later as he made things unnecessarily complicated for what was essentially a game. He crisscrossed and doubled back on himself and more than once another wolf nearly ran into Leah. She snapped at them and they skittered away from her.

Finally, after the first twenty minutes of unwinding Asil’s knots, Leah caught the main trail and started running, slowing only when she approached one of the many rocky outcrops that were features of their mountainous landscape. She climbed, skirting up a steep drop, and then paused, thinking. This trail was too challenging – if the whole group had gone this way, there would have been accidents. She lowered her nose to the trail and then kicked herself. She realized that instead of following the trail of the hare, she had instead been following Asil, the familiarity of her pack mate distracting her. She huffed at herself. An amateur mistake.

She was well behind the hunt now and though they had been instructed not to win, Leah had been of a mind to make it clear that had she wanted to win, she could have done. All that was pointless now. Better to pretend that she had gone off to do something else, she thought.

She trotted home, annoyed with herself and with Asil. 

“Leah?” Tag asked with a laugh, when she ran past him into the house, head held high. “Got lost?”

She Changed in her room and changed into a fresh pair of jeans. Her fingers hovered over the blouse she had been wearing and then, maybe because Dominic had brought a woman with him, maybe because she would enjoy the attention, she put on instead a blouse that revealed more cleavage than she would normally consider appropriate. She left her hair down for a change and put in a pair of diamond earrings she had bought herself for the two-century anniversary of her marriage.

She went to join Tag outside whose eyes dipped to the deep square of her blouse where the small gold cross rested on her skin and then away again, his cheeks going red. “Beer?” he asked, pulling one from the bucket at his feet.

She accepted it, popping the cap on the edge of the picnic bench, before straddling the bench opposite him.

“Good night so far?” he asked.

They didn’t have much to say to each other. Sage had said that he— she shook her head, stopping that thought. Sage had said many things that she had believed, apparently.

“It’s okay,” she said, giving him a small smile.

Tag nodded, pulling from his own beer. They both heard the howls as the first wolf made it to their prize and Tag stood to start manning the grill. He had platters of steaks, burgers, sausages prepared. To the side were buns and rolls. “I’m guessing you’re too fancy to help,” he said, looking at her doubtfully.

“I’ll get an apron,” she sighed.

As always, Bran was one of the last to return and she handed him a plate with a couple of burgers that she had set aside. He barely acknowledged her as he was talking with two of the Alphas from Mexico, chatting away in rapid-fire Spanish.

When she was reasonably certain everyone who needed to be fed had been, she went inside to put away her apron. She was fixing her hair in the reflection of the microwave when Dominic walked in.

He was apparently startled to see her, alone, and held up his hands. “Peace,” he said with his smirk. “I was sent this way to get a bottle of Whiskey.”

“Whiskey?” she repeated, dumbly.

“Arla likes the taste.”

Arla was the female. Leah went to the cabinet where she kept the alcohol she used for cooking and pulled out a bottle of Jack Daniels. Curious, she unscrewed the cap and sniffed it. It had been open a while. She wondered if it went off.

“Don’t think I’ve ever seen you wear your hair down,” he said, leaning on the counter. Dominic had big hands, which he clasped loosely together now. Everything about him was big – he was well over six foot, with broad shoulders, big biceps and thighs. When she had been with him, she had felt physically small. It had been intimidating and also oddly exciting. Of course, his size was why she had chosen him for her first, before she realized size had nothing to do with power.

“I don’t, really. I think this is fine,” she said, passing it to him.

He took it and then didn’t move. He smiled at her and his eyes lowered to her chest, lingered obviously. The blouse had been a mistake, she thought, regretting that moment of vanity, as she always did. She never learnt. “You look fantastic, Leah.”

Leah liked to flirt – she got a real ‘zing’ from a compliment or a lingering eye - but flirting with a man with whom she had once been intimate was a step too far in her book. Dominic did not get that, however. “You can go back outside now,” she told him, frowning.

Dominic unscrewed the cap of the Whiskey. “Come to think of it, the only time I’ve ever seen you with your hair down was in bed,” he said. He took a sip and his swallow was loud. He licked his lips. “It wasn’t as long then, though.”

She made herself roll her eyes. “Ancient history, Dominic. And this is my mate’s house.”

He bared sharp white teeth at her and prowled forward, fingers tracing the counter as he approached her. “I’ve never got the impression he minds.”

That hurt. “Regardless of what you believe the Marrok thinks, I mind,” she said, holding steady. She wasn’t going to be chased from her own kitchen.

“I can hear your heartbeat. I don’t think you mind, either,” he said, fingers reaching out to brush the ends of her hair, just beneath her left breast. “I think you like it.”

Leah had enough. She pushed his hand away. “No,” she said. Thinking that would be enough, she side-stepped him, intending to put space between them but he grabbed her arm. She looked down at it, astonished he had put his hand on her again. “Let go of me, Dominic.”

He chuckled, voice low. “A little bird told me that your husband doesn’t—”

Leah wasn’t about to hear what her husband did or didn’t do. She pulled clout from Bran, which she knew he would feel, and put real power into her voice, “Get your fucking hand off me.”

A shudder went through him but he was unable to disobey, letting go of her. He gave her an unpleasant smile, silver eyes glittering with real anger. “You must get a real kick out of doing that. You always liked being on top.”

“You’re disgusting,” she spat. She walked swiftly towards the door, picking up the Whiskey bottle on her way, thinking if he made another move, she would smash it in his face.

Outside, it was crowded on the decking and she couldn’t immediately see Dominic’s female. No matter. She suspected it had been an excuse anyway. She deposited the bottle with the other drinks and headed into the crowd of people, intending to bury herself in a conversation – any conversation.

An arm caught her around the waist and she spun, intending to viciously reprimand Dominic, how dare he, in front of everyone, only to come face to face with Bran. His eyes darkened and he tugged her towards him. It was almost an embrace. Who? he asked in her head.

“Someone who should know better,” she said, relaxing against him. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Dominic’s hulking form standing in the French doors, lit up from the lights behind. Thinking of his ‘little bird’, she put her arms around Bran’s neck.

“I hope he was suitably chastised,” Bran said, not releasing her. If anything, his arm tightened. Unknowingly, Bran mirrored Dominic’s earlier actions, fingers of his free hand coming up to touch the ends of her hair, twirling a curling end. His eyes dipped briefly down the low neck of her blouse and she shivered as if he had touched her more intimately. “Unless you want me to get involved?”

Leah swallowed with difficulty. Her lips were tingling, as if he had kissed her. She wanted him to. She always wanted him to. “I think that would be overkill.”

Around them, conversations continued, their people laughing and eating and drinking as if this was something the Marrok regularly did, casually held Leah like this, in public.

“If you’re sure,” he said, lifting the curl of her hair to his lips and kissing it. Leah was pretty certain her heart missed several beats. Then he released her and patted her behind affectionately, which was almost more astonishing than anything he’d done before. “Kara’s been trying to get your attention.”

Leah was grateful that he had given her a direction. She made a bee-line for Kara and stared at her for ten minutes, not hearing a word the girl was saying.

*

With the Assemblies out of the way, it felt like Bran really returned to work – which meant he started travelling again. She was almost relieved. If he was away, she didn’t find herself studying his behavior, didn’t lie awake listening to him go out in the middle of the night, didn’t think about that stupid box, or when he had curled her hair around his finger and kissed it.

Leah didn’t even complain when the first trip took him away over full moon. He looked at her expectantly when he announced it – waiting for her explosion of anger.

“That’s fine,” she said, shrugging instead.

Bran studied her a little longer, then nodded. “Good.”

She actually saw him off, which was unusual for them. He normally liked to leave before daylight and Leah wasn’t that desperate for attention but for whatever reason, he was delayed and she came downstairs to find him still in his office, frowning at his laptop.

“I can make you breakfast,” Leah offered, tying her robe around her waist, “if you’d like.” 

At the mention of food, naturally Bran followed her into the kitchen. He looked tired and, resentfully, she knew why. He had gone to visit the box the previous night. He’d taken the car and in the dark she had looked on the map to guess where he might have parked closer to where it was hidden. It would still have been a couple of hours walk there and back, unless he Changed. In any case, she fell asleep around 4am and he still hadn’t returned home. 

She made him an omelet and a coffee, which he didn’t particularly like but he would need if he was going to drive for most of the day. 

“You look miserable,” Leah said, because she didn’t have a filter. She put the food down in front of him and sat on the stool adjacent. Time to try again. “Why can’t you just tell me?”

Bran ate his omelet. “This is very nice, thank you.”

“I think this is the most frustrating you’ve ever been,” she told him, crossly.

He smiled at her blithely. “Surely not.” 

Leah wanted to scream. Or tear her hair out. Or tear his hair out. For a moment, all she saw was a haze of fury and he just sat there and ate his omelet, almost tormenting her with how placid he was.

The haze burned itself out, as it always did.

“So you’ll be back on Tuesday,” she reconfirmed. Full Moon was Monday, four days away.

“Unless something else comes up.”

She acknowledged that sometimes ‘something’ came up a great deal. “You’ll call if that’s the case,” she said insistently. ‘Sometimes’ he forgot. ‘Sometimes’ he said he’d take a vacation in Africa and not answer his phone because he was waiting for someone to kill her for him.

You know. Sometimes something like that. 

“I will. On the landline,” Bran added, thoughtfully, pointedly, putting his knife and fork together on his empty plate.

Leah jolted. “Oh, yes, my number.” It kept slipping her mind to give it to him. She went to get the cell phone from her purse and Bran followed her. His suitcase was already waiting by the door.

She already had Bran’s number programmed into her Contacts – Angus had done that – so she sent him a message. This is your wife. She was hilarious. “There you go.” She dropped her phone back into her purse.

“That was easy, wasn’t it?” Bran said brightly, as his phone pinged.

“Yes, I’m sure you’ll use it frequently,” was her bitingly dry response. She could count on one hand the number of times he’d called her on her previous phone. And she had received fewer messages. He didn’t like cell phones.

Bran gave in to her tone and pulled a sarcastic face. Then he leaned forward and kissed her. Exactly the sort of kiss a husband would give his wife just before he went away for a few days.

Of course, he’d never done anything like it before and Leah had been conditioned to think that his kissing her was an immediate preface to sex, so her body went from zero to full speed ahead, and she instinctively opened her mouth against his and stepped towards him, her arms weaving around his neck.

She had a nanosecond to be mortified for her lapse in behavior and then she thought nothing at all because Bran was suddenly returning the kiss ten-fold, one hand crumpling up her robe and night gown to her thigh, the other cupping her behind and pulling her tight against him. Her brain dove south. His tongue, hot and wet, parted her lips and slid into her mouth and she gripped handfuls of his hair, frantically trying to get closer to him.

It was a messy kiss, deep and fierce, teeth grazing and catching on each other’s lips. They came up for air only so that Bran could continue the theme, dragging his teeth down her neck, which left her limp-as-a-noodle against him, her knees all but useless. He took two steps forward until she was pushed up against the banisters and then he easily lifted her. She parted her thighs so he could step between them, use the support of the banisters to grind himself between her legs. She was wearing no underwear so the rough fabric of his jeans against her tender parts sent shockwaves through her and she could hear herself making small, needy noises.

Bran’s mouth never left her neck, biting and licking and kissing in turns until she was whimpering and writhing against him. She pulled up his T-shirt so she could touch skin, to feel more of him against her, digging her palms into the taut muscles, rubbing herself against him where she throbbed. It wasn’t enough, not nearly enough.

Impatiently, she pulled at his hair so that she could kiss him again, slanting her mouth over his, lapping at his tongue. His hands were roving over her body, one roughly grabbed her breast, fingers clenching, palm rubbing over her nipple, sending a pulsing zing straight to her clit and the knot that was forming inside her.

She fumbled between them to awkwardly pop the buttons on his jeans and he pulled his head back, eyes dark with lust and said, “Here?”

Leah nodded frantically – she would have agreed to anything he had asked at that point. She could smell herself now, smell that she was ready and eager and that he was the same. He eased back momentarily, holding her up with his hands on her ass as his pants hit the floor.

She let go of his shoulders to pull her night gown up so she could see him, watch him stroke the bulbous head of himself against her, stroking so she could hear how slick she was.

Bran stared at her, gaze dipping to her mouth and back to her eyes. Each time she gasped, his head jerked forwards, as if to catch the exhale and she found herself trying to catch his lips, only managing when he finally, finally breached her and she whimpered loudly into his mouth. He thrust, sheathing himself all the way, and Leah’s hands frantically reached out to grab hold of something, anything, before one hand caught hold of a banister, the other going to the hair on the back of his head. 

Baring his teeth, Bran shifted his grip, lifting her higher so that she sunk down on him a millimeter or two more. Raised above him, at this angle, he felt huge, filling her until it nearly hurt. He started thrusting intently, Leah using her grip on the banister to give her enough resistance to try and match his motions. Their eyes half closed, they looked at each other, mouths barely touching. The throbbing knot inside of her started to unravel, heat blooming. “Soon,” she told him, panting with anticipation.

His eyes flared and he started thrusting into her harder. The sound of their bodies joining was wetly loud – echoing in the big space of their living room – and his fingers were digging into her thighs hard enough to bruise her, however temporarily.

He glanced down between them, watched their frantic joining, and when he looked up, she saw the wolf flash across his eyes, his teeth bared. She gasped in shock and her orgasm hit her like a starburst of heat, the knot coming undone and her with it. She knew she made a loud, raw sound and in response Bran shoved her thighs further up, his body connecting powerfully with hers as she clenched down around him, as he wrought more noises from her with every punishing thrust. She saw the moment he came, his mouth forming a shout. He yanked her painfully tighter against him with each pulse of his orgasm, as if he was trying to climb inside of her, and her legs and thighs were trembling, trying to manifest the strength to keep her grip on him as he finished inside her. 

When his hold on her gentled, she dropped her head onto his shoulder, her legs dangling, still pinned to the banisters by his hips. Periodically, he twitched and she trembled in response, still clenching around him.

For a moment, all was quiet. He breathed into her neck, his heart rate slowing. Then he lifted his head. Quickly, she covered his mouth. “Don’t say something horrible,” she instructed.

“I wasn’t,” Bran said, lips moving against her hand. It sounded a little like it was a lie. She would never know.

Leah let go of the banister with her other hand and wrapped her arms around his neck. “All right. You can put me down.”

Bran did so, also slipping from her. He wasn’t entirely steady, she thought smugly because it took him a moment to step back and bend down to pull up his jeans. This was the second time they’d done this that his pants had never come off fully, she thought. They used to always undress first.

She smoothed her gown and robe down. Somehow without her noticing, he’d managed to pull most of her hair out of her topknot. She caught a glimpse of herself in the hall mirror. Yes, she certainly looked like she had been fucked against their staircase.

“Well, have a lovely trip,” she announced, when the silence seemed to go on for too long.

Bran, despite himself and the awkwardness of the moment, exhaled a laugh. “I sincerely doubt it.”

“Oh, yes, I forgot—” She waved a hand expansively, acknowledging he was going to involve himself in some mystery werewolf beheadings. Nothing about it would be lovely. She was embarrassed. “Sorry. My brain cells have died.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” he agreed, really the only time he had admitted he was as thrown as she was. Bran’s hazel eyes flicked to her once, then away. “I’ll see you Tuesday.”

*

Much like the last time they’d had ‘unapproved sex’ – which is how Leah was finding herself referring to it – she spent most of the day in a daze. Horace had sent her another couple of recipes and she had been planning to work her way through them. That went completely out of the window as she found herself just staring at the recipe, not seeing it. A cup of what? Baste with what? Did she even have Nigella seeds?

She went for a run, hoping it would clear her mind, but she just felt more energized, more awake, more ‘on’. Mid-afternoon, she went upstairs and broke open the second drawer of her bedside table and made herself come a couple of times using her current favorite soft-touch substitute for her mate. Leah had been a loyal follower of the sex toy industry for more than fifty years. Once she had found it shameful, indeed immoral, but she had needs. She really, really had needs.

Then she had a nap.

For dinner, Leah ate four grilled cheese sandwiches straight out of the pan, one after the other. Then some ice-cream straight out of the carton. None of this was behavior she would have allowed herself if Bran had been home or if there had been anyone in the house.

Leah had whimsically wondered if perhaps Bran was possessed. That maybe the box had held some kind of spirit that he’d released. And, she had to admit, maybe she liked this possessed version more, even if it inevitably meant that Bran would go on a killing spree or maybe at some point a demon would burst out from inside of him.

She snorted to herself. 

She picked up her cell phone. There were some messages in Angus’s group WhatsApp but nothing for her. She wished she had someone to talk to but could at least admit even if she did, even if she went back in time and Sage had been there, on the couch next to her, she wouldn’t have been able to tell her. Even Sage hadn’t known the real limits of her relationship with Bran. She’d known plenty, too much, in fact, but not that.

Before bed, she went to look at the space where Bran had pinned her. She’d never had sex in her living room before. Bran was very much a four-walls-of-their-bedroom guy. Except for a handful of times when they’d gone camping but she guessed a tent was similar. They’d had sex in a car – once. That was probably the most adventurous. And it had been just before Mercedes had left, when Leah had finally realized the full danger that her marriage had been in and Bran had been trying to convince her otherwise.

They’d had a lot of sex when Mercedes had been a teenager and living in Aspen Creek. In a way, that had made things worse – being the poor substitute for a dead woman was one thing, feeling like she was the substitute for a living one was another. 

Thinking of the past was useless, though. She knew that. Besides, Mercedes was married and mated to another werewolf now. And Leah was almost certainly sure that Bran’s feelings towards her were nothing more than paternal.

Her phone beeped. To her surprise, it was Bran, replying to her message. This is your husband, it said.

She felt a little warm with sudden affection. Ridiculous. The bar was so low.

So it is, she nevertheless replied. Arrived safely?

Bran didn’t respond immediately. She didn’t really think he would respond at all but a few minutes later he surprised her. Torrential rain but yes. Did you know Lawson’s wife had left him?

Yes, she replied. And so did you.

Did I. He blew her mind then by adding an emoji with the thinking face. Already this conversation included more messages from him than he had ever sent her before.

She typed out her next message without really thinking about it. Serious question: are you possessed?

If I was, I would hardly tell you, now would I? Sleep well.

*

Charles was in her kitchen when she came down in her running clothes the next morning and her first, most natural response, was fear, just like always. She covered this up as quickly as she could, though if he’d been paying attention he would have heard her heart jump. She was surprised to see that he was wearing one of his colorful T-shirts and jeans. He’d come here as a wolf.

“Did you wear a collar?” Leah asked, already knowing the answer and tutting.

He gave her a dismissive look. “If you’re available, I thought we would go to where you heard the box.”

She paused in the act of pouring herself a glass of juice. “Really?”

Her step-son nodded. “I just want to get a feel for it. We won’t touch it.”

Leah nodded, putting the juice back. “We’ll drive partway,” she said, excitedly. “I think I’ve worked out where he parks when he doesn’t hike there.”

She drove because Charles didn’t mind it, not like a lot of dominant werewolves, but she took the Ford truck rather than her Lexus because she knew he disapproved of her extravagant car.

“Are you prepared to tell me what kind of behaviors my da has been exhibiting that have you so worried?”

She snorted. “Charles, you absolutely do not want to know,” she told him. “Particularly because he is your father.” 

This seemed to give Charles a hint. “All right,” he said. Then, deeply uncomfortably, he followed this up with, “He’s not… hurting you?”

Leah glanced over at him. The concern on his face, for her, was truly touching even if she suspected he would rather have been anywhere else than in the car with her asking her that question. She had an uncomfortable flash-back to his face as a little boy, when they had been left alone together. “No. Absolutely not. But thank you for asking. Really.”

She pulled over into a tiny track that she could see had fresh tire marks and then wedged the Ford halfway up an incline so a car could pass if necessary. It was unlikely there would be other traffic – as far as she was aware, the track itself went nowhere, the only house up here had burnt down in a wildfire a few decades previously.

She jumped out. “It’s pretty much west from here. Are you going to Change?”

Charles nodded and she waited for the enviably brief amount of time it took for him to Change. They set off, Leah holding her phone in her hand until she was sure of the direction. 

With Charles in his hulking great wolf form, she didn’t have to make any small talk. If she didn’t look at him directly, she could almost pretend he was just a dog and not a threatening dominant werewolf with alien magic.

They approached the area where Leah had heard the box, though from a different angle. She had to re-orientate herself. “It’s here,” she said, listening. It was so much better in the daylight with Charles at her side. The Leah, Leah, Leah sounded less like a taunt. More… exultant, actually. Her fingers brushed the ruff of his neck. “Can you hear anything?”

Charles sniffed the ground, feet padding lightly across the dirt and growth. She could scent Bran the most strongly, in and amongst the wildlife. There was nothing of her own scent – she hadn’t been there long enough and hadn’t been in wolf form. She supposed that was lucky. Bran would have known she had broken his trust, much as they were doing now.

It was forecast to rain this weekend and Bran was going to be away until after Full Moon. She supposed Charles had taken that into account.

Her step-son sneezed, twice, and whined at the base of a tree.

“Is it here?”

He nodded and then took a step back. She watched as he Changed again, back into a T-shirt and jeans. Not for the first time she longed for this facility to transform fully clothed. “It’s here. It’s in this tree, in fact.”

Leah looked at what appeared to be perfectly ordinary fir. “Really?”

“Yes. There’s actually a hole, here,” he pointed. “He’s cut it himself. The box is a snug fit.”

“I’ll have to take your word for that,” she said, seeing nothing but flawless tree trunk.

“I think the box itself is doing the camouflage work, rather than Da.” Charles crouched down. “It stinks of magic, you know. Of Da’s magic.”

“Witch?”

“More the werewolf than anything. It’s not saying your name to me but it is very active.” Charles wiped his hand over his face and stood. “It’s not… negative, if that makes sense. I don’t get any sinister feeling. And when I mean, his magic – I just mean his. No Other.”

She was relieved, naturally. “I asked him if he was possessed. He said he wasn’t.”

“You asked Da if he was possessed?’ Charles laughed at her, silently. “Brave of you.”

“Well. He is freaking me out. He’s not sleeping. He comes out here to do whatever it is with this box and then he— he’s slipping up,” she said, quickly finding the best way to describe it. “He has all these rules about us. These, these, restrictions on what we can and can’t do so he doesn’t cross a line and he’s crossing the line and… and… and…”

Warily Charles approached her, put his hands on her shoulders. “Leah, take a deep breath and try to calm down.”

“I’m calm!” Leah was not calm. She sucked in air several times over, Charles mimicking her but not trying to terrify her into submission by meeting her eyes. “I’m calm,” she repeated, feeling more so. “I’m calm. I just don’t know what’s happening.”

Charles, who had never voluntarily touched her that she could remember, rubbed his hands up and down her arms. “I understand. This is definitely unsettling. I could try to talk to him—”

She shook her head urgently. “He would not like that. He would know it was me. He would feel betrayed.” She couldn’t bear for him to feel betrayed again, not by her.

“Okay, I won’t do that. How frequently does he come out here?”

“On average, three or four times a week.”

Charles’s eyebrows rose. “That’s a lot.”

“I know! What if it’s controlling him somehow?” She covered her face. “I mean, without me telling you what he’s doing, because you’ll think me ridiculous, it’s… he would not like it. I don’t want him to wake up one morning and suddenly—”

What? Be angry? Disgusted at himself? Hate her?

Yes, she thought, all those things.

Selfishly, whatever the repercussions there would be for Bran, Leah also didn’t want to get used to it. If this was a temporary blip caused by magic, a temporary hiatus from the rules and restrictions he usually placed on their marriage, she couldn’t think of anything worse than to experience it and then have it abruptly removed from her life. Look, here’s a thing you’ve always wanted, oh no, you don’t deserve it.

Charles cleared his throat. “Until I have evidence that what he’s doing is hurting the pack, I’m not sure what else I can do.”

Leah exhaled. “I know. You’ve helped. I’m glad it doesn’t feel evil, at least.”

He looked back at the tree, this time thoughtfully. “No, not evil.” He nodded in the direction of where they had come. “Shall we?”

*

Leah paused the TV show when she heard Bran’s truck drive up, listening intently. Used to be she would pretend she had ‘forgotten’ that he was coming home. She fooled no one, least of all Bran. Nowadays she just tried to keep herself as busy as possible so it at least didn’t look like she had been waiting at the door all day.

This evening – to distract herself – Leah had a magazine open in front of her and she was trying out a half-up hairstyle which required maybe four more hands than she actually had. She had half braided the top of her hair, the rest was hanging over her shoulders, and she was in the process of giving up.

Bran pushed open the door and she could tell something was wrong by the way he was moving. Then she sniffed the air. “Why can I smell your blood?” she asked, kneeling on the couch.

“Bullet. Shoulder.”

“I beg your pardon,” she said, clambering up.

“Get it out. Now.” Bran went into their downstairs bath, where they kept the big first aid kit. She followed him and in the much smaller room felt a wave of uncomfortable power from him. Normally, he buttoned himself up pretty tightly. He had to be in some pain.

“Why didn’t someone take it out?” she demanded. Leah crouched down and yanked the box from under the basin whilst Bran put the toilet seat down and sat on it.

He winced and said nothing, just started to undo his shirt. She batted his hands away and did this for him, kneeling in front of him. He was wearing a T-shirt underneath and she could see he had padded the wound. It was oozing blood but not much because it had clearly mostly healed already. She just ripped the T-shirt; they went through dozens a month, it made no odds.

Bran growled, low and long.

As his mate, one thing Leah was absolutely sure of was that he could never physically hurt her so whilst the rest of the pack might have cowered over this, she didn’t. She was kneeling anyway, automatically lower than him. If he wanted to exert his authority, she was already submissive enough.

She pressed her nose to the padding suspiciously. “It’s a fucking silver bullet, Bran,” she snapped.

“Language,” he bit out.

She wasn’t having that. “Fuck fuck fuck.”

Bran’s teeth snapped at her, eyes flashing with fury. Good. If he was angry, the poison hadn’t gone too far. She ignored him and unceremoniously ripped the sticky padding from his skin. Sure enough, there were blue lines etched into his skin, spreading like spider-silk from the wound. Silver poison. Her husband went white, his hands coming up to her shoulders to lean on her, his fingers flexing outwards against the urge to clench.

“Your bedside manner… is execrable,” he said through his teeth.

Reaching behind him, she felt around the muscles of his back. “Only you would use ‘execrable’ when silver poison is running through your body. I think it’s closer to the back. You’re going to have to lie on your front.”

Exhaling, she pulled a fresh scalpel from the pocket of the first aid kit as Bran eased himself down to the tile. He sighed; the tile was probably significantly cooler than his body.

She pulled a towel onto the floor, dropped a pair of forceps on it, some wipes. “Any other wounds you’d like to tell me about?”

“Other bullets went straight through.”

“Other bullets.” She shook her head and swiftly made a cut into the meat of his shoulder.

“A little warning, Leah!” Bran yelped, hands flexing, trying to dig into the tile.

She disposed of the scalpel and held open the cut with her finger and thumb, picking up the small forceps. “I’m digging around into your shoulder now,” she told him brightly. They were lucky, the bullet was fairly close to the surface.

“Fucking hell,” her husband said to the tile.

“Language, Bran.” She gripped hold of it and pulled, parting the little nugget of poison from her husband’s flesh. “Done.”

Bran breathed silently. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” Leah dropped it, the scalpel and the forceps onto the towel. She held back her hair and leaned forward again, sniffing the wound. “It should heal fine but I’ll put a dab of glue on it. Then you can roll over and I’ll look at the front.”

She glued the incision together – werewolf first aid was a great deal simpler when you didn’t have to worry about infection – and then she put a piece of medical tape over it. She helped Bran roll over. He looked better. Still tired, of course.

Leah sniffed the hole on his chest. Sometimes poor quality silver bullets parted ways inside and she didn’t want flecks of silver to stay in him. “Think this is fine too,” she said.

“Oh good,” he said quietly, eyes closed.

She cleaned it, added another dab of glue and taped him up. She rested her hand on his abdomen. “You’re all done.”

Bran put his hand over hers. “I’d like to go to bed now.”

She nodded and helped him up. He stretched a little, wincing. “It’s been a while since I was last shot.”

“For which I’m grateful. Why didn’t you let them take it out?”

“Too close to full moon,” he explained. “I was really only confident you could do it safely.”

Ah. Naturally he would prefer a nine-hour drive to savaging one of his wolves to death over a measly silver bullet.

By the time Bran was at the top of their stairs, he was walking under his own steam. He surprised her by walking past his bedroom door and going into hers. But then, if he had been hurt, his wolf would be restless, she reassured herself.

Bran climbed into her bed, jeans, socks and shoes on.

“Oh, Bran,” she complained, unlacing his boots, then pulling his socks off.

Bran ‘mpphhed’ into her pillow.

“Roll over and I’ll take your jeans off, then.”

He did so, watching her, each blink taking longer than the previous. By the time he was in his underwear, he was already half asleep. She pulled the sheet over him. He would be too hot for the comforter.

It was pretty early to go to bed but Leah found when she was downstairs she was distracted by him upstairs, in her bed, so she turned off the lights and went up anyway, figuring she could at least read or surf the internet whilst he slept. She washed her face, brushed her teeth and then changed into her night gown. Sitting at her dressing table, she unbraided her hair and went through her ritual of brushing it out.

Bran rolled over in her bed. “Leave it down,” he said to her.

She caught his eye in the mirror. He was holding her pillow scrunched under his face. She put down the soft hair-tie she usually used to tie it out of the way and went to join her husband in bed.

*

Leah woke before him, despite his keeping her up well into the early hours of the morning. She leaned over him, sniffed the gauze on his back. “S’fine,” he murmured, not opening his eyes. There was a small smile on his face.

“Sleep then,” she whispered. She brushed her lips over his shoulder, something that could conceivably be an accident, and slipped out of bed.

Out of consideration, Leah showered in his bathroom and dressed in a pair of his sweats and a T-shirt when a glimpse back in her room told her that he was still unconscious. He had rolled over into her side of the bed and buried his face in her pillow. Maybe, like her, he found the smell of his mate very comforting.

Or perhaps her side of the bed was simply cooler.  

She went to get the newspaper, put some bacon on and stood in front of the freezer trying to make a vague plan for dinner. Then she remembered Horace’s recipes. Should she make those today? She mentally ran through the ingredients and thought that Bran wouldn’t be keen on actually consuming the results.

Bran wandered in wearing only his pajama pants. He had taken the tape off and the wound on his front was just a small, purple bruise. “I smell bacon,” he said, enthused.

She gave him a laughing look. “Eggs?”

“I can do them,” Bran volunteered, getting out a pan. He stared at it blankly, as if the thought of the next step overwhelmed him.

“Was it that awful?” she asked, taking the eggs from the refrigerator.

“No. It was fine. Well.” He shrugged.

“Yes, apart from the beheadings,” she acknowledged.

“Full moon was hard,” he told her, quietly.

Leah blinked. “More than usual? Why?”

Bran’s mouth twisted into a moue of distaste. “You know why.”

Her lips parted. “I really don’t, Bran.”

He was uncomfortable with the conversation. Bran was not often uncomfortable. He cracked eggs into a bowl and began to whisk them. He wasn’t going to say any more. She rolled her eyes. “Remember to season that.”

“I know.”

She pulled out some boneless chicken thighs. She’d stuff them with – she opened the refrigerator again – mozzarella cheese and some sun-dried tomatoes, brush the outside with pesto. They’d have hasselback potatoes and a salad on the side. Done. Easy.

Bran served up the eggs and bacon and she got out the orange juice, grabbed two glasses. 

She hopped onto a stool and poured for them both. “May I use your printer?” She needed to print out Horace’s recipes. She’d had another look through again yesterday and the latest ones were complicated. She wanted to make notes. 

“Of course.”

They ate in silence for a few moments. “The eggs are good. Thank you,” Leah said. “How was your trip?”

“Bachelor packs eat nothing but junk food,” Bran said, as if this was even vaguely what she was asking. “If I see another Taco Bell this year it’ll be too soon.”

Leah’s mouth twitched. “Ah. Of course.” She had forgotten the Calgary pack were all entirely single at the moment since Lawson’s wife had left him. She giggled. “She put up with a lot.”

“Very true.”

The rest of breakfast was spent silently, Bran apparently in no mood to elaborate on the trip or how he had ended up shot. He perused the newspaper. Leah tried not to think about how the last time they’d had breakfast together, he’d pinned her against the staircase afterwards and made her come so hard she’d seen stars.

The second time her thoughts drifted in that direction, she got her phone and forwarded the email from Horace, with the attachment, to Bran’s email address with ‘Print me please’ in the body of the email. She then checked on a couple of shopping orders which were due to arrive that week.

Bran padded off, presumably to dress, and Leah put the news on in the living room. Bran preferred to read the news; she preferred to watch it.

When her husband came back, however, it was from the office, and he was still in his pajamas and he was carrying a thick pile of paper. “I printed this. I realized too late you meant the attachment, not the actual email, which is about forty pages long.”

She winced. “Oh, I’m sorry. Yes, just the attachment.”

“This is some correspondence you’re having with Horace.”

“He’s writing a book. I’m helping,” she said, not without pride, taking the recipes from him but rejecting the email chain. “Maybe we could use that for scrap paper?”

“I think we’ll have to. It’s probably two trees.” Bran was very environmentally conscious.

To her surprise, he dropped down next to her on the couch, flicking through the emails with a small smile on his face. It was nice, his arm against hers, so she settled back to watch the TV and get her daily doom and gloom update on the human world.

Occasionally Bran would make a noise as he was reading – a snort of laughter, a considering sound – and she would lean over to see what he was referring to and ‘somehow’ she ended up with her head on his shoulder.

“You’re pretty funny,” he said, once.

She swiveled her head to look at what he was reading, feeling warm with his praise. “Which bit?”

He flicked through a few pages. “Just a lot of it,” Bran said vaguely, turning his nose against her head. “Tell me about the book he’s writing.”

“It’s sort of accessible fancy fusion cooking. I’m supposed to be telling him if it’s hard to get hold of ingredients and stuff in the grocery store and if his techniques are too challenging.”

Bran ‘hmmm’ed thoughtfully into her hair. It was almost a kiss. “We don’t have a public chef. I wonder if that’s something.”

“Oh, no, he’d hate it, Bran.” She looked up to meet his eyes, pleading. “Don’t ask him. He’d feel obliged to do it.”

“Do you think so?” Her mate put his arm around her shoulders. Leah felt a flare of panic – what was he doing? -  and then did her best to act natural. Cuddling on the couch. Absolutely normal. Something they did all the time.

She swallowed, tried to focus on the topic. “He’s worked so hard to get where he is.” Horace worked for an exclusive restaurant in New York. Recently he’d been featured in a couple of culinary magazines and she’d bought them specifically to read his articles. “Outing him would probably damage his career irreparably.”

Considering this, or rather her, Bran ran the pad of his thumb across the edge of her lower lip. He wasn’t thinking about Horace any more, she thought, her mouth tingling with anticipation. This was confirmed when he kissed her softly, taking small, delicate sips of her mouth. She found herself dreamily holding her breath, her hands flexing on her lap, not knowing what to do with themselves.

Almost on cue – as being a fundamental pain in her ass all the time was something at which he excelled – Asil walked through the open French doors of the living room like he owned the place. Leah froze. If she could have taken a picture of Asil’s astonishment at finding them in this position, she would have. She would have liked to frame it.

“Morning,” Bran said, drawing back from her an inch or two as if this was nothing new. She wondered fleetingly if he had known that Asil was approaching. “Did you come for the books? They’re on my desk.”

Asil nodded, recovering his equanimity. Leah wished she could. “Good morning.” He walked behind the couch and down the hall.

Bran went back to reading her emails, his arm still around her.

Leah turned to look at the TV. She tried to think of something to say that wasn’t Why is the box making you kiss me on our couch? “That outfit’s a little salacious for morning TV, don’t you think?” she said, pointing with the remote.

Her husband glanced up. Seemed to agree. And then, “Don’t you have something like that?”

Leah did. But Bran had, in their lifetime, never commented on any item of clothing she had ever worn before. Not once. Not even a cursory ‘you look nice’. She had taken it to mean that when her husband looked at her, he didn’t even see her.

Asil returned carrying a stack of books. Old ones, the kind with splitting spines. Bran didn’t believe in treating books well. They were to be read until they fell apart. He actually encouraged the turning-down of corners.

The Moor looked relieved to find them not embracing, but still faintly confused. “Did I dream the silver poisoning?”

Only the very old and very sensitive in their pack would have recognized the specific flavor of Bran’s wound through the pack bonds. She wouldn’t have known it.  

Bran grunted, as if he had hoped his control over the bonds wouldn’t have let even that through. He hadn’t even let them feel him get shot. “Nothing significant.”

“He drove for nine hours with a silver bullet in his shoulder,” Leah was compelled to say, because it was idiotic and she wanted him to know it.

“What can I say, it was the prospect of your gentle bedside manner that enticed me,” her husband said wryly.

She smiled widely and unrepentantly. He was not the first to complain. Leah’s view was that werewolf first aid was best delivered quickly and without coddling. “Digging bullets out of one’s husband is what every woman dreams of,” she replied.

Asil made a disgusted noise. “What a comedy duo you are today,” he commented, departing much as he had left.

*

By mid-morning, Bran looked more ‘himself’. He’d dressed and had two phone calls in his office. Charles had been by and he gave her a passing look but said nothing, which was normal for their interactions.

In the kitchen, the first recipe spread across the counter, Leah put some music on. Kara had shown her how to link her phone to the speaker in the kitchen and had given her a playlist of ‘modern’ music to listen to that she had charmingly crafted specifically for Leah’s tastes. Kara had teased her that ‘modern’ shouldn’t really include Bruce Springsteen but Leah had pointed out that the most popular song of her youth had been Amazing Grace which made Springsteen positively futuristic.

Still, the teenager had woven a few additional tracks into the playlist to introduce Leah to real contemporary music and she liked one in particular, going to her cell phone to press the rewind button repeatedly so she could listen to it again.

Leah wasn’t musical – she couldn’t play an instrument and her singing voice was entirely average – and the music that the Cornicks liked, she now included Anna in this, had never been to her taste. She had tolerated many an evening of folk music for the sake of the pack. Leah liked her music loud, aggressive and with a strong, fast beat.

Which meant on days like this, when Bran was in his office, she kept the volume low or he’d be standing in the door of the kitchen glowering at her.

Bran stuck his head in just before lunch. “Going out. Do you want anything?”

Leah shook her head. “Where are you going?” she asked, not keeping the suspicion from her voice.

“I need printer ink,” Bran said wryly and truthfully.

She grimaced. “Oh. Sorry, again. When you come back, can you show me how to scan with your printer?” Leah held up her well-scribbled notes in explanation.

“I can do that, yes.” Bran strolled forward and looked into the pot that was on her stove. She’d just turned the heat off. “What is it?”

“It’s a sort of broth. It’s quite nice.” She dipped the spoon she’d been using to test it and held out some to him, holding her hand underneath.

Bran tried it and wrinkled his straight nose. “What’s that taste?”

“It’s star anise. Not your favorite,” she acknowledged. “I’m not intending to feed this to you.”

“I’m not that picky,” Bran claimed, though he looked relieved.

“You’re very picky, actually,” Leah said, amused. She started counting on her hand. “You don’t like very spicy things, you don’t like very sweet things. You don’t like aniseed in general so that counts out quite a few herbs and vegetables. No coriander or celery. Cardamom. You don’t really like fish, though you pretend you do. You can only eat cucumber if it’s very fresh, as in just-picked-fresh. You think zucchini is disgusting to the point where if it touches anything else on your plate you don’t eat it.”

Bran’s eyes were dancing as he laughed at himself and perhaps a little at her for noticing these very niche things about him. He crowded her against the counter, hands on her hips. “Put it that way, I do sound very picky, don’t I?”

And he kissed her before she could respond. For the second time that morning. And this time Leah sighed into it, almost as if she was less surprised, as if he was becoming more predictable instead of less. She responded to his soft nips with her own, slipping the tip of her tongue into his mouth to touch his, to tangle with his. As the kiss grew more heated, their mouths opened wider, each of them turning one way, then the other, trying to find a better, deeper angle. He pressed her against the counter harder and she rubbed herself against him, winding a leg around his thigh, vaguely thinking that if she dragged him down to the floor, he would go with her. That she had no underwear on under his sweats and T-shirt. That he could be inside of her in a matter of seconds.

The door to the kitchen opened and they froze. This time, it wasn’t Asil, it was Charles, who blew out a breath of surprised air at the sight of them and said, “I’ll come back later.”

Slowly, Bran pulled his hand from where it had migrated under her T-shirt. She could feel the imprint of his fingers on her breast. “You know what’s funny?”

“That Charles is having a coronary in his car?” she suggested because that was what she was thinking about. Her step-son had always been very careful to give them their privacy but even he wouldn’t have expected this sort of activity in the kitchen.

He smiled. “If anyone had asked me if there was a food I didn’t like, I would probably have said no and it turns out there’s a whole list.”

Leah smiled. “That is funny.”

Bran patted her hip. “I’ll see you later.”

*

Affectionate, cuddling Bran disappeared the next day after another night of keeping Leah enthusiastically awake and they were briefly back to normal.

‘Briefly’ because Bran’s unpredictability continued to be a gift that kept on giving because one week of relative calm later, irritated and grumpy Bran arrived.

Used to be, she was the mercurial one in the relationship, Leah thought as he yelled down the phone at someone. Those were the days.

This new version of Bran was going out of his way not to touch her, not to engage with her at all. It would have been hurtful if it hadn’t been so preposterously obvious. If it hadn’t followed such extraordinarily opposite behavior.

Instead of being hurt, Leah felt like she was watching a nature documentary. Here, watch how the predator avoids his prey by eating his meals at different times.

Anna, who by her very nature was observant, was baffled by Bran. They had a standing invitation to Sunday dinner and he was unpleasant to everyone.

“Did you guys have a fight?” Anna whispered, when Bran had cleared the plates of their first courses furiously.

“Nope,” Leah said, taking a gulp of her wine. Though truth be told, when they rowed, Bran never showed any evidence of said row anyway – as if their arguing had no impact on him whatsoever. Which it probably didn’t, she thought.

She went to the kitchen to serve the next course, which of course led to Bran abruptly leaving the kitchen. Watch how the predator cunningly escapes discourse, she thought. He was right. She was pretty funny.

With a surreal sense of calm, Leah let the dinner unfold. When he wasn’t ranting about his topic of the moment – so far, the fae, the European Union, the continued existence of the penny, and the Civil War – Bran was rude to Anna, which annoyed Charles. He snapped at Charles, which annoyed both of them. He didn’t speak a word to Leah but anything she said was very obviously ignored so she gave up speaking at all when he was in the room.

After a while, Leah had to put an end to it, once Bran went to the kitchen to ostensibly slam cupboard doors. “Both of you have better things to do with your evenings than this,” she said, jerking her head to the door.

“Are you sure? It feels like you might need back-up,” Anna said staunchly.

“You’re sweet,” she said reflexively, then both of them stared at each other in astonishment. Leah managed to finish her sentence after that slip-up, “But it’s fine. Go before he starts on something else.”

Charles snorted and stood. “Let’s get out of here before it gets weirder.” He put down his napkin. “Thank you for a wonderful meal, as always.”

Bran was angry that they had left without saying goodbye. “You cannot be surprised,” she told him, stacking the bowls. “You were very badly behaved.”

He said nothing, just audibly ground his teeth and then stalked off to his office. She finished clearing the table, put the dishwasher on and saw that in his anger Bran had already helpfully cleaned the counters.

Normally, their dinners ended with music – either one of Bran’s records or maybe someone on the piano. Sometimes Anna brought her cello. To be frank, usually Leah only tolerated this as the only person who didn’t ‘feel’ music in quite the same way as the Cornicks did, but she was vaguely missing it now. It finished the evening in a way she had become used to.

She dropped onto the couch and surfed through the available television options, the strange behavior of her husband in the back of her mind as it always was these days. She selected a re-run of a show she had seen before and then immediately paused it as something occurred to her. He hadn’t been to see the box, she thought. Since he’d been back.

Suddenly inspired, she pulled open one of the drawers in the coffee table and found the stack of emails Bran had printed off. She flipped them over so she had a blank page. In another drawer she found a pen and she chewed it thoughtfully as she pondered. Slowly, she began to outline a calendar, starting with the last couple of months. With a sense of the ridiculous, she marked on it when she remembered he had visited the box – finding it reasonably easy to do so given how worried she had been about each occasion. She drew a little square for that. Then, she put little hearts in the days when they’d had sex – a lot of them. Astonishing. She added a circle for the full moon, the most recent they’d not spent together, the one before that they had.

She wondered if that had been what Bran meant when he’d said full moon had been hard. They had never verbally acknowledged that the ‘rules’ meant they spent it together. He had certainly never implied that if they weren’t it was difficult for him, or, rather, for controlling his wolf.

Chewing the end of the pen again, she decided she needed to put in a few more details. A little tear for when he’d hurt her. A frowning face for when he had been hurt or his wolf was near to the surface. She filled in the little heart if they’d had sex but kept the heart uncolored if they hadn’t had sex but he’d been oddly affectionate. This last couple of days she drew a jagged zigzag to truly encapsulate Bran’s mood.

Done, she looked at the picture she had drawn and tried to draw conclusions from it.

Her first conclusion was that this was insane and she was an insane person for thinking she could try and find a ‘pattern’ to her husband’s behavior. For all she knew, he’d received some terrible news this week and was processing it. Maybe Aspen Creek was about to be outed and they were going to have to move to Alaska or something. He was allowed to be angry if he needed to be.

Her second came a few minutes later when she realized that if he visited the box, there was definitively no sex, no affection, in the immediate day, sometimes two days afterwards. The only time he broke this rule was the week before he’d gone to Calgary when he had visited the box four times the proceeding week and then they’d had sex in the morning that he left.

That was maybe weird, she thought, and maybe a pattern? Or was she simply reading too much into this?

She marked other things on the calendar. The assemblies. Pack runs. Any time they’d done any ‘entertainment’ with the pack. This didn’t really tell her anything interesting.

She went back to the original ‘pattern’. The really big anomaly was Calgary. He’d visited the box, they’d had sex, he’d gone away for several days and when he’d come back they’d had a good two days of abnormal Bran behavior. Then he’d been normal. Then he’d turned into angry Bran.

Bran himself stalked from his office, passing her by without a glance. He put on his jacket, picked up his keys and left. She heard the car start.

With dawning excitement, Leah marked a small box on that day’s date. She would see what tomorrow would bring.

*

Bran was out for nearly four-and-a-half hours, returning at just after 2AM. She listened to him shower and get into bed, mentally walking through the journey he had taken. Whatever he did with the box obviously took some time. Some kind of spell, she guessed. Or ritual?

She fell asleep pondering this and when she woke in the morning, it was to find old Bran had returned. Neither angry or loving. She couldn’t stop the wide smile she gave him as she made him breakfast. The box had fixed him. She put nothing in the box for that day. The day after that, also nothing.

The day after that he started to get a little fidgety. She didn’t have an icon for fidgety so she had to invent one – she did a little wiggly line. Not a full zigzag. The next day she was doing laundry and decided the shirt she was wearing could do with washing since she’d splattered it with oil that morning. She stripped it off and shoved it into the machine with the rest of the whites and found Bran had stopped in the open door of their laundry room to stare at her.

She looked at him looking at her. Or part of her. Normally, Leah wore a bra every day. She was a touch too big to be going about without one but today, knowing she wasn’t going to be leaving the house at all, she had decided to do without. It was nice to walk about without underwire or elastic. She liked the feeling of the material of her tops against the sensitive, delicate skin of her breasts.

Leah wasn’t certain what prompted her to do it. Maybe it was testing her ill-formed theory. Maybe it was just sheer devilry. But she reached up to stroke a finger around her left nipple, just to see what happened.

Bran didn’t disappoint. He took two step forwards as if he couldn’t help himself. Then his hands clenched at his sides and he turned on his heel and walked away.

The rejection stung but she was used to it. She plucked an un-ironed T-shirt from the laundry basket and pulled it on.

Three hours later, Bran put his hiking boots on and took himself off into the woods. Leah watched him go from her bedroom. It had rained a great deal. If she was right, he would be gone most of the night, re-creating a trail to put her off the scent.

Suddenly, she thought of her husband – weighed down by whatever was tormenting him – trailing around for hours in the night, trying to make sure his secret stayed safe when she had discovered it weeks ago.

And Leah felt sorry and guilty.

Shaking her head at herself, Leah took her time in changing into more appropriate clothes – Lycra leggings, a couple of layers, her most well-worn hiking boots. She braided her hair around the crown of her head whilst she waited for some tea to brew, then she poured it into a thermos. After a little debate, she wrapped some cookies into a paper towel and put them in her waterproof jacket pocket.

It was dark by the time she climbed into the truck – and it had just started spitting with rain. She shook her head. Fantastic. The drive to the same track she and Charles had used before took just under half an hour and she wedged the truck up the same incline.

Of course, the mud was significantly worse than before and she felt her feet ooze into the ground when she climbed out. It would not be a pleasant walk. So thinking, she grabbed a waterproof blanket from the trunk of the car and pulled up the hood of her jacket to keep the worst of the rain off. Hopefully it wouldn’t start to pour down.

Her sense of direction was pretty good, so she only checked the map on her phone a couple of times before she started to hear the sound of her name being repeated over and over again. She reached the tree and, deciding since she didn’t know for sure what the box did, she would err on the side of caution and shook out her blanket a few yards away. Then she sat down and waited for her husband.

Bran didn’t disappoint, walking through the trees just over an hour later - though it was obvious by the time he had arrived that he had sensed her so she didn’t get to see what had been his reaction to her discovering his little secret. Didn’t see if she had surprised him. If he had been angry.

He came to stand over her. “Did you bring the car?” he asked, face neutral.

She nodded.

He set off in the direction she had come from without another word.

“Aren’t you going to do whatever it is you need to do with it?” she called.

“Not with you here,” he replied, not stopping.

Leah stood and folded the blanket, put the lid back on the thermos. She followed him. He was walking at a brisk pace but she kept her distance, reasonably certain his mood wouldn’t be positive.

They reached the truck. Bran held out his hand for the keys and she silently handed them to him.

She ate the cookies on the drive home, one after the other, filling the silence with quiet munching. She could admit to being a little nervous and kept glancing at him out of the corner of her eye.

They arrived home. Bran turned off the engine.

“How long?” he asked.

“About a month.”

He listened to her answer and then got out of the car. She allowed herself a couple of deep breaths and then she climbed out, leaving the blanket on the seat.

Inside the house, Bran had kicked off his muddy boots, leaving them in a haphazard way in the hall entrance. She tidied them onto the drying rack with her own and then put away her jacket, picked up the damp coat he’d left on the floor. He was annoyed, then.

Leah felt the fluttering nerves that she got when they were about to have a fight about something she knew she had done wrong. And she didn’t want to. She didn’t feel it was fair. 

She locked the door and walked into their dark living room. Bran was standing by the windows, his back to her. She crossed her arms. She had never been good at fighting with him – she didn’t have what it took to make him listen to her. She’d seen Anna do it, of course. Sometimes Charles, when he forgot his role was to obey. Sam could do it because he was a lone wolf and nearly as old as Bran himself, though by no means as powerful.

Her socked feet making little noise, she went to sit cross-legged on the couch, making herself as small as possible.

In the weirdest way, Leah wanted to show him her calendar. She wanted his approval for her terribly basic detective work. She wanted to point at it and say, Look, there’s a pattern, but I don’t know what it means.

Bran moved and she flinched back into the cushions. He came towards her and sat on the coffee table opposite. He clasped his hands between his knees loosely and looked down at them. “I’m disappointed in you.”

Oh, this was bad. She felt her heart rate start to climb and she took three deep breaths, inhaling and exhaling. These arguments went significantly better if she didn’t lose her temper early on.

“I have repeatedly asked you to trust me.”

Inhale. Exhale.

“I have been as honest as necessary.”

As necessary? Inhale. Exhale.

“I told you it was nothing to worry about.”

Her heart was racing now, blood pounding in her ears. She tried to keep up the deep breathing.

“And yet you have persisted which I can only take to mean that you don’t trust me.”

Leah felt her lip curl and she looked down. Inhale. Exhale. She must sound like she’s just chased down a buffalo. He on the other hand was icy calm, like always. I’m disappointed in you.

“Have I done something to make you mistrust me, Leah?”

If this was really a question – and not simply hypothetical – he already knew the answer. Her wolf trusted his implicitly, as his wolf trusted hers. That was part and parcel of the mating bond. The human, however… the human couldn’t work on blind faith. Perhaps she had done once but he had knocked her back in the last few years.

“I await your rebuttal,” Bran said, with a courtly hand gesture.

She had so many things to say. So many she almost didn’t know where to start. But at the heart of it was one really important detail, “You really won’t answer any questions I have?”

“It’s private,” he said heavily.

Leah sat back. She thought about her response to that for a while. Putting aside her belief that few things should really be private between man and wife, she tried to imagine what his reaction would be to her doing the same thing to him. To having a secret like that. He would never accept it and yet it was what he expected from her.

Bran wanted her to fall in line.

No, he needed her to. Needed her to go back to accepting whatever he gave her. Sex on the kitchen floor one day, cold shoulder the next. Kisses to her hair or furious silence.

That… that was not their agreement.

She sat up. Then she stood up. Then - in what felt like a truly momentous moment - she picked up the car keys, put her shoes on, and walked out.

*

Charles’s and Anna’s house was quieter than hers. Maybe because hers was often filled with the pack. Maybe because it was newer. She slept surprisingly well, all things considered. The bed was very comfortable.

All of which she repeated to Anna politely over breakfast. Charles, it appeared, had gone to see Bran.

“Bran called him,” Anna said, wincing.

“Head or phone,” Leah asked for clarification.

“Head, so I couldn’t intervene,” she said, slightly petulantly.

Leah nodded. She moved fruit around her bowl, thoughtfully. Bran had not made any attempt to contact her. But that was expected. “I want to tell you what’s been happening because I would like to know what you think but I will hate doing it,” she said, in a rush. She had thought about this a great deal the previous night.

Anna put down her fork, looking as though Leah had just handed her a great weight to carry. “Okay. Why will you hate it?”

“You’ll see.” She sighed. She couldn’t believe she was proposing this. “I want you to whammy me.”

Anna laughed, a burst of noise that startled them both. “Whammy?”

“Yes. I want you to whammy me. I’ll be— it’ll be easier,” Leah said, finally. 

The smaller woman chewed her lip. Anna had a sweet, heart-shaped face with light brown eyes. She was pretty. The kind of pretty that all the Cornicks liked; that nebulous, wholesome pretty. Her goodness shone through her eyes. “Maybe it should be hard to say?”

Leah shook her head. “I’m not sure I would be able to do it if you don’t. Please?” she asked.

Anna wavered. “Is it something you could say in front of Charles? Should we wait for him?”

“No. It has to be you. Just you.” Increasingly Leah was beginning to think it could only be Anna. By comparison, she had known her a very short period of time. They had very little history. She was also female and, Leah had acknowledged this once with some resentment, utterly trustworthy.

This seemed to make up Anna’s mind. She nodded slowly. “I’ll do it. If it’s what you want.”

At first, Leah didn’t even notice Anna working on her. Such was the turmoil that she felt, it didn’t seem like she was really compelled to spill her guts until she had described the different parameters whereby Bran would have sex with her and she realized the words were flying off her tongue. Even if she immediately felt shame – humiliation – it wasn’t hard.

It was working, she thought triumphantly. 

It had been interesting to watch the expressions that crossed Anna’s face as she told her marital history. The sadness - she had a face that particularly suited sadness which was why the effect of her happiness was so particularly heart-wrenching - juxtaposed with the anger. Anna was good. It was only Leah who was usually angry.

Once their history was out of the way, she drew Anna's attention to the present and Bran's behavior. “I drew a calendar, I don’t have it here, trying to correlate his visits to the box with any behavioral change. And the only conclusion I can draw is that I think the box has something to do with desire or sex.” She paused. “Specifically pertaining to me. At least, I hope so.”

God, what a thought.

Anna chewed her bottom lip some more. She looked unsure. “Without any more info than what we have to go on, I would guess so too.”

“What I can’t work out is whether it’s compelling him to have sex with me or to not. And if it is compelling him to do either of those things, why – is there some kind of magical reason? Is it something he is complicit in? Is it a spell? He has repeatedly said it’s nothing I need to be worried about but it’s obviously tormenting him. It just doesn’t make sense. And he won’t tell me.”

Anna sat forward, resting her hands on the table. “I— want to say some things. And I don’t want you to get mad.”

Now that Anna had said it, Leah could almost guarantee that would be the case. She spread her hands on the table. “I’ll try.”

“You are telling me that Bran – in order to ensure that he never formed an emotional connection to you – controlled your marital intimacy to such a degree that you could set a clock by it. Or a calendar.”

“More or less.”

Anna nodded. She gave Leah a half-smile, eyes wide. “So… that’s really horrible. Just so you know. I cannot imagine how painful that has been for you.”

The corner of Leah’s mouth twitched. “It’s certainly been a challenge.”

“And so he’s had you in this cage he created for all these years and now, I don’t know, he’s opening the door to sometimes let you out and then he shoves you back in when he wants to. That’s about right, isn’t it?”

That was a surprisingly impressive analogy, Leah had to admit. “Yes, that’s certainly what it feels like.”

“And Bran thinks you should just be fine with that. That whatever the reason is, whatever this box does, you should just patiently be oblivious until he puts it right.”

“So you agree – it’s not fair?” Leah said eagerly.

“Not fair? Leah, it’s despicable. The whole thing. I know you’ve made the best of it. I know you have said that based on where you were before, that this is better. That it was a different time. I know all that. But what he’s been doing, what he’s doing now, it’s heinous. It’s emotional manipulation. It’s abusive.”

Leah reared back, everything in her recoiling. “It’s not—”

“No, Leah, really. He knows you love him and yet he’s yo-yo-ing you around like that doesn’t matter. That’s cruel.” Angrily, Anna began stacking the breakfast things but not in any particular order – plates on top of bowls, cups under cutlery. “I’m hoping, I’m really hoping, that there’s some diabolical Bran reason for this.”

Not particularly used to having someone her side, she shifted on her seat slightly. Her next words were hopeful, “So, just to be clear, you agree that the situation deserved my actions? That I was right to walk out? That… I shouldn’t have just accepted it?”

Anna’s nodding was fervent, her eyes earnest. “If Charles did that to me, I would have lost my mind.”

With true Cornick timing, the front door opened and they both turned to look. Charles gave them a grim smile. “That was pleasant,” he said. He came to kiss Anna’s cheek and patted Leah’s shoulder. Then he looked at his wife properly. “What has you so fired up?”

“We’ll discuss it in a moment,” Anna said grimly, holding up a hand. “What did my father-in-law have to say for himself?”

Charles’s dark eyebrows lifted at her tone. “Not a great deal that is of any value repeating. Thank you for not mentioning I was aware of the location of the box, that helped,” he said to Leah. She nodded faintly. “He was pretty shocked that you walked out and didn’t come home.”

“Well, I’ve never done it before.” The unspoken statement being she had never had somewhere to go to. Even she would have baulked at walking out on him to go to Sage. That shame would have been too great.

“I think because that was the case it made him calm down a bit and reconsider from your perspective. I told him you were extremely worried about him which he took about as well as he would normally.”

Leah inclined her head. “He denied something was wrong.”

“Not exactly. He said he hadn’t been himself and that he was working on ‘fixing’ it and that he needed you to be patient.”

Anna snorted crossly, then waved a hand to Charles to get him to continue. Leah found herself trying not to smile. 

“Then, he wanted to know when you were going to come back.”

“Oh, I wonder why,” Anna snapped.

Charles gave Anna another puzzled look, obviously aware that she had information that he didn’t. “I told him I didn’t know and that maybe you two should have some time apart.”

Her wolf didn't like the sound of that but Leah was curious. “What did he say to that?”

Her step-son stole a grape from his wife’s bowl, stacked on top of a coffee mug. “It made him twitchy, which is not something I would normally say about Da.”

“Let me make you something,” Anna sighed, getting up.

“No, thank you, I ate with Da. I’m just picking. So, what have you two been discussing?” Charles glanced between the two of them.

Anna pursed her lips. “I think it’s up to Leah to decide what she should share. Rest assured, I think she should divorce him and move to another state.”

“I’m not going to do that,” Leah said quickly to Charles as his eyes flared with alarm. “Anna is charmingly over-exaggerating. Our situations,” she emphasized firmly, “are very different.”

Charles was concerned. “You told me he wasn’t hurting you.”

“He’s not.” At Anna’s snort, Leah gave her another repressing look. “He’s not. It’s not the same. I’m not saying he isn’t emotionally manipulating me because he is.” Charles looked uncomfortable. “But I know he’s doing it. And I don’t believe he’s doing it on purpose.”

“But before this, Leah, he was doing it before this,” Anna said plaintively, covering her face with her hands, like she couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

“Anna,” Leah said sharply. “You said it yourself – this life is the consequence of a choice I made two centuries before you were born and was necessary at the time. I have a bargain with Bran. A bargain that we all benefit from, need I remind you. Until recently, he has done his best. I’m not saying he hasn’t made mistakes and I have made far more. But it works. Not in a way that you would like, in your relationship, but in a way that I am fine with. I would like to go back to that.”

“Because you have no choice.”

Fine. “Because I have no choice,” Leah agreed. “Until the day he dies, or I do, I have no choice. This the bargain we made. All I am asking now is that he gives me the honesty that he expects from me so we can work together on this problem. That he respects me enough to do that.”

Charles nodded. “Then that is what you should tell him.” 

*

Leah returned home two days later. Two days of Charles’s and Anna’s quiet house and their quiet, content lives. They were… pleasant to her. More than pleasant. She had spoken to Charles, with Charles, more in the last two days than she thought she had done in twenty years. They weren’t ever going to be friends but there was an accord there, she thought. If anything good was going to come out of this, there was that.

In her house, she dropped her keys in the bowl and toed off her sneakers. She felt the watchful pressure of Bran’s presence as he approached her silently out of the corner of her eye.

“Hello,” Bran said, breaking the silence first, with a small, neutral smile.

Leah gave him a tight smile in return. “Hello.”

Bran looked tired. Of course he did. He had looked tired for months – since before Sage. “Are you staying?” he asked, as if there was the slightest possibility that she might not.

“Yes, I’m staying.”

He half nodded and then turned to go back the way he had come. She reached out quickly and grabbed his hand. Bran looked down at the connection in some surprise. “I want to help,” she said.

“You want to help.”

“Yes. You are trying to fix something. And I want to help you. I’m your wife. What can I do to help you?”

Bran continued to look down at their hands. He applied a very slight pressure, pulling her towards him. She came, until she was nearly pressed against him. Up close he smelled strongly of her. He had been sleeping in her bed, she thought.

She wondered if it had really hurt him that she had not been there. She knew what that felt like.

“I would… like that. I am trying to reach a balance,” Bran said, eventually, looking at her face as if he was mapping it. “For my wolf and me. For you.”

“How did you lose the balance? Did the box do that?”

“No. The box has always helped me find focus,” he said, as if saying the words out loud was somehow difficult for him.

Leah didn’t understand what that meant. ‘Focus’? Was it a meditation device? “Then, should it be in the house? Would that make it better? If it’s not dangerous, I could ignore it calling me.”

Bran closed his eyes and lowered his head until their foreheads kissed. “I started having problems around the time you started hearing it. Where it is isn’t the issue. And I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” she sighed.

“It’s not. I created these circumstances so I believed myself to be the only victim. I am not. I have been unkind to you.”

This so-mirrored Anna’s words that Leah was quite startled. “Oh, yes, Bran, it’s been a real hardship,” she said, trying to make a joke of it. “Particularly the part here against this wall.” She waved towards the stairs vaguely. 

He snorted. “You know what I mean.”

She did, of course. “So do you think I can help?”

Bran, who had not let go of her hand, silently tugged her down towards the office. In his office, on the desk, right in the middle, was the ornate box. 

“I couldn’t hear it,” Leah said, in surprise. Though she had been told by Charles that it wasn’t sinister, just looking at it made her feel uncomfortable. As if it was somehow tainting their house.

“I’m emptying it.”

“Emptying it? Of what?”

Bran looked shifty. “Every feeling I’ve ever had for you.”

Leah pulled her fingers away from him. “Every feeling you’ve had for me?” she repeated, the question rising at the end.

“Yes.”

Naturally, she was finding this hard to process. “You put your feelings for me… in a box.” 

“Yes,” he sighed.

Feelings, she thought. She was blindsided. “Not just sex?”

“Not just sex,” he said. He edged towards her, hands outstretched at his sides, as if he was afraid she was about to bolt.

“In this box, Bran.”

“Yes.”

“Well… why the fuck did you do that?” Leah demanded, with rising ire, like he had lit a torch within her.

He pointed his finger at her. “Don’t curse.”

That was a mistake and he knew it because his head pulled back at the fury on her face. “I will fucking curse if I fucking want to, if the situation fucking deserves it, Bran. Why were you putting your feelings for me into a box, Bran?” she spat, pointing at it on his desk.

His eyes slanted down to the right, as they did when he knew when he was in the wrong. “You know why.”

Then she screamed. An actual scream of rage and frustration. The windows were open. Probably the whole of Aspen Creek had heard it. Certainly it was loud enough that Bran winced. “Our entire marriage? Our entire marriage?” she demanded.

“Yes, okay, yes! Our entire marriage.”

She was going to be sick. It came upon her suddenly, rising up her body with her anger and frustration, and she covered her mouth with her hand as a buzzing, fizzing noise started in her head. Bran seemed to realize. He dove under his desk and thrust the waste paper bin at her, just in time for her to bend over and retch, fruitlessly, into it. She felt his hands pull back her hair and she shoved at him. “Get off me,” she said, in between gagging.

He ignored her and instead coaxed her into one of the chairs. She sat, clutching the bin on her lap, staring at the box on his desk. The nausea lingered, she felt unsteady, not a state she often found herself in. She’d once been poisoned; it felt a lot like that.

Bran was sitting on the other chair, hands clasped loosely between his legs.

“So, what, you thought— if I died, and your feelings were elsewhere, it wouldn’t be the same?” she asked, trying to follow his logic. “The Berserker wouldn’t escape?”

“That was the theory.”

Years after they had mated, she had overheard Sam explaining to a confused teenage Charles about why Bran had married her. When he had realized he needed a mate, he had apparently searched far and wide for a woman so unlikeable – so selfish and stupid that he couldn’t possibly love her – and the only woman to have fit that bill had been Leah.

It had not, of course, been the way Bran had put it to her when they had met. He had told her that the wolf had chosen her – which was true – and that he had been looking for a partner, someone who was strong, a fighter like her, but he was not interested in love. This is a partnership, he had said to her. We don’t need to like each other for that to work. We just need common goals.

And, lest she forget, in the beginning, she hadn’t particularly liked him either. If Anna thought Bran now was cruel, that had been nothing compared to what he had once been like. More high-handed and cold. He would ignore her or belittle her – because she was so stupid. He talked to his sons only in Welsh so she couldn’t understand them, deliberately leaving her out. Bran had resented her, resented his need for her, and still been mourning his one true love, Blue-Jay Woman, whose presence in his long life had been fleeting but apparently irreplaceable.

But after a few years they had started to rub along well enough. Bran’s heartbreak had softened and he’d stopped punishing her for his decision to mate again. She had started to show him that if she couldn’t be loved, she could be useful for those common goals that they shared. And Leah’s opinion of him had changed. He was clever and wise. People came to him and he solved their problems. She had been touched by the care he had for their people. For the wolves in Aspen Creek. How his heart broke for them when she’d always thought him so cold-hearted.

And sometimes he had been kind to her. Sometimes, when they were in bed together, he held her like he might like her. Sometimes they had laughed.

That his feelings hadn’t appeared to change about her had simply been an indictment of herself, as far as Leah had been concerned. Further demonstration that she could not compare to the woman before her. That the gap was so vast between them that she shouldn’t even bother trying. But she did try. She never stopped. Leah was stubborn.

“What kind of feelings?” she asked numbly.

Bran exhaled. “You—”

“Don’t say ‘you know what’. I don’t know,” she hissed at him, furiously. “You have been lying to me our entire marriage. Tell me what feelings you put in the box.”

“In the beginning, mostly… desire for you. Then any affection. Or fondness.” Bran rubbed a hand over his face, as if in saying it out loud he realized how awful it sounded. “Positive feelings, Leah. I put my positive feelings for you in that box.”

She couldn’t believe it. Affection. For her. “How?”

“I created a one-way bond with it. I channel them into it when I need to.”

“Goddamn,” she said. She let out a little laugh. It sounded hysterical. Affection. Fondness. “Well. No wonder it started saying my name.”

“Yes, that was an unpleasant surprise. I didn’t really know what it would do if you touched it. Nothing good, I imagined.”

Leah nodded. Though it was the very opposite of the gauntlet that he had. Maybe it would have just made her feel happy. Like knowing he had feelings for her would have made her happy.

“All of this… just in case I die?” she asked.

Bran raised a hand, turning it so the palm was up. “Just, Leah?”

Just in case she died. Just in case the death of another mate, one he had feelings for, broke him and released the monster inside of him.

“You absolute bastard, Bran,” she said. “You conniving, manipulative bastard.”

Bran gave her a dead-eyed smile. “I know.”

*

Leah didn’t see or speak to him for most of the day. It wasn’t just because she was angry – and, oh, she was – it was because she was simply too overwhelmed by what she had learnt.   

She had been tempted to drive back to Charles’s and Anna’s. She knew Anna would have shared her righteous anger – and part of her would have enjoyed that, would have enjoyed seeing her face as she told her what her cold-hearted asshole of a husband had done - but truthfully this felt too raw for that. It cut her too close to the bone.

She sat in the chair in her room, a magazine on her lap, staring at the floor for hours. Periodically she heard him moving downstairs. Once he came up to his room for something. The doors to her room were closed and she had flicked the lock on the one that connected theirs. Not that he tried it.

For two-hundred years he had pretended not to like her. Not to have warmed to her. She had slept in his bed, she had loved him, he had known she loved him, and he had used magic to manipulate his feelings so he didn’t. And he had never let her know that, perhaps only in some little way, what she felt for him was reciprocated.

She… didn’t know what to do. Or think. How to respond. It was like tiny bubbles of thoughts and feelings kept bursting in her head, distracting her from one direction. Outraged one moment, ecstatically happy the next.

Just after six, he knocked on her door. She stared at it, blankly.

“I would like to make you dinner,” Bran said, quietly.

On cue, her stomach rumbled. She hadn’t eaten since she had left his son’s that morning. “All right,” Leah replied. She sounded perfectly normal.

Leah waited another twenty minutes so she could be sure that whatever he was making was well underway, then she walked down with her head held high. Chicken stir fry, she thought, sniffing the air. Ginger, garlic, peanut and fresh chili. In the kitchen, he had set the table. She adjusted the lights to a more relaxing setting and got herself a coke, sliding onto a stool.

Silently, Bran served her and then sat down himself.

Normally manners would compel her to thank him for a meal he prepared, just as he would thank her. She couldn’t muster those manners now. But it was good. Spicy. He had piled the fresh chilies he had cooked with on her plate like he always did. 

Leah cleared her throat. He looked up, anticipating her words. He looked hopeful. “What did you mean when you said you were emptying it?” she asked, politely.

“I am transferring the contents to other receptacles. I have a theory that it might have become full.”

“I guess it isn’t a very big box,” she sighed. Perhaps a reflection of the quantity of his feelings.

“I actually didn’t think it would be possible to get ‘full’,” Bran said, correcting her gently. “It’s not being filled with matter after all.”

Magical theory was beyond her and had always been very much his domain. She didn’t understand how Bran’s wolf was smaller than his human body, for instance. “So, was that why it was calling me? Why you were having trouble with it? Because it was full?”

He twisted a noodle around his fork. “Maybe.”

Leah took a sip of her coke. “So, you put the feelings somewhere else and everything goes back to normal?”

“Maybe.”

This was unusually unconfident of him. “Maybe? You don’t know?”

“I don’t. I’ve been emptying the box for a while. That’s what I was doing out there, sometimes.”

Leah frowned. “So it hasn’t worked yet?”

“I think it would give me a day or two of relief but that was it.”

‘Relief’, she thought. Relief from feelings for her. How telling. She ate a chili quickly, the burn in her mouth a pleasurable distraction. “I see. How unfortunate,” she said dully.

“I chose that word poorly,” he admitted apologetically, lowering his eyes.

They ate for a couple more minutes. Bran got up to bring the pan over, scraped more onto her plate without asking. When he sat down again, she had a new line of attack.

“So you go to the box, you channel all your ‘feelings’ into it. Afterwards you feel, I don’t know, pleasantly disinterested in me? How does it work?” Tell me about this relief, Bran.

Bran pressed his lips together. “Not disinterested, Leah. Just. It’s quiet.”

“It’s quiet.”

Leah tried to imagine looking at him and feeling nothing but ‘quiet’. She supposed, right now, that would be quite restful. But right now she was angry with him. Angry and hurt and, quite frankly, on the edge of tears. Though it was hard to imagine it, she knew sometimes she looked at him and felt warm and happy, fizzing with the energy that her love for him gave her. Followed by the crushing thought that he would never return that love, that all her emotions were hopeless.

What was going on his head that he had decided it would be better if there was nothing but quiet instead? Just, what, the safety that if she was suddenly killed, he wouldn’t snap and decimate the world? Was that really it?

Leah looked at the food on her plate. If it weren’t for the monster, could he have loved her?

“I remember the box always being there. Did you have it made before we met? Or after?” she asked.

“I made it. After we married.”

“When? And why?”

“About six months. And because I felt I needed it.”

Six months. “What the heck were you feeling after six months?” Leah asked in surprised. She hadn’t liked him after six months. All she had really felt was anger and confusion. When they’d had sex, it had almost been fighting. Good fighting but still fighting nonetheless.

Bran picked up a sugar-snap pea with his fingers and bit into it. “I wanted you. Constantly.”

Leah felt an unwelcome rush of lust. Bran never spoke of wanting her. She scowled at her half-finished meal, annoyed at herself for being distracted. “And that didn’t suit the rules you had,” she said. There. She had mentioned the rules out loud.  

“No.”

Leah ate a little more, not tasting anything now. “Wish I’d had a box for that,” she said, thinking how unfair it was that he had poured all his desire into a box whilst she’d been shamefully teaching herself how to masturbate efficiently. When they’d had a small cabin and shared a bed, that had been a challenge.   

“To be truthful, it only helped with the mental affects. It didn’t help with the physical,” Bran added. “There was – is –  a lot of…” He made a crude gesture she would have sworn she would never, ever see him make.

Leah gaped at him. “I never see you.” Or even smelled him. Though she guessed they’d had their own bathrooms for decades now. Or, for all she knew, he’d been wandering off and masturbating furiously in the woods. Jesus Christ.

“I never saw you.” He slanted his eyes to her. “Until that time.”

Another flush of heat. She put down her fork abruptly. She was done. “Okay. Fine. So you channeled that into the box. That was its original purpose.”

“Yes.”

“How long before you started using it for other things?”

Bran picked up her plate and his and turned his back on her so he could scrape the remains into the composter. His spine was rigid with tension. This was not a topic he wanted to talk about. “A few years.”

“Five years, Bran? Ten years? Twenty?”

“I don’t know, Leah, I don’t remember,” he said, a little snappy. It was almost truthful. She bet if he thought hard he’d be able to remember. Remember when he’d first felt affection for her. Fondness. All those emotions he couldn’t afford to have for her.

She let it go. She had other fish to fry. “So what is the plan, now? You’re hoping that by emptying the box into these overflow ‘receptacles’, you’ll be able to channel your inconvenient affection for me into the box again? We go back to how it was?”

Bran put the plates into the dishwasher. “That’s about it.”

“Right. Great.” She rested her elbows on the table, rubbed her face. “What a freaking mess.”

He slammed the door of the dishwasher closed. “Yes,” he agreed.

                                                                           *

Leah lay on her bed, staring up at the ceiling. She hadn’t been able to sleep, her thoughts just whirring and whirring around and around in her head. Bran felt affection for her. He was fond of her.

But he couldn’t allow himself those tender feelings. So, he got rid of them. Swept them up like dirt and pretended they didn’t exist.

At least, in a way, it was nice to know that this was possible. That she wasn’t so heinous, so stupid and selfish. That he could like her. He felt fondly of her, even.

That was not just nice to know, she amended, thoughtfully. It was life changing.

There had always been a critical voice in the back of Leah’s mind, telling her that if Bran didn’t like her, then no one could or would and that perhaps she deserved not to be liked. That there was something so fundamentally wrong with her it made her different from everyone else. It had probably affected more than just her relationship with Bran.

I wanted you. Constantly.

Leah shivered a little. Sex, she could understand. You could desire someone and not feel affection for them. And he did desire her. Not just at full moon. Not when it served a purpose. Constantly.

Thank God for that, she thought with a soul deep sense of relief. That was an age-old mystery solved. At least now she knew he didn’t have to force himself to have sex with her to cage his monster.

Leah rolled over to look at the time. 2AM. Perhaps if she did something useful, something mindless, she could switch off her brain.

She peered in her laundry hamper. Probably enough for a load, she decided, picking it up and carrying it downstairs, through the kitchen to the laundry room. She sorted lights from darks, then went through the other things that Bran sometimes tossed into the laundry room as if the magical laundry fairies were waiting to do his bidding. There were some muddy sweats. A T-shirt that had clearly been shredded in the Change. Three socks. Where was the fourth? she wondered. And a sweater that wasn’t his but was probably Tag’s and smelled of turpentine.

Leah put the first load on and shrieked when she saw Bran was standing in the doorway. “Bran. My god.”

“I made plenty of noise,” Bran told her earnestly. “I really did. You were just very absorbed. Why are you doing laundry in the middle of the night?”

“Obviously because I couldn’t sleep. Why are you prowling around in the dark?”

“I’m—” He waved vaguely in the direction of his office.

She frowned. “Are you still working on it? Emptying it?” 

“Yes. It’s… a challenge.”

It really must have been if he’d been doing it for weeks and not solved it. “This is perhaps a stupid question give my lack of understanding but couldn’t you just channel things into another box? Why does it have to be this box?”

“I’d have to create another bond. This one was hard enough. Living beings shouldn’t bond with inanimate objects.”

It might as well have been Kara’s math homework for the all the sense he made to her, Leah thought. “I see,” she said. He wouldn’t be fooled. “Couldn’t you just ‘release’ them? Do they have to go somewhere?”

“If I do that, they will just come back to me. All at once.” Bran hummed thoughtfully, eyes dipping to her shoulder. “The brain is not designed for that.”

She supposed she could imagine that. If she had two-hundred years of pent up feelings for Bran slap her in the brain all at once, she wasn’t sure she’d survive that. She was barely managing now.

“You know, for someone who was so resistant to it you have a lot of answers now,” Leah surmised. Perhaps she should walk out on him more often.

Bran gave her a closed-mouth smile. “I’m doing a puzzle now, if you want to join me?”

“A puzzle?”

“With the little pieces.”

“I know what a puzzle is.” She trailed after him into the dining room off the main living area. Sure enough, there was a puzzle box, a pile of puzzle pieces and four corners already neatly arranged. This had not been here earlier in the day. “Why are you doing a puzzle?”

“I read it is very good for relaxation.”

She took a seat, rapidly realized it was his seat because it was still warm and stood up. Then, in a comedy of errors no two werewolves with their reflexes should ever put up with, they bumped into each other, dove in the same direction to get around each other, twice, then Bran put his hands on her shoulders and simply pushed her back down. “Stay,” he told her. He was laughing silently.

Flushed with awkwardness, Leah sat and reached for the box lid. It was a painting. Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Even she knew that one. She set to work.

They finished the puzzle just before dawn, both of them yawning. Leah had done two loads of washing and drying. She followed him up to bed and wasn’t unduly surprised when he came into her room with her. She took off her robe and didn’t say anything, just got into her side of the bed, turning her back to him. She felt the bed dip behind her as he climbed into his side.

This was fine.

If he laid a hand on her, she would rip it off, though. Wisely, he did not attempt it. 

*

Bran worked on his box for the next two days. Perhaps he was giving off ‘stay away’ vibes through the pack bonds, but their people weren’t hanging around as much as they normally did. Charles and Anna also both stayed away, though Anna sent her frequent messages to check up on her that Leah mostly ignored.

Twice, Bran asked her if the messages she was receiving were from Angus. Twice she told them they weren’t. She did not have the head space to address this issue, she decided.

Kara came for lunch and was unusually somber. “Are you fighting?” she whispered, looking faintly scared. Leah supposed Kara’s parents must have fought a great deal before they divorced.

“No, we are just working through something. And mated couples don’t divorce,” Leah added, as an aside.

Kara still smelled anxious. “What if you stop liking each other?”

It occurred to Leah that Kara had never really asked about werewolf relationships before. Or perhaps she hadn’t asked Leah, which wasn’t quite the same thing. “What have you been told about our kind of relationships?”

“Not a lot. Anna just said that your wolf spirits have to trust each other.”

Leah tapped her fingers on the table. “Okay. Charles and Anna are a good, modern example. They are mated to each other. That means their wolf spirits trust and accept each other. Wolf spirits are just looking for…” She tilted her head to the side. “Partnership. Compatibility.” Yes, that felt right to her own wolf. “But the human sides of them are also in love. Just like any other nauseatingly happy couple you might see. So they also got married.”  

Kara nodded, lips quirking at her comment. “My wolf was singularly uninterested in Toby,” she said slowly. “Does that mean we weren’t compatible?”

Leah smirked, tempted to say that the wolf wasn’t interested because he was just a teenage boy, but she needed to take this conversation seriously for Kara’s sake. “Between a wolf and a human it’s entirely possible to love one another but for the wolf not to recognize the human as its mate.”

“But it can happen? A wolf could recognize a human as its mate too?”

“Yes. From what I’ve observed, sometimes it’s just a question of time. Two wolf spirits can quickly determine whether the other is trustworthy. It’s not the same with a human, sometimes the wolf needs to observe the human’s trustworthiness. And sometimes it doesn’t happen at all. A relationship can still be successful,” she said, because she’d been told that, not because she believed it. It would never, ever have occurred to her to seek a human for a mate. Never.

“Can two wolf spirits be mated,” Kara said ‘mated’ as if it was a word she didn’t like using, “and the humans not want each other?”

“Not really,” Leah said cautiously. “It’s not… your wolf side is pretty good at knowing what you want. If you are truly unwilling then it won’t work. Sometimes it can take a little convincing. In the old days, when there were so few of us, the mating was the thing that mattered. That’s the part that makes you stronger. The human sides just had to accept that it was beneficial. Loving one another was just a nice-to-have.”

Kara squirmed. Sighing, Leah put her out of her misery. “Yes. That’s the kind of mating I have with Bran,” she said. “It’s very different to the one that Charles and Anna have.”

“But you still like each other.”

“Yes,” Leah said, more confident of this than she had ever been. “We like each other. We are stronger together. We are not going to get divorced, which isn’t possible anyway.” She wanted to explain that in more detail, to tell Kara that it was possible for a mating bond to dissolve through neglect or betrayal. That it was possible for a mating bond to be attacked. But these were extremes and ones that Kara didn’t need to know. Not yet.

“Okay,” Kara said, picking up her spoon. She looked at Leah through her eyelashes. “I’m glad. I know she turned out to be a bad person, but sometimes Sage would say stuff about you and Bran and it kinda made it sound like neither of you wanted to be together.”

How delightful, Leah thought, that their traitor was so happy to be loose lipped in front of the child in their pack. “Sage lied. About everything.” She managed not to say this through her teeth.

Later, when Kara was gone, Leah went to scowl at Bran in his office. They’d had a relatively polite couple of days since she had come back. Both evenings had been spent working on a series of increasingly complex puzzles. Since he’d not touched her affectionately or otherwise, she was wondering if ‘things’ had already gone back to normal.

“Is it working, then?” she asked, gesturing to the series of boxes around his office.

“Not as I would like,” was his vague answer.

“What does that mean?”

“It means it’s not working as I would like,” Bran replied, a little testily.

“Fine,” Leah replied, equally testily. She forced the next words out, “Is there anything I can do help?”

“Do you mean that?”

Only she and Bran could have an argument about helping one another. She sucked in a deep breath and let it out. “I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t mean it.”

“There’s… one thing,” Bran said slowly, “that would help me.”

“What is it?”

Bran cleared his throat and looked at the wall of books. “It will seem ridiculous.”

“More ridiculous that the boxes with your feelings in them?” she asked tartly.

He did not appear pleased with this comment. Then he grimaced his acknowledgement that perhaps that was true. “It would probably be better if I showed you.”

Bemused, and expecting the worst, Leah followed him upstairs into her room and, with further bemusement, into her closet.

She watched as Bran began to pull items down onto the rug on the floor. A seemingly random selection of things. Sweaters and dresses and a lace shirt that she particularly liked and then her nice, red silk dress which she only wore at Christmas. He kept going until about half her wardrobe was on the floor.

“All of that… if you could not wear it for the time being,” he said, waving his hand over it all as if he was disgusted. “That would be helpful to me.”

Leah’s lips parted. “Not wear any of these,” she said, to the pile of clothes. She bent down and picked up a lose knitted sweater. It was just a normal sweater. She didn’t understand. “This?”

Bran nodded. “Yes.”

“You… don’t like these things?” She picked up a dress. It was something she only wore on very hot days and was a very thin, blue cotton with sprigs of white flowers embroidered on it and a lovely floaty skirt. It was one of her favorites. It made her feel soft and feminine. It swooshed.

Her husband blew out a breath. “Just. For the time being, I would find it easier if you didn’t wear these.” His eye roved towards the shelves and hangers again. Quick as a flash, he pulled something else out. “Also this.”

Leah was getting an inkling. She was tempted to laugh. “You… like it when I’m wearing these things?”

“It’s more a distraction,” he amended vaguely.

This was ridiculous. And not just because of the farce that this Power in the world apparently got distracted when she wore a knitted sweater. He had made absolutely no comments on her clothes their entire lives together and now he revealed this. She scooped up a grey Saint Laurent sweater dress, which really shouldn’t be touching the floor. “Really?” she demanded.

She shook it. He found her distracting in this? Had she never understood men at all?

Bran was not having a good time. His jaw was clenched. By no means was he finding this as amusing as she was.

She dropped the dress and held out her hands pleadingly. “Fine. Any shoes?” she asked, trying not to get hysterical. “What about lingerie?”

“No, that’s fine. Oh, except these, don’t wear these,” he said, turning to pluck the handful of red-soled shoes she had and adding them to the pile of clothes. “And can you get some pajamas? Normal ones?”

Wow. This was another life changing conversation, Leah thought, clasping her hands together because she wanted to wave them around like a damsel in a movie. “Fine.”

He nodded. “Excellent. Thank you. I mean, you can obviously wear these when I’m not around,” Bran said magnanimously.

“Oh, I intend to.”

“And full moon,” he added.

“Right.” Sure. For full moon. When they could have sex. When it didn’t matter.

The next full moon was in a few days, she thought. Maybe she should start planning what to wear. Drive him wild in an oversized cashmere sweater and, apparently, a pair of palazzo pants.

“The lingerie really isn’t a problem?” Leah asked, curious. She had probably spent a small fortune on lingerie in her lifetime. Lace and silk and mesh, straps and ribbons and bows – all designed to make her assets as enticing as possible.

Bran cleared his throat, a particularly pinched expression on his face. “To be honest, if I’m seeing you in your underwear, it’s probably too late.”

She gurgled uncontrollably and slapped a hand over her mouth.

*

That night they watched a movie. She chose something with Ryan Reynolds that seemed to involve lots of violence. It was by no means frightening – she recalled he had walked out of the last one - and was fairly predictable, so much so that it didn’t entirely grab her attention and she found herself surfing her phone more than once.

She was lying curled up across the couch on her side, Bran at the other end, a good half a yard away from her. After a while, she rolled onto her back, bending her knees.

“Forty-three humans have died so far in this movie,” Bran said thoughtfully.

“You know what would be good, if we had a public werewolf actor,” she said. She parted her knees so she could look at him. “Do we have any actors?”

Bran shook his head. “We just have a couple of stunt people.” He turned to look at her and his eyes went from the top of her knees to the apex of her thighs. His expression changed.

Leah snapped her knees closed reflexively. “Not a chance,” she told him with a growl.

Bran put a hand around her ankle. “That would help me, too,” he said, his thumb rubbing her bare skin.

“What would?”

“Saying no.”

They watched the movie for a little longer, Leah not seeing or hearing anything. She suddenly had such power, she thought. For the first time. Apparently just a knitted sweater would bring him to his knees.

She squirmed a little at the thought of Bran on his knees in front of her. She pressed her thighs together tightly, trying to contain the sensation that this image wrought.

Bran’s thumb kept rubbing her ankle, up and down, up and down.  

Leah had never really seduced her husband. He had been un-seduce-able. She had tried, of course she had tried, in their early days, when she had worked out that he diarized their intimacy and she had been testing the boundaries. Each time he had rejected her. Sometimes kindly, sometimes hard. Now she knew it wasn’t just disinterest and will-power - it had been his magic little box that had helped him.

Obviously seducing him now would be morally wrong, she thought. She had agreed to help with the situation. Not hinder it.

Of course, it might be the last time she could seduce him, the devil on her shoulder said. 

Slowly, Leah parted her thighs to look at him. He was already watching her, as if he had already known what was going on in her head. Maybe he did. It was always a possibility with Bran.

She climbed up onto her knees, him still watching her, waiting, and, feeling oddly breathless, a nervous but anticipatory breathlessness, she straddled him slowly, lowering herself so that she was sitting astride him. They were both wearing sweat pants; she could feel that he was already hard against her thigh.

Bran looked up at her, his eyes dark with longing, his mouth flushed. Very gently, he rested his hands on her hips.

She was still angry with him. He had controlled himself – and by extension her – all their marriage. At the heart of it was what he thought was a good, rational reason but it was a selfish one. There were longer-term repercussions to herself that she was only just coming to understand.

But he wanted her. Constantly. As she wanted him.

“Does this have to go into the box?” she asked softly. “I understand the other things. But this?” She rolled her hips slightly and Bran’s eyelids fluttered.

He nodded. “I can’t separate sex from the other things.”

She was surprised. Apparently he couldn’t compartmentalize the way she had thought he could. “I can’t either,” Leah conceded. She rolled her hips again just to watch his eyelids flutter. He even made a small noise. How gratifying. “So, just to be clear, if I kept going – you wouldn’t stop me?”

“I could.”

Leah leaned forward and nipped his bottom lip. She pulled back quickly and he tried to follow. “That’s not what I asked, Bran,” she whispered. “Would you stop me? Or would you let me ride you here on our couch?”

Bran exhaled shakily and his hands flexed on her hips. “I… no, I wouldn’t stop you.”

She thought about his comment about lingerie and leaned back, pulled her sweater off. She wouldn’t have particularly said her bra was one of her most titillating but his hands left her hips to cup her, thumbs moving across the silk cups, his eyes dreamily fixated on her breasts.

When it looked like he was going to lean forward to kiss them, she pulled on his hair, directing his attention back to her face. He liked that. The dreamy look was gone and replaced with something infinitely darker.

She kissed him, closed-mouthed and chaste, keeping her eyes open, as he did his. Looking into them, Leah felt more powerful than she had ever before. It was a heady thing, that power. She kissed him again, opening her mouth, slipping her tongue into his and with a sigh, he wrapped his arms about her and pulled her close. Their lips met over and over, hard and soft, wet and hot. Their hips rocked against each other, mimicking the movement of their anticipated coming together, building the friction that would lead to their release.

That would help me, too.

What would?

Saying ‘no’.

With enormous willpower, Leah tore her mouth from his with a wet pop. She climbed off him and he let her. Her legs weren’t steady. “I’m just as bad as you,” she said in horrible realization, panting. Taking what she wanted from him. Working against him, not with him. Not towards their common goals.

Bran didn’t say anything. She didn’t think he could. His eyes were blown with lust now and he had reached up to grab handfuls of his hair, pulling on it, as if to hold himself in place.

She had succeeded where she had never before - she had turned him on, turned him all the way up. She thought about touching him. About putting her mouth over the outline of his hardness she could see through his sweats. About stripping off her sweats and her panties and lying back on the couch and spreading her legs. About telling him to get on his knees. She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth. She might have made a noise, she didn’t know. Bran jerked, regardless, and slouched lower on the couch.

With as much dignity as she could muster, Leah escaped upstairs to her room, closing her door behind her. She crawled onto her bed and lay facedown on her cool pillows for a moment. She couldn’t believe this. Now she knew what was really going on, now she had this power, she was complicity helping him to take it away. That was what was happening here. She was helping him end this.

Leah rolled onto her back, unable to concentrate with the throbbing between her legs. She slid her hand into her underwear. This wasn’t going to take long, she thought bitterly.

Their adjoining door opened. “Don’t do that,” Bran told her, walking through without knocking, breaking one of their cardinal rules.

“Get out,” she told him, furiously.

Bran ignored her. He climbed on top of her, tugging at her wrists. She resisted. “At least let me do it,” he hissed at her.

She abruptly stopped. He pinned her hands to the mattress on either side. “Really,” she said, interested.

“Yes, because it would be such a hardship,” he said, throwing her words back at her form the other day. He pulled her sweats and underwear off, almost crossly. He looked like an adorable porcupine – his hair was pulled up in tufts.

Bran parted her legs and she gasped when he put his mouth to her, diving straight in, spreading her, pushing his face into her like he was going to eat her.

“Oh fu—” She swallowed the curse as his mouth closed down on the epicenter of where the knot of frustrated pleasure had pooled. She couldn’t stop moving, simultaneously trying to get away but also trying to push up against him. Her hands grabbed onto the pillows above her, fretfully looking for purchase.

Heat began to build under the ministrations of his tongue and mouth, as he sucked and licked her. Then he slid two fingers into her and curled them upwards and she was done. She was just done. Gasping, she grabbed his hair and came so hard the edges of her vision went dark, feeling her body clamp down on his fingers as they scissored inside of her.

Bran gentled the pressure of his tongue, lapping at her as she trembled, alternating tiny licks with open-mouthed kisses to her clitoris until the last flicker of her climax ebbed. Then he rested his face on her hip.

Licking her dry lips, Leah looked down at him. “Did you come?” she asked, suspiciously.

“Oh yes,” Bran said, breath tickling her skin, no hint of embarrassment in his voice. “Like a teenager.”

She laughed weakly, smoothing her hand over his hair. “Fair enough.”

*

They slept – just slept – together again that night. From the moment Leah’s head hit the pillow, she didn’t dream or wake once, until he woke her by speaking.

“I never built the box for the purpose I’m using it for now.”

She lifted her head. Light pressed behind the curtains – it was probably gone 7am. Bran was lying on his back, hands folded on his stomach. It looked as if he had been awake for a while. “No, I can imagine that. I wasn’t that keen on you either.”

He smiled and it was wide and gleeful. “Yes, you made that clear.”

“You were an asshole,” Leah told him bluntly, crossly.   

“I am still an asshole.”

She grunted and put her head back down, turned away from him. “That’s true.” Another grunt. “And I acknowledge that I am a bitch.”

“You have better reason than most,” Bran told her, rolling over to put his arm about her waist. It was companionable more than anything. “I didn’t think we would last this long.”

“Oh?” She thought about it, eyes closed. “Oh. You thought I would die.” Of course he had. His first mate had died within five years of them being together. He would have expected the same.

“Or I would. We were living in dangerous times.”

That was true. Bran had been building his territory – the territory of what would become all of North America. They travelled a great deal, sometimes just him, sometimes the both of them. Not every Alpha wanted to be under Bran’s thumb. Often they had needed convincing. And of course there had been the vampires and pockets of fae to deal with. Leah had fought ten times more fights – indeed, battles – in the first hundred years of her marriage than she had in the second. In Aspen Creek, Sage’s betrayal had been the most action she had seen for nearly twenty years.

“No one’s tried to kill me in a long time,” Leah murmured, as this thought occurred to her. “Perhaps I’m losing my touch.”

She snoozed for a few minutes, thoughts drifting lazily in and out. From the rhythm of Bran’s breathing, she thought he did too. Downstairs, she heard someone come in. Tag, she guessed, who liked to patrol and would drop by for a coffee with the Marrok if he was free. He used to do that with her, she thought. They’d sit outside and he’d tell her tales from before. When had that changed?

She lifted her head when another thought occurred to her and turned to tell him. His head was nearly on her pillow, eyes closed. He looked unaccountably appealing, so much so that she longed to lean over and kiss him, and to tell him that. Instead, she broached a subject she had been trying to ignore since it had first occurred to her, “Sage used to tell me things. About what people were saying about me behind my back. Do you think she was making them up?”

“Undoubtedly,” Bran said, voice muffled. He opened his hazel eyes, looking piercingly at her. “What kind of things?”

“Oh, that Tag hated me. Thought me weak. Things like that.” Saying it out loud hurt. Much as it had hurt to hear it.

Bran’s hand started to move up and down her back. “Well, none of those things are true.”

“Mmm,” she said, lying back down but still looking at him. “I believed her.”

Her husband exhaled slowly. He kept stroking her back. “I wish you had told me. You know how I have always been about the pack disrespecting you.”

She did. It was the one thing Bran had never tolerated. If his sons – if anyone, but the most frequent culprits had been his sons - had been rude to her directly, Bran was quick to shut them down, often aggressively.

But there was a difference between what was said behind her back and what was said to her face. Sage had played to her one fear, that of being seen as weak. Tattling to Bran about what she had been told would have just proven the point – that she needed the Marrok to make her stronger. Instead, she had turned on Tag. On the others. Making herself stronger by showing them they mattered to her less.

“If I’d told you, perhaps we would have found out the truth about her earlier,” Leah said guiltily.

“No use thinking of that now. It’s done.” Bran moved and kissed her bare arm before getting up. “I’ve told Tag to wait. Come and have coffee.”

*

Leah spent the rest of the day tending to the recipes Horace had sent her, which required a trip to a grocery store to buy a few things she didn’t have in her pantry. She also bought some new pajamas, a blue gingham shorts-and-tee set that she hoped Bran found as unappealing as she did. As a back-up, she also grabbed a voluminous white cotton nightdress which hit her below the knee. She’d worn something very similar when she’d been first married, actually.

At home, she heard the more normal sounds of Charles and Bran in the office, on a conference call. Anna was in the living room, flicking through one of Leah’s magazines.

“What are you making?” she asked, following Leah into the kitchen.

Leah put the grocery bags down and pulled the recipe from her pocket. “Here,” she said.

“This looks complicated,” Anna said, reading it through and frowning. “What’s a bain-marie?”

“It looks complicated but it’s not; his instructions are overly elaborate. And it’s just a double broiler. Or, in my case, it’s going to be a big pan of hot water into which I’ll put the cheesecake tin in inside the oven.”

“Oh,” she said with dawning understanding. “I’ve done that before.”

“Exactly.”

Anna pulled a face. “I didn’t realize that had a name.”

Leah unloaded the groceries, putting all the ingredients she was going to use immediately on the counter, and tossed the new pajamas onto the table, out of the way.

“Are these for you?” Anna asked, picking up the shorts set.

“Unfortunately.”

“But it’s cute!”

Leah hesitated. “Is it?” she asked, doubtfully. 

Anna held them up. “I think it is. I wouldn’t necessarily have said they were your sort of thing, however.”

Likely Anna had seen Leah in her more usual attire. “You would be correct.” She put water into the teakettle and put it on to boil as Anna held up the nightdress, her face twisted in her effort to not laugh. Leah grinned. “We’re both in agreement that that’s horrible, then?”

Anna burst out laughing and held it against herself, holding the skirt out to one side and swaying. “My granny wore something like this.”

“Good.” At least Leah had nailed that one. She poured boiling water onto a rosehip teabag. “Do you want something?”

The other woman shook her head. She looked at the clock on the wall. “I’m fine, thank you. Charles said he’d be done with this call by four. We’re going to see a movie.”

“Indeed? I would never have thought that was something Charles would do.”

Anna smiled, a cheeky, private smile. “I don’t think it is. I think he is humoring me. But this one’s been out for ages; I’m sure the theatre won’t be busy and we’ll have the place to ourselves.”

It never ceased to astonish her the change Anna had wrought in Charles, who would surely have never stepped foot into a multiplex movie theatre in his life before her. Leah pictured suggesting such a thing to Bran and almost laughed out loud. 

Anna put the nightdress down over the back of a chair. “How are things?” she asked casually.

“Things are good,” Leah said, feeling automatically defensive. There was a fine balance between what she needed Anna to know and what she wanted her to know. 

At this, Anna looked doubtful. “Really?”

Leah nodded and sipped her tea. “Really.”

They both heard their respective men finish the phone call in the office and laugh about something. “I’m glad,” Anna said quickly, then pasted on a smile when Charles stuck his head into the kitchen. “All done?”

“I am. We can go. Hello, Leah,” Charles said, the special acknowledgement that she existed another change. Perhaps not one Anna had wrought, Leah thought.

“Charles. Enjoy the movie,” she said, a teasing note in her voice as she smiled widely and sipped her tea.

Her step-son smiled back but it was a little pained. “I’m sure it’ll be an unforgettable experience.”

Anna rolled her eyes. “All right, let’s go before you chicken out.”

Chicken out. Charles. Hilarious. Leah chuckled.

With the two of them gone, she picked up the pajamas, thinking she would tease her husband a little now. “Busy?” she asked at his door, holding the night dress against herself.

Bran glanced up, smiled. Then he laughed, properly, leaning back his chair the way he did when he was pleased. “Didn’t you have something similar once?”

She was glad he appreciated it. “I did. My Alpha’s wife made it for me. So I would be a respectable married lady.”

Bran’s face lit up with delight. “I did not know that.”

“Augustine was being rude,” Leah said with a sniff. She sat on one of his chairs. “Because she didn’t think I was.”

“She was keen to be rid of you, from what I remember.”

“Her husband kept making a move on me.” Leah grimaced. At Bran’s frown – this wasn’t the Alpha behavior he desired of his people – she clarified, “It wasn’t just me, either. It was all the females.”

“I didn’t know that either.”

“Mmm. It’s why all the men in that pack were out of control.” And why, ultimately, she had been so desperate to leave. “So, which do you prefer? Or not prefer?”

Bran propped his head up on his hand. “Well, I have to admit the nightdress has some nostalgic appeal, so probably the shorts thing.”

Nostalgic appeal? “Fine.” Leah glanced at the box, set to one side on the desk. She decided she didn’t want to know.

*

“If that is Angus I swear, I will—”

Leah reared back, her cell phone in her hand. “You’ll do what? Exactly?”

Bran glared at her.

Suffice to say, two days from full moon, things were not going well. Apart from sharing the same bed, they had both very carefully avoided any physical intimacy since their second ‘failed’ movie night. That strangeness aside, she had been thinking how much nicer it was, now that she knew, now that it felt like they were both working towards a shared goal. It had been amicable.

But that morning it felt like Bran had woken up in a bad mood and it just seemed to go down hill from there. 

“What is going on with you?” she demanded, never afraid of poking the wolf. “Is it full moon? Is the box not working? Or has something happened that has just ticked you off generally?”

Her husband ground his teeth. “I just think you could put the phone away when we’re eating.”

Since Bran regularly answered phone calls mid-meals, she thought this was a bit much. “All right. If that’s a new rule, then certainly we can do that,” she said, putting the phone on silent and on the counter behind her.

Leah picked up a French fry and ate it, proceeding to ignore him. Every conversation she had started with him had led to a squabble. She decided she would just finish her lunch, in silence, and then she would go and hide in her room. Possible until full moon itself after which, hopefully, his mood would have improved.

Bran stabbed at his salad furiously, looking like a petulant child – which, frankly, had usually been her role. It was nice to feel the burn of superiority, for once.

He put down his fork abruptly. Fascinated, out of the corner of her eye Leah watched him attempt to get a hold of himself. He took a sip of his water. Then he sighed. “I am very frustrated with myself. It is making me angry.”

“I see,” she said, carefully. “I take it I’m bearing the brunt of this just by being here.”

His jaw clenched tight, Bran picked up his fork again. “Yes. I know that is unfair,” he said.  

That he ‘knew’ was no consolation. Leah pushed her meal away. “Then, if you’ll excuse me,” she said haughtily. She got up and stomped out of the kitchen, making her escape to her room.   

She fell on her bed, facedown. “Ugh,” she told her comforter.

Leah allowed herself to wallow for a while, rolling around on her bed making increasingly annoyed noises, then she grew stubborn about it. If he was angry at her for no good reason, then he was the one who needed to manage himself. She had done nothing wrong. She shouldn’t have to hide in her room like she was ashamed of herself.

So thinking, Leah marched downstairs with her head held high. Naturally, this effect was quite wasted – she realized immediately that he had gone out. A quick check out the windows and she saw that their cars were still here. She checked the shoes in the hall and, frowning, saw that all of his were present and accounted for. Face lightening with understanding, she figured he had Changed and gone for a run. Sans collar, she thought, because Bran was allowed to do whatever he wanted.

Leah checked the kitchen, saw he had cleaned and tidied everything away, so she couldn’t be annoyed about that. Then she went into his office to have a poke around. The hateful box was still sitting on his desk, indeed as if he had just been using it. There were now nearly twenty other ‘boxes’ of various sizes on his bookshelves.

Tucking her hands under her armpits lest she was tempted to ‘touch’, she looked at each of these more closely. Unlike the ornate, hand carved box on his desk, these were an eclectically-sized mixture of cheaper wooden boxes that Bran had sourced from Amazon.com, of all places. Hardly what Leah would have expected for ‘magical’ receptacles. They each had a flimsy little metal lock on the front, nothing more complicated than a sliding bolt. Bran had told her that only he could open them but of course she was drawn to try. She wasn’t insane, however, so she didn’t. She knew well the repercussions of playing around with magical objects.

Leah went to sit at his desk, tapped a key on his laptop and entered his password. She glanced at his emails in no more detail than the subject and who it was from and then clicked on his calendar, looked at his schedule for the following week. He hadn’t been travelling recently which normally meant that he would soon. There was nothing scheduled but then most of Bran’s work trips were last minute cries for help.

She sat back in his chair and looked at the box. Bran had said he had made it. He had done quite a bit of woodworking early on in their married lives. Most men did back then. With others, he had built many of the original structures of the ‘town’ of Aspen Creek, including their first home together. She supposed the patterns and symbols on it were magical in origin. She pictured her husband, angrily creating something so he could stop wanting the woman he didn’t love. It was almost funny. Retrospectively, of course.

Maybe the next two hundred years would be better, she thought, looking at this thing her husband had created that had taken everything she wanted from her marriage.

She heard the sound of claws on the hardwood floors of their house and her husband’s wolf trotted into the room. “Hello,” Leah said.

He chuffed at her and jumped onto the couch.

“Feeling better?” she asked.

Rather than speaking to her mind-to-mind as he could, Bran made a faintly derisive noise, always a challenge in wolf form. Sighing, she stood up from his desk. “I’ll leave you to Change, then.”

She went into the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea. Bran walked in a few minutes later; his Change was faster than most. He came up behind her and put his arms around her. “Ah. You are better,” she said, tensing and then relaxing. Apparently hugging was something they were doing now. She poured water into her cup and dunked the little bag.

“Manageable.” He pressed his face to her shoulder. “I apologize.”

“You’re forgiven,” she said by rote.

“I just do not understand why something that has worked for so long has stopped being effective.”

Leah closed her eyes with the ceaseless reminder of what he was working towards. She decided to enjoy Bran’s embrace, however temporary it was. “Would it help you to talk theories at me?”

Sometimes Bran used her as a sounding board, knowing full well she hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. She was just a receptive face to look at whilst he talked and he would let her ask questions for clarification because that could also be helpful.

“I would appreciate it.” He sighed, and it was a heavy one. “Let’s go into my office.”

Bran sat her down on his couch. It was by no means as big as the ones in their living room so when she curled up at one end, they were still touching. He put his hand around her bare ankle.

“Theory one – is that it’s still full and I’m not emptying it properly.” They both looked around the room at the little boxes. “It certainly feels like I’m transferring something but it’s not an exact science, given I am making this up as I go. The only way I could possibly test this is if I open one of those boxes, which are small enough to not overwhelm me. I hope.”

Leah nodded. “What form do you think ‘overwhelming’ will take?”

“Again, I could only hypothesize. Potentially nothing. I just get back what I put in. And we know it’s worked. Alternatively, we could be looking at mental damage. I could pass out. I could be so caught up that I do something to you. The possibilities are endless.”

“This sounds a little risky,” Leah thought. Mental damage.

“I don’t know,” Bran said thoughtfully. He stood up and picked up a box that was about the length of his thumb from the mantelpiece above his fireplace. “I thought we could try with this one.”

“You want to try now?” she asked, surprised.

He was studying the box, turning it one way and then another. “After full moon, I think. When the wolf is calmest. We would need to make a containment plan.”

Now Leah frowned. “I’m not sure…”

Bran’s hazel eyes met hers. “I’m 99% certain it would be fine.”

“Oh, that’s so reassuring,” she replied drily. “Can we talk about the other theories, please?”

He put the box back and returned to the couch. This time Bran swiveled to face her, pulling his legs up and pushing one behind her back and one on her lap. She laughed at him, silently, and took hold of his foot, started to press her thumbs into it. He made a small, appreciative noise and his head dropped back onto the armrest. He closed his eyes.

“Theory two is that it wasn’t created for the purpose I ended up relying on it for – ah, yes, there, thank you – but then it certainly seemed to work for a long time so...” He drifted off in thought whilst she continued to massage his foot. He had very elegant, well-kept feet. Like most wolves, Bran was quite meticulous with his personal hygiene. “So I think I shall dismiss theory two.”

“Let’s do that,” she said, supportively.

He smiled. “Very good. Theory two is dismissed.” Bran wriggled and deposited his other foot in her lap, giving her a broad grin. He was in a much better mood now, she thought. She assumed he’d had a good run in his wolf form.

“I have a question,” Leah said, arranging his feet so she could push her thumbs into the soles simultaneously. “Back to theory one. Surely if it’s full, it wouldn’t be working at all? You seem to be able to have some ‘normal’ days, don’t you?”

Bran was silent for a little while, looking at her. He had a sort of twisted look of pleasure on his face, not completely dissimilar to the look he wore when she went down on him, actually. Like he was liking something he shouldn’t. She dug her thumbs in, rotating them slightly, pressing them up the middle of his feet. Yes, she thought, as Bran’s eyes rolled backwards. Very similar.

“So— what I think is that, ah, again another theory, because it’s full, whatever I put in, comes back to me. So I get a temporary ‘fix’. This is what it feels like, regardless, and what I mean by ‘effectiveness’. Nothing is lasting as long as it should. All right, you have to stop that, it’s too distracting,” Bran said, pulling his feet back.

Leah grinned widely. Being ‘distracting’ was becoming her favorite thing. “Next theory, please,” she said, triumphantly.

He sat up against the armrest, knees drawn up slightly and an arm draped across the back of the couch. “Theory three - I think its effectiveness has been deteriorating over time and I didn’t notice until recently.”

“You said you started having ‘problems’ around the time I first heard it.” Which had been a few weeks before she had told him.

“Ye-es,” Bran said slowly.

“That’s not true?”

“It’s what I thought was true. Now I’m thinking it might have been months before.”

Leah lifted her eyebrows. “Oh?”

He blew out a breath, eyes slanting to her and away again. “I think it might have started before Sage.”

“Ah,” she said, a world of feeling in that syllable.

“Ah,” he said back to her.

They had not talked, in detail, about the months leading up to the revelation that Sage was their betrayer. That Leah could have shared a house with a man who believed she was a traitor and been none the wiser had been one thing. In the context of Bran’s current situation, she supposed Bran had experienced his own emotional upheaval. Certainly, when he had returned from his forced imprisonment in Spokane, after he had apologized to her – a rarity – they had spent the following two days almost exclusively in bed together. She had assumed that the suffering had only been the wolf’s though.

Despite the reason, she had loved every moment of it.

“Were you using the box more or less during that time?” she asked.

“More. Significantly more,” Bran added, giving her a smile that told her he was pleased with her question.

“I suppose, if you thought it had been me, you would have to have been extra diligent knowing that— that I might have to die soon.” This, in essence, encapsulated Bran’s need for the box. Leah realized she had been wrong, before. Someone had wanted to kill her recently. Her husband. 

A small growl slipped from Bran before he stopped it. The corner of his mouth pressed in. His hand went to his chest. “He did not like that.”

“Well, neither did I,” Leah muttered, mirroring him and rubbing a hand against her own chest where her own wolf hurt.

“Since then, I have been using the box more than I have ever done since I made it. So, theory four,” Bran said softly, “is that I broke it. That it is not working at all.”

She looked at him sharply. “Forgive me, but I think I would have noticed.”

Bran smirked. “I do have some willpower.”

Leah pointed to the box and said nothing. Its very existence put doubt as to Bran’s ‘willpower’.

Bran at least had the self-awareness to acknowledge this. His smirk turned wry. “I said some. And I have been using the box. There is something to be said for the placebo effect.”

Leah had her doubts. If she were to put money on it, she would make a guess that the box was full. Theory number one. “So,” she said, being practical. “We have a test for theory number one. It has some risk. Number two we have dismissed. How do we test theory number three? Do you create a new box?”

Bran winced. “I would like that to be a last resort.”

“It was that difficult?” 

“There was some significant resistance, let’s put it that way.”

Whatever that meant. “Fine. Theory four,” she blew out a breath, “I guess the test is the same as theory three. Unless you just don’t use the box at all for a time and we see what happens to you? Which, from what I recall after you came back from Calgary, put you in a terrible, terrible mood.”

Her husband frowned. “It did?”

“You must be joking. Don’t you remember the dinner with Anna and Charles? At one point, I thought you and Charles were going to start fighting over the lasagna.”

He was perplexed. “When was this?”

“Hold on,” Leah said, jumping up. She went into the living room and pulled open the drawer under the coffee table. She had ‘hidden’ her calendar in the middle of the pile of paper, correctly assuming that no one would go into the drawer in the first place and that her code was so baffling they wouldn’t know what they were looking at.

She came back to her husband and dropped down next to him. “I made a calendar,” she told him.

Bran laughed and draped his arm behind her. “Of course you did.”

She took him through her key and pointed out to the week that followed his return from Calgary. “Here. Over this weekend. You were unbearable,” she told him. “Then you stomped off to visit your box and you came back fine.”

Her husband took the piece of paper. He stood and went to his laptop, tapping in the password and clicking around. After a moment, he nodded. “Well, Saturday morning I had a phone call with Libor regarding his son, whom I am hiding from him here. He made me furious. Then Adam annoyed me.”

Libor she understood. There was bad blood there. “What about Adam?”

“He’s—” Bran pressed his lips together and looked at her through his eyelashes. “I do not want to unnecessarily antagonize you but sometimes the man treats Mercedes like an imbecile when it comes to their mating bond. It frustrates me as it causes unnecessary strife. It is also very difficult having a pack in my territory which is not mine. It niggles at me. Speaking to Adam doesn’t help. It’s like having a strange wolf camping in our back yard.”

She took a moment to contain the immediate fury which came on the tail of any mention of Mercedes. Deep breaths. She also hadn’t known that having the Columbia Basin pack untethered bothered him. “So… you were in a furious mood just because? Why were you avoiding me? As in, you ate meals without me and walked from rooms when I come in.”

Bran was contrite. “Ill-timed as it was, I was trying to see if avoiding you helped with the box at all. It really is just a coincidence, I’m afraid.”

“I take it, it didn’t help?”

“No, and it was awful,” Bran added, tapping his chest again to indicate the monster inside, “like a punishment. So that probably contributed to my mood as well.”

“What, exactly, would you have done if it had helped?” Leah asked, testily, folding her arms across her chest.

“I genuinely didn’t think about it further than testing it.” Bran thought, then, looking down at the piece of paper. “I would probably have decided it wasn’t worth it, Leah.”

“Well that’s at least something,” she said, pouting. Then she realized what this meant. “So it didn’t put you in a foul mood.”

“No.”

“Then perhaps another option is that you don’t use the box for longer than you would normally be comfortable with and then you use it. See if it makes a difference. Surely if there’s a big enough gap you would notice if it wasn’t working at all, placebo or not,” she added, waving her hands around.

“I could do that,” Bran said hesitantly. He didn’t seem to like the idea. Perhaps because it meant he would feel for her longer. She felt her lip curl. Of course. Why would he want to do that?

Leah looked at the little box he’d left on the mantelpiece. “And maybe there’s an even smaller box,” she suggested, thinking of the mental damage.

“I deliberately didn’t put much in that one, actually.”

She sighed. “You really want to try it?”

He nodded. “After full moon.” Bran lowered his eyes to his desk and the sheet of paper he was still holding.

“After full moon,” she agreed.

*

The morning of the full moon, Bran left before dawn. Already buzzing with the pull of magic, and an anticipated night with her husband, Leah had spent her morning ferociously cleaning the house to burn off excess energy and to keep her mind occupied. At lunchtime, she decided she would re-paint the garage.

Anna came by with one of Charles’s specialty casseroles and stood in the open garage door, dish in hand. “Wow,” she said admiringly. “Have you done all this today?”

Leah had cleared everything off the meticulously organized storage shelves, moved it all to the middle, swept and cleaned the garage and only then been able to start painting. “It needed a fresh coat,” she said briskly. It really hadn’t.

“I’d have helped. I love painting.” Anna lifted the dish with a smile. “I’ll put this in the kitchen.”

Leah didn’t care. So long as she just kept mindlessly rolling, she wouldn’t think about Bran.

By 6PM, the house was full of the pack and Leah had changed from her painting overalls but hadn’t showered. There wasn’t much point if she was going to Change and roll about in the woods. She sat on a stool in the kitchen and watched Juste make Bolognese, quietly explaining everything he was doing to Peggy. It was quite soothing.

“It’s quite challenging to find guanciale in America. At least, around here,” Juste said mildly. “Perhaps in a larger city. Pancetta is an adequate substitute, though few Italians would agree.”

Peggy nodded and made a note. “How do you spell guanciale?” she asked.

Bran walked in, eyes sweeping the kitchen. He smiled at his wolves. “Smells delicious,” he said. Don’t panic, he told Leah, then, “May I speak with you in my office?”

She followed him, curious, and only made a small noise of surprise when he closed the door behind them and pushed her against it. “Oh,” she said, as Bran cupped her face and proceeded to thoroughly kiss her. Delighted, she wound her arms around him and kissed him back. She had thought this would be something they only did after the run, in a bedroom, in the dark.

“Why,” Bran said, pulling back briefly with a curious smile, “do you smell like turpentine?”

“I painted the garage.” Leah tugged him back towards her and he obeyed. When he moved to kiss her neck, pulling her sweater down off her shoulder, she sighed, “What did you do?”

In between nips and kisses that were making her knees weak, he told her. “Drove to Helena. Bought one of those sit down mowers. It’s going to be delivered next week. And a new chainsaw that I definitely don’t need. Take this off,” he said, impatiently lifting the hem of her sweater.

Leah did so with alacrity, tossing it onto his couch. She may have taken particular care of her lingerie choice. His glittering eyes told her she had been successful. “You too,” she said, tugging at his shirt before he could put his hands on her. He didn’t bother to unbutton it, just pulled it over his head and threw it to one side. Her husband had a very beautiful torso, strong and lean. She stroked her hands down him from shoulder to abdomen, running her nails across the scars, enjoying him in a way she didn’t often get to do.

“If you keep looking at me like that, we won’t be leaving this room,” he told her, nuzzling the side of her face, smoothing his hands up her sides.

She made a noise that was perilously close to a giggle. “Oh, the horror.”

Bran grinned and kissed her again, parting her lips with his tongue, his hands sliding down to cup her behind. She sighed into him. This is what she wanted, everything she had ever wanted, she thought, wrapping her arms about him, feeling him hot skin to hot skin.

“Da?”

Leah jerked. The voice was right behind them on the other side of the door. “That’s your son,” she whispered, as if he needed telling.

Bran lifted his head up, narrowing his eyes. “Actually, it’s both of my sons.”

“Sam too?” Leah was dismayed. Charles disliked her, maybe disliked her now a little less, but Samuel hated her, truly and deeply. Life had been immeasurably better for her with him living away from Aspen Creek, without his critical eyes and sharp tongue.

“Samuel, Charles,” Bran said to them both. “Give me a couple of minutes.”

Irritated, Leah untangled herself from her husband but Bran’s hand on her hip stopped her from moving away. Instead, he picked up her sweater and eased it over her head himself. She pushed her arms through the sleeves and then he ran his hands behind her neck, pulling out her hair, fingers pressing against her scalp.

“We will finish this later,” Bran whispered, kissing her softly.

It was on the tip of her tongue to make him swear to it but she knew that was foolish. Bran didn’t make verbal promises. She handed him his shirt, watched him dress resentfully. He laughed silently at her, kissed the pout that she knew had formed of its own accord. “This mouth is trouble,” he said, mock-sternly.

She liked that, though she tried not to show it, tried to keep her sulky mien to express her disapproval of his children coming before her. Still smiling, Bran held the door open for her and she walked out, past his sons and their serious faces. There was a little curl on Sam’s lip.   

“I see this needs to be a private conversation,” she heard Bran say.

Leah felt an impending sense of doom.

*

“You smell like blood,” she said before she was even really awake.

He kissed his way down her spine, hands caressing. “Not mine.”

Leah stretched deliciously under his touch, goose-bumps rising in its wake. She had Changed back and fallen into bed naked. Without him. “Where have you—oh.” She shuddered as his lips and tongue crested over the cleft of her buttocks, hands easing her thighs apart. His knuckle dragged between her legs and she arched up towards him.

“I’ll tell you after,” he growled, biting her left cheek, then licking it, before doing the same to the other side.

After, she thought. His fingers slid under her, cresting over her clit. She jolted, electricity sparking through her body at the sudden contact and ground down on his hand. She was already wet. Maybe had been before. Her moon-bled dreams had featured him very heavily. She had been needy and he had been demanding. The sheets were twisted underneath her.  

Bran eased her onto her hands and her knees and Leah’s head dropped down as she felt the head of his cock slide between her lower lips. He teased her, teased himself – his hands were digging into her hips. He nudged himself until just the head of him was wedged inside of her and she mewed, pushing back. He thrust hard, entering her. This wasn’t a position they took very often. It felt painfully deep and maybe she wasn’t as ready as she thought. She gasped.

“Sorry,” he whispered, adjusting her slightly, hands smoothing across her hips and down her thighs. He held still and lowered himself to cover her, kissing her spine again. Bran reached around her to cup her breasts. The next thrust was shorter, shallower. “Okay?”

Leah nodded the affirmative, clenching down around him. God, he felt good. He felt amazing, like he was unwinding her. He drew back, thrust again, again, again. She could hear herself making loud ‘ah’ noises each time he filled her. She had been so wound up all day; she knew she was going to come quickly. She dropped her face into the pillow and the change in angle made Bran swear and say her name.

He gripped hold of her hips again, started pounding hard. She felt the first crest of her climax rising and she bit down on the material of the pillow as it hit. Everything felt hot and loose and tight all at once, the feel of him the only solid point as he split her in two, as she rippled and clenched around him, waves of pleasure shaking her body. He thrust so hard she wrenched forward, one hand going to the headboard and then he froze, holding her tight against him as he shook. He said her name again, loudly, an actual yell, and came. 

Moments afterwards, Bran rolled her over, kissed her lingeringly, languidly, sliding his wet tongue inside of her. “Hello,” her mate said, nipping at her upper lip, moving to kiss her cheek, her chin.

She touched his face, ran her fingers through his hair, which was knotted with sweat and other things. He smelled like he had run hard. “Hello. Tell me whose blood it is.”

“After,” he told her neck.

Leah kissed what she could of him. His sweat-salted temple, the corner of his eyebrow, then clutched at the back of his head, squirming as his teeth pulled at the skin of her neck. After, she thought, dazed. His fingers tweaked her hard nipples. “You smell like your wolf,” he told her, nonsensically. Of course she did. So did he.

“I ran without you,” she said, sighing. He kissed his way down her body, mouthing around her belly button.

“I felt you. You were happy.” He lapped at the jut of her hipbone and then rested his cheek on her thigh, breath hot on the wet curls between her legs. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”

“Duty first,” she said. Leah had been annoyed but that had been it, oddly enough. Where once his absence from the full moon run – particularly when he had planned to attend – would have kindled a bone-deep resentment in her, she had found herself shrugging it off. It must have been important. Bran didn’t shirk pack duties for whims.

Bran crawled up her body and slotted himself over her, heavy and real, raising himself on his elbows so he could look down into her face. She stroked his cheek and he turned his face to kiss her palm. It made such a fundamental difference to her, the knowledge that he cared – that she knew what the look in his eyes as he moved within her meant. She decided then that if they were only together like this over full moon, she would be able to manage it more now.

Leah lifted her head so she could kiss him, touching the tip of her tongue to the dip of his lower lip and sliding inside. They breathed into each other, opening wide, their hands roving each other’s familiar bodies. She could feel that Bran was hard again, caged between her thighs. She reached down to guide him back inside of her, where he belonged, and then wrapped her legs around him. They moved together in small, sinuous movements, exchanging hot kisses, clasped so tightly there was no gap between their bodies.

For long moments, it was tender and slow and then, breath coming in pants, Bran began peppering her face with urgent kisses, moving down her neck again. He dragged her legs up to hook them over his shoulders, bending her in half. The gap allowed her to slide her hand between them, lay her fingers over her clit. He began to pull almost all the way back out before plunging his way in again. His mouth was parted into an ‘o’ of pleasure. She slid her fingers further down so she could feel him entering her, slick and hard.

“Can I put you in my mouth?” she asked, suddenly breathless to have the weight of him on her tongue.

“Jesus. After,” Bran gasped in surprise.

She laughed because if he took the Lord’s name in vain, then he must really have been out of it, then moaned as he angled his thrusts upwards, hitting her at just the right spot. She felt the first lick of heat that was her orgasm. “Keep doing that,” she told him, grabbing hold of his upper arms.

“I intend to, fy nghariad,” her husband told her, keeping his pace steady. His head lowered so he could look between them, watch himself move in and out of her. “You feel amazing.”

Leah was too focused on her impending pleasure to think of much else but how it felt. It was going to be a good one, she thought. She released him and pressed her hands against the headboard, bracing herself. “I’m coming,” she told him on a breath and in the next it was happening, words and sounds tumbling from her mouth “Oh, oh, Bran.”

The first ripple hurt it was so good, like she was knotting herself around him. She wanted it to stop and to never stop. Then the next was easier and then she was coming hard in a rush of heat, the sensation blooming inside of her, Bran moving in tandem with each clench of her body around him. She touched her clit experimentally and cried out. Too much. She was making noises and Bran’s mouth was moving, saying things under his breath, as he plunged into her. She caught the back of his neck, pulled him close so she could capture his exhale as he climaxed. She held on tight to him with her legs as he shuddered violently and then collapsed on her.

Leah quivered, beneath him.

“Not that it’s not always, but that was remarkable,” he said into the mattress over her shoulder. 

She waggled her legs, still hooked over his shoulders. “Agreed. This is not comfortable, however,” she reminded him.

Bran lifted himself and helped her rearrange. He rolled off her onto his back. Leah snuggled close to him, knowing now that he would put his arms around her. “Mmm, tell me about the blood now?”

“Sam found the other gauntlet.”

“There were two? Of course there were two. Two hands. Where did he find it?”

“Nevada.”

“Nevada?”

Bran sighed. “Apparently it was on display in a casino – a roaming exhibit of medieval armor and weapons, of all things - and then it was stolen by a lone wolf who recognized its power. He meant well but as soon as he put his hands on it, he started to experience an intense desire to slaughter. Thankfully for all involved, he knew of Sam and called him.”

“Oh, thank goodness.”

“Naturally, rather than call me to tell me what was going on in my territory, instead my son got on a plane to visit this wolf,” this was delivered with a disapproving growl, “and when he arrived, it was to find the wolf had killed himself, thinking he was going mad.”

Leah squeezed her husband, silently conveying her sadness.

“So, Sam had to deal with that before driving it here and then he started to feel it affecting him. So he buried it and then came home to update me.”

She frowned at this. Not so long ago, they’d been worried about Sam’s mental state. He was more emotional than Bran. Or perhaps, she mused, Bran had just found a solution for that. “Are you saying you flew to Nevada tonight?”

“No, Sam got as far as Idaho Falls. We had to destroy it. It was—” Bran shook his head. “Far worse than the one we have. Particularly since it could affect someone without putting it on.”

“And the blood?”

“It had attracted an itinerant human who very much resisted our attempts to separate it from him.”

She shook her head. “All on full moon, too. It would have been nice if Sam had mentioned this before.”

“Wouldn’t it?” Bran said brightly. “We exchanged a few words on the subject. Charles had to intervene. He’s in the guest room now.”

“Oh, I didn’t realize,” Leah said. She bristled, slightly. She didn’t like it when his sons stayed in their house. Also, she thought, they hadn’t exactly been quiet.

Bran rubbed her back. “It’s only for tonight. Come, help me shower.”

*

At 2pm the next day, Leah looked at her cell phone for the first time as she boiled salted water for some pasta. They had both woken up starving. There was a message from Anna. Charles has been by three times today. Each time you were ‘busy’. This was followed by a series of smiling and crying emoji.

“Apparently Charles has been by,” Leah told her husband. He was eating salami directly from the pack, standing in front of the open refrigerator.

Bran grunted. His hair was sticking up at the back. There was a fading mark on his neck that she only just noticed. She didn’t precisely remember doing that.  

Leah poured in about half the packet of penne. Then some more. She was very hungry. “Is this cheating?”

“What?”

“Today. Is this cheating?” They didn’t spend the day in bed together. They didn’t usually spend the night together so… thoroughly. Even if it had been full moon. She didn’t know what the rules were any more.   

“Without question,” Bran sighed, tossing the empty packet onto the counter and peeling open some sliced cheese. “I’m trying not to think about it.”

She reached for a wooden spoon and gave the pot a brisk stir before setting it aside. “So, what would you normally do about it?”

“Emotionally punish myself,” he said drily, “and then skim off the whole thing into the box.”

Leah made a thoughtful noise. “Is that what it feels like? Skimming?”

“Yes. You think about a subject and skim off the top layer,” he replied easily. He folded up a slice of cheese and ate it. 

“Is the subject me?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“You think about me and skim off the top layer,” Leah repeated. She didn’t have the energy to be angry. Just resigned. “That sounds… just lovely.”

“You can see why I didn’t really want you to know.”

No kidding. “Can you grate me some parmesan? Oh – is there bacon in there?”

Bran tossed a packet of bacon onto the counter and took out the parmesan, still rolling up the sliced cheese and eating it. “How much?”

“All of it. Into the bowl with the egg yolks,” she added.

Obediently, he started grating.

“I prefer knowing,” Leah told him, honestly. “It’s comforting to know that after two-hundred years with me, I’m not such a heinously unlikeable person you have to steel yourself to sleep with me.”

Her husband choked. “Leah—”

The kitchen door opened. “Finally you’ve emerged,” Samuel said, walking in with his younger brother on his heels.

Leah blinked. She had entirely, entirely, forgotten Sam was staying with them. She exchanged an equally dismissive look with her eldest step-son and opened the packet of bacon to chop it up, with the prickling discomfort of having her back to him. Her husband’s sons were a heady combination of power.

“Hello to you both, as well.” Bran passed Leah the bowl of parmesan and egg yolks. “What next?” he asked her.

“Season it with black pepper and whisk it, please.” She put the chopped up bacon in a small pan to cook quickly.

Charles was brusque, leaning against the kitchen island. “We’ve dealt with the body of the itinerant human and Danilo has taken care of Sandro’s body at the motel.”

“Good. Did he have any next of kin?”

Leah’s ears had pricked. “Sandro Monterrei?”

“You knew him?” Bran touched her arm with a knuckle.

“Vaguely. That’s sad,” she said. She pulled a face. He had been quite mild-mannered for a werewolf. No wonder he had panicked when he thought he was turning violent. “He didn’t have any family.”

“No,” Charles agreed. “I couldn’t find any either. Is there anyone else you think who should be informed?” This last he aimed at Leah.

Leah thought about it, shaking the pan so the bacon crisped evenly. “There was a woman, a Frenchwoman. Aimee? You could ask Juste. She may no longer be with us. It was nearly a century ago that I last saw them both. Oh, Angus might know. They were in Seattle with him. I can message him.”

“Charles will do it,” Bran said neutrally, stopping her from picking up her phone.

Whilst Leah put together her interpretation of carbonara at short notice, Sam, Charles and Bran discussed plans for tracing the second gauntlet’s journey to Nevada. Presumably it had left a trail of death and destruction behind. Unless, of course, only werewolves were susceptible. She handed Bran his bowl of pasta with a smile and then took hers out into the living room. Experience had taught her that the Cornick men would prefer to discuss business without her and today she felt no need to force the issue.

A few minutes later, Bran came out, followed by his sons, and he dropped down next to her on the couch. “We should finish that movie,” he said, as if Charles and Sam weren’t there. He shoveled a big mouthful of pasta into his mouth.

If he was going to ignore his offspring, then Leah would too. “Which one? The scary one or the violent one?”

“The scary one.”

“Not going to walk out of it this time?” she asked with an arch look.

Bran grinned, digging his fork back into his bowl. “Depends.”

Charles snorted. “Oh, I can see where this is going. Da, I’ll speak to you later with news of this Frenchwoman,” Charles said. He slapped his hand on Sam’s back. “If I don’t see you later, have a safe trip back. Give Ariana my regards. Bye, Leah.”

Sam was frowning, looking between his father and Leah. She chose to ignore him, instead cuing up the movie.

“You’re welcome to join us,” Bran said to his eldest, “but we were more than halfway through and Leah, as you know, shrieks.”

“I do not,” she protested, weakly.

Sam’s frown morphed into a more perplexed look. “No, thank you. And I ought to be going anyway.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to stay another night? We could have dinner as a family.”

This was a test. For reasons that were beyond Leah’s ken, Bran sometimes played these games with Sam to see where his loyalties lay. She had often wondered if it was a dominance thing. Though more diluted, Sam was witch-born, too, which Bran was always wary of in any other werewolf. And he was nearly as old as Bran. Unlike Charles, Sam regularly defied Bran – and didn’t seem to have difficulty doing so. She thought one day the time would come that blood would be spilt over it. She wondered as well how serious the ‘words’ they had exchanged the previous night had been.

Perhaps she was overthinking it, though. Perhaps Bran just missed him. If that was the case…

“Do stay for dinner, Sam,” Leah said, not looking at her step-son. She couldn’t; not when she skirted so close to a lie. “I’m sure Anna would love to spend more time with you, as well. She’s never really had a chance to get to know you. A flying visit at Christmas isn’t the same thing.”

Bran looked at Leah sharply. “Yes,” he said, his tone considering. He put his hand on her thigh. “She would.”

Sam was silent for a moment. He had wiped all expression from his face. “All right. Let me call Ariana to let her know.”

Her husband was pleased. Happy, in fact. “Wonderful.”

Her stepson walked upstairs quietly. Leah’s mind mulled over the repercussions of this dinner. She would have to go out. She didn’t have anything prepared that would feed the full Cornick clan.

“You should actually ask Charles if they can make it,” she told Bran, finishing her bowl of pasta and sliding forward to get up. “I need to go to the grocery store. Sam eats like you do.”

Bran pulled her back. He turned her to face him, hand on her chin, and held her still for a moment so that she would meet his eyes, see his gratitude. “Thank you,” he said. He kissed her briefly. He tasted of parmesan and bacon.

“You’re very welcome,” Leah said, warmed by his thanks. She had done something good regarding his family. How unusual. “But I really do need to go to the grocery store. We’ll have to save my shrieking for another day.”

*

Dinner was fine. Leah couldn’t have called it a rousing success. Sam vacillated between being his usual cheerful self and oddly combative with both his father and his brother. He snapped at Leah, once, in the way that he did and both Bran and Charles snapped back before Leah could do it herself, which surprised him and pleased her no end. Anna smoothed things over and all Leah had to do was restrain herself, which made her look like the better person.   

It was interesting how much easier it was to control herself when she was more content in her marriage. Suddenly it didn’t matter so much that Sam didn’t respect her because Bran wanted her. Constantly. He might love Sam but she had a role in his life now more than just his wolf’s personal jailer.

“A sensitive question,” Bran started, when they gone to bed and were lying side by side on their stomachs, “but how much does Charles know?”

“About us? I mean, the box?” she corrected.

“Mmm.”

“I haven’t said anything since I stayed with them. But I told Anna some things before that,” she clarified, wary of his anger.

He was surprised, not angry. “You did?”

“I had to tell someone,” she said defensively. “You weren’t talking to me.”

Bran stroked a hand down her back. “I’m not criticizing. I guess I am just surprised by your choice.”

“Well, there wasn’t much of a choice, in the end.”

He acknowledged that. He kissed her shoulder. “That’s a big deal for you. Talking to her.”

Leah nodded. “I didn’t like it,” she said, a little petulantly. “I don’t like people knowing our business.”

“No. Me either.”

“So, I don’t know what Charles knows,” she summarized. Certainly, he hadn’t implied he knew anything, not by word or deed. “Anna could have told him nothing. Or everything. I suspect she would have edited in any case. But.” Leah shrugged. She didn’t know. She had decided not to know. “Why? Did he say something to you tonight? He was really only concerned that you weren’t hurting me.”

Bran’s eyes flashed. “He thought I would hurt you?”

“No,” she clarified crossly, “he was concerned because I was thoroughly spooked but couldn’t tell him what you were doing so he was trying to guess. Given the choice between beating me and fucking me against walls, I think Charles would think the former was more likely.”

“Is it,” her husband said darkly.

Leah giggled. “He would probably prefer to think so.” This time she leaned over and kissed his shoulder, lingered because she could. Because it was allowed. “I reassured him you weren’t.”

He grunted. “So they don’t know what I used the box for.”

“No. Why?”

Bran blew out a breath. “I was thinking I might show it to Charles. Properly. If our experiment doesn’t work.”

“You mean after we’ve opened the Little Box of Feelings?” They were supposed to have done that today but had never got around to it – the unexpected dinner with his family occupying Leah all afternoon.

He narrowed his eyes. “Why does it sound like you’re capitalizing that?”

“Because I did.” She nudged him with her foot, then draped her leg over the back of his legs. “You’ll have to tell him everything.”

Her husband didn’t like that.  

“You were hoping I’d done your job for you,” Leah surmised. She laughed.

“I admit I was.” Bran turned his face into the pillow and sighed manfully.

She patted his shoulder. “If it’s any consolation, he will be as uncomfortable as you will be.”

“I doubt that.”

“I would volunteer to be there when you told him but it would just make it more excruciating.” Leah laughed again, not envying him in the slightest. She tried to picture how Bran would do it. Here’s the thing, Charles, I’ve started to have sex with your step-mother more than I’m allowed to…

She supposed they must have both dozed for a while. It was strange, at the moment. They seemed to spend as much time in bed talking as they did anything else, just lying next to each other whispering their thoughts.

Leah opened her eyes to ask a question that had popped into her head. “When you ‘skim off’, do you forget the whole memory?”

Bran responded with his eyes closed. “No. I just forget how I felt about it.”

“It’s quiet,” she repeated, recalling him saying.

“Yes.”

She looked at him for a long moment, watching his face in repose. He needed a haircut. She reached out to touch a strand that was brushing his cheek. She ended up cupping his face, her heart aching. “I don’t like that you’re doing it. You know that, right?”

Bran nodded, opening his eyes and reaching up to cover her hand. “I know.”

“And I wish you didn’t feel you have to,” she said carefully.

“But you’ll still help me anyway,” Bran said, quietly.

Marriage was a partnership and her marriage more so than most. “Yes. I’ll help you anyway.”

*

When Sam had gone, Leah and Bran went down into the basement. Most pack houses had a basement like theirs – designed to cage violent werewolves, maybe those who had been moon-struck, or had been hurt enough that they couldn’t control themselves.

Theirs was a little different. Theirs had been designed to hold Bran.

Every inch of the cement walls had been covered in symbols drawn by Bran himself. The cement itself had flecks of silver in it – in the walls, in the floor. There was a silver cage, the floor of which was embedded into the ground so that it was sunk two feet deep. Beyond this cage was another, a secondary layer, that hummed with Charles’s magic.

The whole room made Leah’s skin crawl. She felt weaker in the room. And sad. So, so sad. She put a hand over her chest. It didn’t normally affect her like this.

“You really think this is necessary,” she said, her voice wavering as Bran unlocked the first, outer cage and then handed her the key.

“I think it behooves us to be prepared.”

She dropped the mat she had been carrying by the side of the cage and waited for him to climb inside the second cage. She leaned forward to lock it behind him, feeling the burn of the silver on her face. She had worn jeans and a long-sleeved shirt. Bran was wearing shorts and a T-shirt. Already, she could see red marks rising on his skin.

“It’s not going to make your wolf mad?” Leah’s was itching to leave. She locked the outer cage, hating the feeling of trapping her mate within it, the pressure of dread on her heart. If something went wrong, she had to be prepared to get him out of the cage and carry him up out of the room.

“He can barely feel it,” Bran said confidently. He gave her a reassuring smile, as if it wasn’t he who was trapped inside the cage but her.

Bran sat on the silver-flecked floor, cross-legged. She winced for him and sat on her own mat.

Bran took a deep breath and opened the tiny little box he had been clutching in his palm. His mouth shaped a word and then he jolted as if he had been shot in the stomach, bending over so his nose nearly touched the ground.

Her husband sat still for a moment. For a long moment. Too long.

Leah swallowed. He had briefed her before they had come down, advised her not to talk, not to move overmuch. The wolf would be comforted by her presence. He would not be comforted if she was obviously distressed.

“All right,” Bran said on a whoosh of air. He raised himself up and Leah saw the flash of his wolf, briefly, when he met her gaze and then it was gone. “I think that worked.”

“Are you all right?” she asked anxiously. Her hands wanted to reach out, grab the bars of the cage, but she held herself back.

“Mmm, let’s just say I wouldn’t want to do that with anything more,” he said. “You can let me out.”

She scrambled to do so and the burn of being close to the cage made her wince. A rumble of noise came from her mate and she saw him out of the corner of her eye. He wasn’t so sanguine now, she thought. She unlocked the first door, then climbed inside to do the next. This time she hissed. She could feel her exposed skin blistering with the prolonged exposure.

The rumble grew louder and as soon as the second door had slid to the side, her husband picked her up and carried her out and away from the cage. The pressure was immediately better. “I hate this place,” she told him as he put her down.

“It’s very effective,” Bran said, tilted her head to the side and blowing on the sore parts of her face. “You’re more sensitive than most to this, though, I’ve always noticed.”

Leah nodded. She had, too. A disappointing weakness. “Can we leave? Are you fine?”

He smiled at her. “I’m fine.”

She scampered up the stairs, keyed in the code that would release them and all but fell out into their hallway. The air smelled clean and fresh and healing.

She went to look in the mirror. “I look like I’m sunburnt,” she grumbled. She fanned her hot face with her hot hands, knowing it would heal reasonably quickly. She assessed Bran’s arms and legs. What redness she had seen before had already gone. Amazing.

Bran was smirking at her, hands in his pockets.

“It worked,” she said, both relieved and pleased for him. “That’s good, isn’t it? Means you are transferring something.”

“Seems so.”

Leah stopped fanning her face. “Do you feel different?” she asked. “I mean, do you know what it was that you skimmed off?”

“It… is hard to tell. It could be attached to an old memory that I don’t really remember any more.”

“Oh.” She tried to imagine it. The way he had described it to her, he had all these memories of her that were just words and actions, no feeling ascribed to them. To her that meant it wasn’t really memory at all any more – most of what she remembered was how they made her feel, after all – but perhaps his brain worked differently.

“Wait. Does it mean that the only feelings you have attached to memories of me are all negative?” Leah said, suddenly inspired by this awful thought.

And then, in her head, this awful thought grew.

Because there were plenty of unpleasant things in their past and in the not-so-recent past, at that. Screaming rows. Passive aggressive disagreements. Slammed doors and words that couldn’t be unsaid. Hateful, spiteful things she had done to get back at him that had made him so angry. People she had hurt because he loved them.   

She couldn’t look at him, suddenly, and the longer he was silent, the more she realized she had hit the nail on the head. Those feelings towards her he had kept. Anger. Disgust. Resentment. Dislike. Hate.

Leah’s heart, a fragile thing already, shivered and broke. “Oh. That’s useful to you, isn’t it,” she said quietly. The terrible sadness from the room downstairs seemed to lick at her, the heat draining from her face with its chill. Loving him as she did, she knew there were still times when she didn’t like him. When he made her angry. When she hated him.

Bran preferred it when he didn’t like her. That was what he actually wanted. Needed. Didn’t want or need the inconvenience of having to put his feelings in a box. It would be better for them all, that way.

She felt that warning prickle behind her eyes, the manifestation of the lump in her throat that told her that her body was going to show how much this had hurt her. She needed to leave now before she embarrassed herself.

Leah picked up her chin and swiveled on her heels towards the door. “Okay!” she announced, as if he’d said something, anything, to confirm or deny what she’d belatedly – stupidly – only just learnt. She pasted a smile on her face, one that he couldn’t see and was for no one but herself.

She walked off briskly, picked up her jacket and grabbed her cell phone from her purse. She’d just go for a walk. Calm down.

She knew exactly where she was going because she had done this walk many times before. Straight down the drive, a left behind the small greenhouse and into the woods. She walked at a quick pace. If she was lucky, very lucky, the walk, the air on her face, the changing surroundings would stave off any tears.

Leah heard him call her name and thought Absolutely not and then she started running.

*

It started raining because of course it did and of course she had grabbed the wrong jacket. She was also very much not wearing a bra for running which was Bran’s fault because since the revelation of her ability to apparently distract him with her outward appearance, she’d started preparing for any possibility that he might undress her.

Fucking pathetic, she thought.

She got about five miles from the house and slowed down, panting. She hadn’t paced herself but, uncomfortable though it had been, the run had been good. Got her blood pumping. Probably some handy chemicals running through her body, giving her the will to continue living.   

The trick now, Leah thought as she zipped up the unfortunately not water-proof jacket she had chosen at random, was to keep upbeat. And if she couldn’t do that, then she should get angry.

As often happened, Leah went for angry.

Maybe Anna was right. This was abuse. It was emotional abuse.

The problem was for two centuries he had been very clear with her. He had never deviated from the rules. That she had fallen in love with him was entirely her fault, not his – she hadn’t thought she had been capable and it turned out she was. Entirely.

Oh, yes, it had been hell for her, no question about it. And she had been jealous and spiteful and difficult because of it, this lopsided relationship she had agreed upon, this never-ending comparison to a woman Bran had only known for a handful of years. But in the face of it, she had known he had done nothing to encourage her. He had made it obvious it wasn’t reciprocated. He’d told her to stay in the lines and she’d crossed them.

Now, now, she knew that it was a lie. That whilst he hadn’t fallen for her – she honestly couldn’t allow her to think otherwise – he liked her, he felt fondly of her. There was tenderness, there, maybe. Bran could find it in himself to enjoy her. She had seen that, over the last few days, she had seen him enjoying her. And she had enjoyed him doing it. It had worked.

Despite all her best intentions, there was a stupid, hopeful part of her imagining what it would be like all the time if he didn’t bury his feelings for her. If their relationship was like every other modern werewolf couple with ups as well as downs. That they’d sleep in after full moon and kiss in their living room and have sex whenever either of them wanted and when she was sad he would hold her.

Instead, here Leah was, helping him bury all that. And when he looked back on her, all he remembered were the terrible emotions she had created. The things she truly regretted. When she hadn’t gone to Carter’s funeral with him, hadn’t sat at his side and loved him. That she had lost the pack money when Charles had left the finances in her care. That he was married to a woman who disliked his sons, was unkind to everyone when she was threatened. Who tried to make him jealous by flirting with other men. 

It had started to rain quite heavily. She tilted her head to the tree canopy so that the hot tears on her face mixed with the cold droplets of rain.

She guessed she could try to be good all the time. Never give him reason to have negative thoughts about her. Leah laughed bitterly to the sky, even before she’d finished this fanciful idea. No, she didn’t have that in her. She couldn’t be good. She had never been good.  

Leah took a deep breath and turned around. “Okay!” she said to no one, brightly as she could. “Okay.”

There was, as always, nothing she could do about it.

*

She returned home a couple of hours later, truly wet through and very muddy. Three of the pack were in her living room, playing some game involving pirates on her television. Charles was here – his car was outside – and she guessed he was in with Bran as the door to the office was closed.

Tag laughed loudly when he saw her, drawing the attention of the other two, who paused the game to gape at her. “What happened to you, a leanbh?” he chuckled.

Leah experienced a fleeting moment of anger followed by the sudden clarity that Tag wasn’t laughing at her. That he had used a term of endearment for a child not to patronize but in the way it was meant – affectionately. To Tag, she was a child. As much as she would like to, she couldn’t pretend otherwise.

“I took the wrong jacket,” she admitted, sheepishly smiling, feeling a little shy. Leah didn’t like feeling stupid.

Tag laughed again. “You’re right on that.”

Leah toed off her – also inappropriate – sodden sneakers. Her socks were wet through. She peeled these off with a grimace and walked past the pack, all giggling at her, through the kitchen so she could strip off everything in the laundry room. She came out wearing sweats and carrying a small hand towel to dry her hair. Where normally she would have gone to her room – video games the type the pack was playing were not really her sort of thing – she decided instead to hop on the couch. She didn’t want to be alone.

Leah watched the screen, mystified, as she unbraided her hair and carefully started drying it. It was difficult to really understand what was happening. It was like a movie, one of the animated ones, only much jerkier, with many conflicting sound effects both on screen and off screen as the trio playing shouted and argued. The music was good, though.

Tag appeared to be the most skilled, which surprised her. After Bran, he was the oldest in their pack. She wouldn’t have pictured him as someone who could adapt to something so obviously modern. Gareth, on the other hand, was one of their new Changes.

On screen, Anderson died. Off-screen, he dramatically fell back on the couch, making appropriately guttural final-death noises. Gareth patted his shoulder. “I’m sorry, my friend. You fought a good game. But you know the forfeit.”

Anderson stood. “Aye, Captain,” he said. He glanced at Leah, a little nervous. His eyes skittered to her cheek. Anderson was only a couple of decades older than her but not very dominant. Bran liked to vary the levels of dominance in the Aspen Creek pack. “Ah. I have to make cookies.”

“Be my guest,” she said, seeing he was asking for permission. She had no problem if people used the kitchen provided they cleaned up after themselves.

“Do you want to have a go?” Tag asked, holding up Anderson’s controller.

“Oh. No, no thank you.” She’d really experienced enough humiliation in one day to be forced to learn how to play a video game. Anderson and Gareth were less dominant than her – they would have to be to play against Tag – and she couldn’t face being seen as ‘less skilled’, even for something so patently ridiculous.

“Another time then?”

She nodded. “Yes. Actually. Another time.” Maybe Tag could teach her, she thought.

Anderson came back twenty-five minutes later with a plate of still-warm cookies and deposited them on the table. Leah fetched some milk and glasses. “Can’t have cookies without milk,” she told Anderson, mock-sternly.

He smiled at her, a proper one. “Of course not. What was I thinking?”

A few minutes later, Leah tensed as she heard the door of Bran’s office open. When Charles appeared, she relaxed a little. Then she caught his eye. Though he conveyed nothing, Leah realized that he knew. Bran had told him.

Charles came over and stood behind her, putting a hand on her shoulder. She stared at it out of the corner of her eye whilst he exchanged a few pleasantries with Tag. He might as well have put a snake on her, for all the sense it made. Then, pleasantries done, he patted her shoulder and left.

In the time it must have taken for Charles to get into his truck, drive home, get out and talk to his wife, Leah’s phone bleeped with a message. As it was still in her jacket, she hopped over the back of the couch to pick it up.

It was from Anna. Do you want to come for dinner tonight? Alone?

A new concept, blinding in its intensity, hit her. She held the cell phone against her chest. They were both on her side. Not Bran’s. Hers. Charles had gone home, told Anna, and they had agreed that perhaps Leah would like company without Bran that evening. Would like to talk to someone.

She looked down the hallway. From the front door she could see a clear path to Bran’s office, the door slightly ajar. If he wasn’t on calls, he liked to be able to hear the pack in the living room.

Leah wanted to rub this in Bran’s face. They have chosen me, not you, she wanted to tell him. Someone other than her thought what he was doing was cruel. So much so that, in Charles’s case, he was willing to overcome two centuries of antagonism.

It was astonishing.

Maybe she should pick up the phone and tell Sam. See if she could get the whole set.

Of course, rubbing it in his face would certainly give Bran some negative feelings about her. She also imagined Bran knew what Charles thought of him. He’d been dreading telling him in the first place.

And besides, what did she think she would get from it? He’d probably apologize. He knew what he was doing was cruel. He was still going to do it. Nothing would stop that, not her tears or hurt feelings, not what his son thought of him. Bran didn’t care. In fact, the only two people who had ever changed his mind about something were Anna and, goddamn it, Mercedes. Anna who likely wouldn’t intervene in Leah’s relationship even if Leah wanted her to and Mercedes who would absolutely never be told.

“I’ve changed my mind,” Leah announced. “Would someone please teach me how to become a pirate?”

*

In what was her rare good fortune, word got out about the video game and several more members of the pack came to join them. Perhaps it was the novelty of Leah playing. Perhaps it was when she said she would buy pizza and drive to get it herself. Her living room was filled with noise and laughter and terrible, terrible pirate impressions and she didn’t have to think about Bran at all.  

“Has anyone ever actually met a pirate?” Kara asked at one point.

A few hands went up. Kara’s eyes went wide as she surveyed the history in front of her. She clutched the magazine she had been reading to her chest.

“Didn’t you meet Blackbeard?” Leah leaned back to look at Tag. Sometimes, for Kara, Tag would be willing to remember more things.

“Aye,” Tag said, eyes not moving from the game, fingers moving faster than light on the controller in his hand. He was undefeated. He had utterly flattened Leah, who had been forced to give up her controller to the next player.

“Tag.”

“Why? Are you writing another essay?” It hadn’t taken Kara long to realize she had a font of historical knowledge at her fingertips in some members of the pack. It also hadn’t taken her long to realize that ‘bias’ existed in the people as well as in the books.

“No, she’s just watched all of Pirates of the Caribbean back to back,” Peggy remarked drily.

Tag chuckled. “Ah. I can assure you, none of them looked like that Johnny fella.”

“Very little eyeliner on real pirates,” Juste added, chipping in with a rare comment.

Kara’s face was grave. “This is disappointing,” she said, dead-pan, to the general amusement of all.

Leah looked at the clock and pulled out a sheet of paper and a pen from the coffee table drawer. “All right. Place your orders, please.” She wrote quickly as the requests were put in. She raised her eyebrows at some of them – pineapple, pepperoni and capers, really? – but nonetheless took note. “Kara, could you run and ask Bran what he wants, please?” she said, lightly.

Kara jumped over the back of the couch and could be heard running down to, then knocking on, the door of his office.

Leah read back the order to the assembled crowd. “Anything else? Garlic bread? Any sauces? Sodas? Cheesecake?”

This set off a cascade of requests for various dips and desserts. She scribbled faster.

Kara came back. “Bran says he’ll come with you, he just needs five minutes,” she said, smiling.

Leah decided she could have seen that coming.

*

Since she wasn’t prepared to go out in public in sweats and no underwear, Leah went to change. She chose what she wanted to wear, not what her husband said she could, and put on the forbidden knitted sweater, a pair of jeans and some boots. Her hair had dried in a frizzy mess so she brushed it vigorously and swept it up into a topknot.

When she bounced downstairs, Bran was waiting for her, holding the keys to her car and her waterproof jacket. She took these from him and handed him the folded piece of paper with the pack’s pizza requests and her cell phone. “Thank you. Here’s the order. You can call it in whilst I drive.” She bared her teeth and walked out of the house.

Leah rarely drove Bran. It bothered him, even if he denied it did, so she always let him take the wheel. But she wanted to drive because she wanted to have something to concentrate on other than his presence. Plus, she drove faster. ‘Like a maniac’, he had said to her once.

Bran waited to make the call until they were on the highway, where the signal would be better, which meant they sat in silence whilst she navigated. It was pouring with rain, still, and the wipers were at maximum speed. She listened to him repeat the order carefully, then conscientiously asked them to repeat it back to him.

“We’ll be there in thirty minutes,” Bran said to wrap-up.

He hung up and put her phone into the little space in the dash.

Leah turned the radio on.

Bran turned it off.

She tucked her tongue between her teeth and flexed her hands on the wheel. Fine.

Ten agonizingly silent minutes into the drive, her phone bleeped. Thinking it might be an additional request from the pack, she asked him to check.

It really wasn’t her day. “It’s Angus,” Bran said in an extremely friendly tone. “Would you like me to open it and read it to you?”

“No, thanks,” she replied, regretting with every fiber of her being bringing her phone with her and not calling in the order before she’d left. “I’ll read it later.”

Bran stared at her. She did not look at him. She refused. After a solid thirty seconds, he put her phone in her dash and sat back.

The atmosphere in the car was becoming claustrophobic. She opened her window just a little and chewed her bottom lip. She hadn’t expected to have a fight with him, which was the direction it felt like this was going. He also hadn’t apologized, which was more normal when he was in the wrong – which he was, she assured herself. 

Leah glanced over at him. Definitely mad about something, she decided. He wasn’t even bothering to hide it.

“What is it?” she asked. “It can’t be Angus.”

Bran tapped his fingers on his knee. “Yes. Also you ran away from me.”

She swallowed. Angus? Really? “I didn’t want you to see me.” She glanced in her side mirror to overtake a truck. “I wanted some space.”

“That’s fine. But I would like to be given the opportunity to finish our conversation and you have been avoiding me.”

“Fine,” she said, thinking how unfair that was. One of them hadn’t come out of his office all afternoon. “Would you like to do that now?”

Her phone bleeped again. “Oh for god’s sake,” she muttered. Maybe there was a convenient tree she could drive into. 

“Would you like me to see who that is?” her husband asked with a pleasant bite to his tone.

It bleeped again.

It was too much. Leah pulled over abruptly and when she came to a stop, Bran got out of the car and slammed the door behind him. Hard. She picked up the phone, honestly astonished that it was coming to this. She skimmed through Angus’s messages. He had been told about Sandro. He was sad. He remembered a raucous dinner with him and Aimee at The Louisa Hotel in the 1920s. The messages were innocuous and friendly. Nothing Bran should be worried about.

It was funny. When she had imagined how she would feel making Bran jealous – and she had imagined it, she had created scenarios where he had been so jealous and angry he had been nearly violent with it – she had thought it would feel better than this. Instead, she just felt sick for him and for her. And for her innocent friend. One of Bran’s own Alphas.

She put her phone back in the dash and peered through the window at her husband, standing in the rain and staring out at the trees. Leah had been soaked once already today and it seemed she would be soaked once more.

Leah zipped her jacket and pulled up the hood. She climbed out of the car and walked over to him, hands tucked under her armpits, rain pattering on the plastic material. “I guess you won’t be putting much of me into the box today,” she said, aiming for humor and really, really missing the mark.

Bran looked at her and she let out a small gasp. He looked wounded, his eyes like raw, dark holes of pain. She never, ever wanted him to look that way again. She reached out, not sure what she was going to do if she touched him, but he stepped away.

“I do not enjoy hurting you, Leah,” he told her, water dripping from his wet hair, falling down his cheeks like tears.

“I didn’t think you did,” she said truthfully. But she was compelled, as ever, to go a step further. “I— don’t think you care very much when you do though. Not when it’s a necessity.”

He shook his head. “That’s not true.”

“All right,” she said quietly. A car drove past them, headlights on and rainwater splashing up under its tires. Leah looked down at her boots. A puddle was forming around her. “Well. Today hurt. I don’t know if there’s much more to say.”

“I never planned this.” He tilted his head back, looking up at the darkening sky. “None of it. It became some kind of compulsion that just grew worse as time wore on. The complications have been… beyond what I could have imagined.”

“The complications being…?”

“You. Hurting you. Never-endingly hurting you. What was it Charles said to me today? Ah, yes, emotional manipulation, he called it. Abuse, he said.” Bran’s teeth flashed in the headlights of an oncoming car and then his face fell dark again. “Imagine.”

Leah flushed. “Well, they’re exaggerating, of course. I knew… you told me what I was getting into.”

“But I didn’t know, so how were you expected to,” Bran challenged her, unexpectedly. “I changed the game. I kept changing the game and I didn’t tell you. I accused you of betraying me and I have been lying to you for two centuries.”

Water dripped down her neck and she shivered at the contrast. “Yes.” That was all there was to it. Just ‘yes’. “But you have… a reason. Don’t you?” she asked, gently.

Bran turned to fully face her, lifted his wet hands to her face. “I did. I had a reason, when I thought neither of us would survive ten, twenty years together. I never imagined this.”

This. Her and him, on the side of the road, two centuries later standing by her car as traffic passed them. His wounded eyes and her fragile heart.

Leah didn’t know what to say. She knew what she wanted him to say. To say he was going to give it up. That whatever happened could happen. That if he liked her – the devil on her shoulder whispered, if he loved her – and she died, he would accept the consequences. The dire, world-changing consequences of a Power in the world losing his mind. A nuclear bomb in a human-shaped body.

She couldn’t say that. She couldn’t ask that of him. So Leah didn’t say anything.

She leaned into his hands and sighed. “Let’s go get the pizza, Bran.”

*

The pack was loud and Bran was more than capable of disguising his feelings. He was ebullient, almost festive, when they arrived home bearing an exceptional quantity of pizza boxes. Someone had lit the fire even though it wasn’t particularly cold and there was music on, plates and napkins laid out on the big coffee table. The video game had been replaced with, Leah laughed, one of the Pirates of the Caribbean films. One of the first two, she thought, judging on the age of the actors.

“What’s this?” Bran asked, taking a seat in the middle of one of the couches.

Leah didn’t hesitate. She sat next to him and pulled her pizza box towards herself. She was famished. “You’ll hate it. Just go to your happy place,” she suggested before she folded half a slice of pizza into her mouth, holding a paper napkin underneath for any fallout.

Tag laughed and Bran snorted. He sat back, his pizza box on his damp knees. “All right, then,” he replied, putting his arm behind her.

Despite everything, it was a good evening. The film, ridiculous as it was, got a few laughs from the unlikely older audience. Kara made Leah choke when she asked if she had to wear clothes like Elizabeth Swann. “A little before my time,” Leah clarified, licking sauce from her thumb. “My mother did, though.”

“S’pretty,” Kara said, tipping her head back and eating a slice of pizza almost in one go like a pelican.

“Your wedding dress looked similar,” Tag commented.

He was right. She’d quite forgotten. Or repressed it. “That’s because Augustine made us all wear it,” she said with a sneer. For those who hadn’t had the pleasure, she clarified, “Augustine was my Alpha’s wife. And she was shorter than me.”

Peggy and Kara pulled sympathetic faces.

Leah shuddered. It had never been washed and smelled of all the previous occupants. She still had whiffs of it for days afterwards. And she’d had to pay the horrible woman for the pleasure of ‘renting’ it.

“You looked lovely, that’s all I remember,” Bran said.

There were a series of schmaltzy noises around them and Leah gave Bran a doubtful look. Doubtful because she wondered if he couldn’t remember how he felt on the day and doubtful because she had looked at herself in a mirror. She had not looked lovely.

“Thank you. That was an artful lie,” she said, smirking knowingly.

“It wasn’t a lie. I remember it,” Bran said firmly, narrowing his eyes at her, challenging her to disagree. “You looked lovely.”

As usual, she couldn’t tell. She sighed and decided not to make a fuss. “You had a black eye,” she said, for the entertainment of everyone.

“From you.”

Leah grinned. “That’s true.” Kara’s face was particularly entertaining – vacillating between delighted and horrified.

She sat back in the cradle of Bran’s arm and he draped his hand over her shoulder. They watched out the rest of the movie, relatively quietly. Leah was drained from the exertions of an eventful day, Bran likely the same. The pack reflected their Alpha’s mood as they always did, growing sleepy and contemplative.

Everyone sighed when the credits rolled. Juste and Gareth started packing up the pizza boxes, tidying up the remains to be put into the refrigerator for someone to snack on the next day. Someone else picked up all the sticky glasses of soda, the napkins, the pots of dip. Then, there was a chorus of ‘thank you's as the pack left one after the other.

She stood, walked around the couches and fluffed cushions, pulled the blankets she draped over the backs into order.

“Can I sleep with you tonight?” Bran asked her, after turning off the kitchen lights.

“Yes,” she said, switching off the lamps in the living area. “But just sleep.”

He nodded his agreement.

They went to bed.

*

Leah woke, alone, a few hours later. Behind the drapes, she could see it was still pitch black outside and when she stretched out a leg, the mattress was cool. Bran had been gone for some time.

She debated, briefly, going back to sleep but then curiosity got the better of her and she got up and checked his room first. It was empty and dark. He hadn’t gone to sleep alone; it had been some time since he had. Since both of them had. 

She padded down the stairs. The living room was dark, so was the dining room but a shard of light down the hallway told her he was in his office. Of course he was.

Faintly dreading what she’d find, she trailed reluctantly down the hall to his office. She pushed open the door with one finger, expecting to see him crouched over the box at his desk, pouring his affection for her away.

Instead, she yelped and an icicle of fear shuddered its way through her body. “What the hell are you doing?” she demanded, horrified.

Bran held up a hand, as if instructing her to wait. She froze in the doorway, palms towards him, fully about to start yelling at him but knowing it was exactly the opposite of what she should be doing. Four boxes were open in front of him and he was sitting cross-legged on the floor, blood streaming from his nose. She watched as he bent back over into the hunched-up position he had been when she had opened the door, his palms flat against the rug.

Leah huffed and ran to the downstairs bathroom. On the shelves above the basin she had a series of small towels, rolled decoratively. She grabbed three, wet one under the faucet, squeezed out the excess, and ran back to him.

She dropped one dry towel onto the puddle of his blood and then crouched down, kneeling before him. “Look at me,” she instructed firmly.

Bran lifted his head. At least his eyes were his normal, human eyes, she thought. She used the damp towel to gently wipe the blood smeared over the lower half of his face. Some of it was dried to his cheeks, with wavering streaks coming from his eyes. Tears of agony, she thought, crossly.

“Idiot,” she told him. “What were you thinking.”

Her husband patiently allowed her to clean his face and then his hands. She glanced at the other boxes sitting closed in the semi-circle of brain damage her husband had arranged and shook her head. “No more, Bran,” she told him. She helped him up and they stood, loosely clasped together, whilst they both decided if he was capable of standing on his own.

“Bit longer,” he told her, leaning heavily on her shoulders.

“All right,” Leah agreed. She attempted to unclench her painfully tight jaw. She glanced down at the three open boxes – each at least five times bigger than the tiny one he had opened only that morning – and looked away again, feeling faintly sick. “Are you insane?”

Bran shuffled a little closer to her. He was shivering. She pulled him tightly to her, trying to cover as much of his naked body as she could with just her arms. Apparently he’d decided to do this in just his pajama pants. His flesh felt damp with cold, pebbled with goosebumps.

Leah broke away from him briefly and grabbed the blanket from the back of his couch. She shook it out and wrapped it around him but his octopus-like arms were only interested in getting her closer. That was the wolf, she thought. Her husband had hurt himself and needed her.

“Idiot,” she said again, rubbing her palms over the muscles of his back under the knitted cashmere of the blanket. “Why? Why would you do that?”

“Doesn’t matter,” he said, his teeth chattering.

“It doesn’t matter? That you give yourself brain damage?” she demanded, furiously.

Bran shook his head. “C-c-can you sh-sh-shout at me later?”

Leah growled. Blood was still trickling from one of his nostrils. She wanted to scream at him.

She manhandled him upstairs and sat him down at the end of her bed with a towel pressed to his nose. “Don’t move.”

Going into his closet, she found one of his older sweaters, one she didn’t like so much, and came back. He obediently lifted his arms so that she could put it on him, like a child. “Pinch your nose and lean forward,” she told him.

Bran shuddered and did so. Not sure what else to do, she rested her hands on his shoulders, stroking him from neck to upper arm. He leaned his forehead against her abdomen. She relaxed a little. He was fine. He was alive, she repeated to herself. She closed her eyes. Seeing him in a pool of his own blood had been extremely alarming.

Her mate lifted his head. “I think it’s stopped,” he said, sitting up. He was shaking less, as well.

She took the towel away and looked. He was still smeared with blood. “Let me get a wash cloth. Then you can get into bed.”

But his hands scrabbled to keep hold of her when she made to leave. “No,” he said.

Leah brushed a hand through his hair. “I am getting you a cloth, then coming back.”

“I’m fine. Just stay.”

“You’re not going to sleep with blood on your face, Bran,” she protested, slipping from his hands and hurrying to her bathroom. She grabbed a cloth, wet it, and hurried back. She dabbed at his face, remembering his complaints about her bedside manner and trying to be gentle, just this once. She scrubbed at the blood on his chest, too. “I can’t believe you were doing that on your own.”

“They were small.”

“You said the other one was bad and it was tiny. You could have given yourself brain damage.” She stopped, crouched so she could look him in the eye. “Did you give yourself brain damage?”

He smirked half-heartedly. “I’m fine. Now can we go to bed?”

Muttering that she hadn’t been the one who had woken up in the middle of the night to go and sabotage herself, Leah threw the cloth towards the laundry hamper and climbed into bed with her husband. She tucked the comforter around him. “Idiot,” she said.

Bran cuddled her. “You mentioned.” He kissed her shoulder, her neck. His hands rucked her night gown up. “This is my favorite one.”

His intent became belatedly clear to her. “Are you—seriously?” It came out as a surprised squeak.

He rolled her onto her back, hands roaming all over her. “I love you in this color,” Bran said, scraping his fingers over her breasts, catching her nipples through the silk. She arched into him.

“You what— oh for. Bran. Come on. Oh.” She got a hold of his hands and held them still, one between her legs, the other clutching her left breast. “Stop,” she said firmly.

Bran rested his head against her clavicle. “I’m stopping,” he said. She could tell he was smiling. Was he hysterical?

“Tell me why you opened the boxes.”

“Because I realized it doesn’t matter.”

“Explain for simpler minds, please.”

He wriggled his fingers between her thighs. She clenched down hard. “It doesn’t matter. I can skim every feeling I have for you off every day and it doesn’t matter. It comes back because it’s already there. Exactly the same.”

“Huh?” she said.

He straddled her, mouth cruising across her collarbone, pressing small kisses to the dips and bones. “I’m an idiot.”

“I can agree with that.”

Bran lifted his head, kissed her chin, the corner of her mouth. She found herself moving her face to capture his attention and he pressed a closed-mouth kiss to her lips. “If I emptied myself of every drop of love for you now and you died three minutes or thirty years later, it wouldn’t make a difference. You don’t stop loving a person for no reason. It’s not a jug that you can empty. It’s… it’s infinite, Leah. I’ve been fooling myself.”

“I don’t–” She released his hands because she wanted to kiss him, because whatever he was saying involved the words love and she was sure it was good but she didn’t understand him. He started pulling the hem of her night gown up again. “I don’t really have any idea what you’re saying.”

“I’m going to empty all the boxes. Slowly,” he amended, when her teeth bit down on his bottom lip in reaction. “I’m already one-hundred percent certain that it’ll feel no different than I already feel but I have to be sure.”

“Uh-huh.” Not a clue, she thought, pulled his sweater over his head. He helped her shove her night gown off and his head dove to suck a nipple into his mouth. “You don’t feel any different?”

“The small box this morning changed nothing.”

“Yes, but you said you couldn’t remember–” It was no good. He was sliding the knuckle of his index finger over the crease of her folds, teasing. She couldn’t concentrate when she was aroused and what he was saying was important. “Stop, Bran, please stop.”

Bran held still, pulled his lips from her breast and looked up at her with heavy-eyed expectancy.

“You said you couldn’t remember,” she repeated quietly. “That it could have been feelings attached to an old memory.”

“So I had a theory about that. I opened another box, whilst you were gone.” He ignored her noise of dismay. He’d done this without her knowledge. “It changed nothing. It gave me back the feelings but I still felt exactly the same.” Bran pressed his mouth to her breast then above it to where her heart beat below her skin. He crawled up her body, rested his weight on his arms on either side of her head. His mouth brushed hers very, very gently. She held her breath. “Do you see?”

Leah half nodded. “I— think so,” she said, sounding unsure to her own ears.

“I will open every one of those boxes, Leah, and I will remember every moment, every time I wanted you, every time I loved you,” his voice hitched over the word, just as her heart jumped, “and it will be beautiful and it will just reinforce everything I already feel now. I’ve been pouring my emotions into a sieve.” Bran laughed at himself, truly laughed. “Like a damn fool, pretending that it wasn’t happening, that I was wiping the slate clean. And then you walk into a room and, snap, they’re just there again.” He shook his head, kissed her again and she opened her mouth, responded the way she had been trained to respond, the way she wanted to respond. She clung to him eagerly. He loved her, she kept thinking, but the words wouldn’t penetrate. He loved her.

She pulled back. She could taste the faintest remnants of his blood on her lips. “Tell me you love me again.”

“I love you,” he said obediently.

Leah grabbed hold of his face, shaking her head and staring into his eyes. His words felt truthful but… No. Couldn’t be real. There had to be some other explanation. “Are you brain damaged?” she asked fearfully.

Bran growled. “Now, this, this is a thing I am particularly proud of creating. This doubt on your face.” He kissed her harder, weaving his arms around her, slanting his mouth across hers, pouring his passion, his love into her. She took it. She took all of it. “I love you. I have probably loved you for a very long time, had I but allowed myself to know it.”

She made a small noise. Not pathetic, not quite. Maybe she was dreaming, she thought, writhing against him. “But— doesn’t this mean that you’re still a ticking time bomb?”

“Oh yes, but now it means I can’t do anything about it.” He drew back, kissed the bow of her lips, the corner of her mouth, her neck, her breasts, one after the other, cupping them with his hands. “You have no idea what a relief that is. I can’t do anything about it.”

She stared at the top of his head as he moved down her body again, kissing every inch of her. It felt unreal. Bran rubbed his face between her thighs and she sighed and then gasped when he turned his face and licked her firmly, one long stroke from bottom to top. His thumbs spread her and she wove her fingers into his hair as he used the tip of his tongue to circle her clit, alternating with little licks and flicks, each jolting her like an electric shock, building a pool of heat within her. He slid two fingers inside of her, slipping them in and out. She would come like this, with his mouth on her, around his fingers, and she suddenly didn’t want that.

“Bran, I want you inside me,” she whispered, tugging his hair. “I want you.”

Bran pulled her down the bed by her thighs, caught her mouth with his. He tasted and smelled overpoweringly of her now, of her desire for him, and she sucked on his tongue, pulled herself up against him as if she could climb inside his body.

“I love you,” her husband told her, without her prompting, pressing his forehead to hers.

She shook her head. Too much. It was too much. Leah felt like she was going to burst from her head, her heart. She took hold of his erection, heavy and hot, guided the head between her lips, to where it felt like her heart was beating. Bran pushed inside of her and she reached up to cover her mouth, afraid of what noises she would make, but he took her hand away with a hiss through his teeth, placed it on the back of his neck.

He moved slowly, achingly slowly, and Leah started trembling, Bran’s eyes never leaving hers. He held her close. “It’s all right, Leah,” he whispered to her. “It’s all right.” 

It wasn’t all right. It wasn’t. She was going to explode. He started to thrust harder and she could hear the sounds she was making as if they were coming from someone else. High, needy sounds. She was hot and cold and shaking and she couldn’t look away from him, though she wanted to, though the look in his eyes was too overwhelming. He lifted her up by her thighs and with one, long keening noise she came, clenching down on him like a vice over and over again, fractures of pleasure that softened into warm waves as Bran moved inside of her.

He kissed her as he came, his hands cupping her face, moaning into her mouth as his body jerked above her, within the cradle of her spread legs.

“You’re crying,” he whispered after, thumbs smoothing the wetness on her cheeks.

“I am not,” Leah said hotly, reaching up to wipe her face. Oh god, how embarrassing.

Bran was trying not to laugh. He kissed her chastely as she prickled with mortification. “No, of course not.”

He sighed contentedly, rolled them over so she was on top of him. He hugged her and she hid her face in his neck. He smelled of his blood and her and under all that, forest and musty books and maple syrup. Mine, her wolf thought.

*

Leah woke hot, smothered under a comforter and, when she pushed this down, her mate. Bran had buried himself under the covers, tucked his head against her hip and wrapped an arm around her legs. He must have been overheating as well, she thought, pulling the comforter off them both. His hair was damp and curling with sweat.

She looked at the clock. Nearly eight. She’d slept well. Out like a light.

Easing out from him, Leah went to shower in his bathroom since they were in her room again. In an effort to revive it from yesterday’s drenching, she washed and conditioned her hair, a laborious process as she had to comb it through whilst the conditioner was in. It was very long, almost to her waist when wet, and there was a lot of it. Combing it took a long time. She washed out the conditioner and dried herself briskly, wrapping her hair in a micro-fiber towel. Wearing Bran’s robe, she crept through her bedroom and went to stand in her closet. 

Leah had reorganized her clothes – one side of the closet was everything Bran apparently found too distracting, the other everything else.

She fingered the silk Christmas dress thoughtfully. Apparently, he liked her in bright, bold colors – the red silk, the blue cotton summer dress, a teal-green blouse. Last night’s night gown had been coral. He liked her in long, flowing lines and soft, tactile materials like the knitted sweater, the grey sweater dress. She thought, just generally, he liked the more obviously feminine clothes that she owned. Werewolves were bloodthirsty, violent creatures – and Leah was both those things as well. A white, fluffy sweater was probably a contrast he found appealing.   

On the other side of her closet now were the clothes that didn’t bother him. Tight dresses and pants. Shirts in muted colors. There were quite a few more ‘smart’ clothes on this side, the sorts of things she would wear if she attended a meeting or went somewhere smart for a meal. She liked everything of course but it was interesting to know what pleased him more given he had never expressed any interest before.

Leah pulled on a pair of jeans and a navy T-shirt, then tugged on a loose knitted cardigan from the ‘Bran’ side of her closet. She went to sit at her dressing table and braided her still-damp hair. Bran was awake now, curled around in the space she had left in the bed, watching her.

She felt the press of last night’s revelations come back to her. She felt, suddenly, very shy, not a feeling she had often. Is it true? Do you still love me? she wanted to ask. Here. Now. In the light of day.

Leah couldn’t, though. It was too raw. Too unbelievable.

“Did you really think that on our wedding day?” she asked instead, making eye contact with him in the mirror.

“Yes. You were – are – lovely. It was very inconvenient.”

She snorted with laughter. He sounded very grumpy. “Sorry for punching you in the eye. I don’t even remember why.”

“I’m sure I deserved it.” She was sure, too. He rolled onto his back and stretched. “A story about the king of the werewolves is going to break soon.”

Leah jerked. “What?”

Bran wiped a hand over his face. “One of the other things I’ve been dealing with. The son of an old contact in the FBI discovered his father’s journal. To my ever-lasting relief, it never mentioned me by name or location and much of his entries were very vague but there was enough there for a story.”

Leah drew in a deep, deep breath and held it. Then she let it out slowly. “Is it serious? I mean – when the humans read it, will they take it seriously?”

“I’ll show you the draft I was sent. It’s— there’s some details there on how we exact punishment, it alludes to a ‘family’ at the top. There’s definite statements on my longevity. Reference to this ‘king’ being referred to as the Marrok within werewolf circles.”

She winced. “Damn,” she said. She swallowed the fluttering nerves that accompanied any discussion about their tenuous secrecy. “How long have you been dealing with this?”

“A few weeks. The draft came through the day before yesterday.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

“I wanted to. There is just too much going on between us.” Bran sat up on the edge of the mattress. “You’re mentioned. Queen of the werewolves. One of my silent killers, by all accounts.”

Despite herself, Leah laughed. Queen of the werewolves. Augustine would be rolling in her grave. “That was a long time ago.”

He nodded, thoughtfully looking down at the floorboards. “I’ll shower. Then I’ll make pancakes for breakfast.”

“Lovely,” she replied. She watched him walk into her shower. I love you, she thought at him. She hadn’t told him that last night and was regretting it.

*

Leah read the draft of the article over breakfast. It was well written with enough ‘meat’ to it to make her wince. The journalist had sourced a few anonymous present-day quotes reinforcing the rumor that there was an authoritative body that sat above all the werewolves. “Chastel would have lost his mind. It implies that you’re in charge of all of us. Globally. Not just here.”

“I’m grateful every day that he is dead.” Bran sucked on his fork. “He would have gone straight to the European press to refute this. Damn the consequences.”

She read – and re-read – the one paragraph about her. At the King’s side is a Queen. His father’s journal details only one reference to this woman – after a string of identical deaths in the 40s and 50s of women later identified by his father’s contact as werewolves. It seems his supposition is that this female embodiment of werewolves was directed to exact justice on the gentler werewolf sex for crimes against their kind and ours.

Leah giggled. “Gentler?”

Her husband rolled his eyes and said nothing.

Once she had read it, she put it aside, thinking. “I suppose next someone will leak Aspen Creek.”

“Yes.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Retire?” Bran suggested blithely. He nodded to her plate, mostly untouched. “Eat your breakfast.”

She picked up her fork. “Disappointing lack of tiaras in my life,” she commented, spearing a blueberry and eating it.

He smiled. “Would a werewolf queen wear a tiara?”

Leah agreed; he did have a point. “You’re right. Very impractical. Maybe some kind of ceremonial knife for exacting justice?” She cut up a piece of pancake, popped it into her mouth, thinking. “Maybe a torc.”

“A torc,” Bran said, impressed. “Don’t see many of those any more.”

“With wolf heads,” she said, gesturing to where the heads of the wolves would meet at the base of her throat.

“So elegant. So you,” her mate continued, dead-pan. “Ruby eyes?”

“You know me so well,” she said. They both broke at the same time, spluttering with laughter at this ridiculous image. This mood continued as she finished breakfast, as she tidied and wished him a fruitful workday.

She put the radio on in the kitchen and went to look at the big lighting feature that hung over the table in their dining room. She had noticed yesterday that four of the lights were now out which was something she couldn’t ignore. The ceiling was vaulted, which meant the only way she could access it was if she put a step-ladder on the table itself.

Leah fetched the ladder from the garage and the light-bulbs, stuffing them into the capacious pockets of her cardigan. Halfway up the ladder, she decided the torc would have to be encrusted with diamonds. This made her giggle.

“What?” her husband called from his office.

“Ruby eyes and diamond encrusted,” she called back. “It’s only logical.”

He laughed. “Your Christmas present is sorted, then.”

Leah stood at the top of the ladder and blew dust off the fixture. She would have to get the duster after this. She unwrapped a light-bulb and paused. “Just to be clear, if you get me a diamond encrusted torc for Christmas, I will not be pleased,” she said.

“It really didn’t need saying, fy nghariad,” he replied.

The expression sounded familiar to her but, like much of the pack, she had learnt Welsh mostly from being shouted at. The challenge with looking up Welsh, however, was that it was a language that liked its unexpected letters. She wouldn’t have a chance in hell of finding out what it meant on her own.

*

Over the next few days, the phone calls, the messages, the emails from their panicked people were incessant as the article picked up traction. Not just to Bran but to Leah as well – whose cell phone number now seemed to have gone to every werewolf in North America. She eventually turned it off and Bran unplugged the house phone. He couldn’t turn off his cell in case there was a real emergency.

She dreaded to think what it would have been like if Bran had really been ‘outed’ instead of ‘just’ an article that spawned a series of rumor-based follow-ups and social media activity.

“Maybe we should go away for a couple of days,” Leah suggested without even the slightest seriousness, lying on his couch with a new interior design magazine.

Bran was looking – for him – a little frazzled. He rubbed his hands over his face and then through his hair which stuck up in tufts. “Hide in a hotel room somewhere?” he suggested.

It was so unlikely. She turned the page of her magazine. “Camping. Somewhere with no signal.”

“Sounds blissful.”

He went back to typing. Leah finished her magazine and picked up her next one. She was looking for inspiration for her bedroom. She’d decided it was too floral and old fashioned. Too ‘country living’. She turned down the corners of a couple of pages. She was leaning towards stark white. The floorboards were a polished, warm-stained oak and so was her furniture. White walls, some dramatic white drapes and crisp bed linen. Maybe a pop of color from a rug or two.

Bran took a phone call from Adam Hauptman, one which made him lean forward and pinch his nose. Remembering what Bran had told her about Adam ‘niggling’ him, she put down her magazine and watched him, this man who now loved her.   

Their conversation was unrelated to the article; it was a cursory one about the fae that apparently lived in their back yard now. Adam signed off with a ‘Thank you, Your Majesty’ which under any other circumstances would have made Leah laugh.

Her husband hung up the phone and got up. He jerked his head at her and she shuffled forward so he could slot himself behind her. She wriggled until she was comfortably leaning against his chest, then resumed reading her magazine.

Bran settled his arm around her waist and exhaled with relief. “One of my concerns is that if I’m truly ‘out’, then so are you. You immediately become one of the biggest targets in the world.”

Lean leaned her head back. “You think so?”

“Yes. Not amongst our people,” he said, playing with the end of her braid. “Not more than usual, at least. But Others.”

A stray thought crossed her mind. “Is that why you stopped sending me out?” Used to be, just as the article had suggested, Bran had sent her to mete out punishment – not just to women, though he had often preferred her to do that than Charles. It had been several decades since she had carried out that sort of work for him. She had thought it was just because he needed her in Aspen Creek more as it had coincided with an increase in his own travel.

“Amongst other things.”

“Like?”

“I worried.”

Leah angled her head to look at him. “You worried.”

“Don’t look at me like I’m suggesting you can’t take care of yourself. I know it’s the opposite. I’m allowed to worry.”

“Good grief,” she said. Every conversation she had with him recently was mind-blowing. Absolutely mind-blowing. He loved her and now he worried about her.

Keen to distract herself, she turned the corner of the current page of her magazine and held it up to him. “Pretend to be interested for a moment. What do you think about this?”

“It’s very white,” Bran said, with an exacting eye for detail.

“I’m so reassured this part of you has remained resolutely the same.” And she was. Bran’s utter disinterest in the building that was his home was generally limited to whether the structure was still sound. 

He squeezed her. “I always like what you do in the house.”

“Good,” she said, faintly aggressively. As if her taste was anything other than impeccable.

Bran slid a hand up her sweater. Boldly, she thought. Then he stopped, tilted his head to the side. “Charles’s car is coming up the drive.”

“Do you have a meeting? Do you want me to leave?”

“It would currently be helpful if you stayed,” he said obliquely, sighing and getting up. “Try to look like you’re not being abused.”

Leah rearranged herself on the couch again. “I’ll try,” she said drily, picking up another magazine.

Her unusual presence on Bran’s couch got her a double-take from Charles and then a smile, which she returned, because that was what they did now. They smiled at each other.

She listened to Bran brief Charles on an issue in Texas that both the San Antonio Alpha and one of the Mexican Alphas across the border had reported. Bran pulled a book off the shelf, turned the page and held it out to Charles.

“The Waay Chivo?” Charles said, looking at the book.

“Apparently. Two men from the San Antonio pack have disappeared over the course of three months – men, I’m told, that no one will miss much but still. Martín claims this creature has been seen by a ‘credible source’.” Bran’s eyebrows rose, which indicated that this ‘credible source’ had not been revealed to him and thus he doubted how credible it was. 

His son made a noise, turning the page. “Most mythical creatures are fae.”

“And some aren’t.”

“All right. We’ll go, if you’re happy for us to leave right now?” This was phrased awkwardly. She wondered if he would have said what he wanted to had she not been in the room.

Bran smiled. “I am, indeed, happy for you to leave right now. But tomorrow would certainly also be fine.”

“May I take this?” Charles held up the book. “Anna will want to read everything there is.”

“She’s a sensible woman,” his father replied easily. Then he held up a finger and went to pluck two others books from different shelves. Bran’s organizational system was very much his own. He handed them to his son.

“Come for dinner tonight, before you go,” Leah piped up, inspired. “Since we’ll miss you on Sunday.”

Charles nodded. “We would like that,” he said.

When he was gone, Bran propped his hand on his hands and watched her. “What inspired that, then?”

She shrugged. “You like having dinner with your family.”

“I didn’t think you did.”

“It’s not so bad if it’s just Charles and Anna.” Anymore, was the unspoken comment.

Bran nodded. He clicked something on his laptop. “They’re your family too,” he said, after a while.

*

Anna was bubbling with information about the creature they were going to chase, having spent most of the afternoon absorbing all she could from Bran’s books and then scouring the internet.

Leah listened with one ear to the conversation as she finished off the preparations for a simple meal – roast chicken, two different potatoes, plenty of vegetables. She put the chicken in front of her husband and he started to carve whilst she made a gravy.

The potatoes and vegetables she handed to Charles who, also without any instructions, went to put them on the table. Anna followed him out, carrying plates that were warm from the oven, and Leah poured the gravy into a jug. She turned and Bran pressed her against the counter, holding a platter of chicken aloft. He kissed her briefly. “I love you,” he said to her.

Her breath caught. “Okay,” she squeaked, clutching the jug to her chest.

Bran looked at her thoughtfully. “I guess panic is an improvement.” He took the jug and walked out. She heard him asking Anna and Charles if there was any cutlery on the table.

Panic. Leah didn’t panic. She adjusted the set of her shoulders and grabbed the knives and forks she’d put out, as well as some serving spoons.

Spine straight, she walked into the dining room. “Here,” she said, waving the cutlery.

Most meals with werewolves were quiet, nothing but the sounds of eating and drinking. The Cornicks, for all their superiority in power, were no different. Perhaps because of it.

“This is delicious, thank you,” Anna said rapturously, after a while. 

Leah took a sip of her wine. “You’re welcome.”

Charles helped his wife to more chicken from the platter and then offered some to Leah who shook her head. “The traction from the article seems to be abating a little.”

Bran nodded. “Perhaps we can re-engage the house phone tomorrow. And you can turn on your cell phone.” A flicker crossed Bran’s face. “I’m sure Angus has missed you.”

If Leah was able to roll her eyes all the way around she would have done. “You’re ridiculous,” she replied, waving her fork at him.

“He sent her a crown,” her husband said to their guests. He was not smiling.

Anna bit her lip. “That’s hilarious,” she giggled, exchanging a laughing glance with Charles.

“Is it,” Bran said darkly.

Leah sought wildly for an alternative topic, one that drew her mate’s attention away from the plastic toy the Seattle Alpha had sent her that had apparently wound Bran up. “Christmas is soon,” she said brightly. If ‘soon’ could be categorized as three months away. “What are your plans this year?”

“Funny you should ask, actually. I spoke to Dad this morning. My brother and his fiancée are going to Florida to spend Christmas with her family so Charles and I were discussing what we were going to do.” Anna looked hesitantly between Bran and Leah, as if she could possibly think they might have an opinion on it. The past few years, Anna and Charles had alternated spending Christmas with her family and with Charles’s. “Would it be insane if he spent it here? With us?”

Bran’s fork paused momentarily on the way to his mouth. “Ah,” he said before taking a bite of mashed potatoes.

Anna ploughed ahead. “It would only be for a couple of days. I was thinking you could both come over on Christmas Day and we could cook for you and my Dad. And Sam and Ariana if they’re around.”

Leah felt a smile tug at her lips. The tall, thin man who was Anna’s father had stayed with them before Anna had married so she knew him a little. “It would certainly be novel pretending to be human for the day.”

“I like your father,” was all Bran had to say on the subject, which was as much of an approval as Anna was going to get.

Anna’s shoulders slumped. She looked at Charles in relief. “Oh good.”

Leah realized that meant she was off Christmas duty for the first time in decades. Given she also always hosted Thanksgiving, which was a depressing affair so soon after the October full moon ceremony, that was a relief.

However, her husband soon kyboshed that thinking. “Perhaps we could do something for some of the pack on Christmas Eve,” he murmured.

“Or we could do nothing,” Leah suggested.

“I could cook,” was his retort.

“Oh, could you.”

Bran’s eyes twinkled. “If you’d let me, I could, but you won’t, so there we are.”

She narrowed her eyes at him, sensing criticism. “I don’t know what you think you’re implying, but if you want to cook for the pack, you are more than welcome to any time.”

“I sense a challenge.” Bran waved his fork at her before putting it neatly together with his knife on his plate. He was done. “You’re on.”

Leah held up her hands. “Knock yourself out. Christmas Eve is all you.”

“This feels like something we should definitely witness,” Charles mock-whispered to his wife because in marrying Anna he had discovered he had a sense of humor. “Possibly even record for posterity.”

“Maybe my dad could fly in that afternoon…” Anna whispered back.

Sighing, because they were all so deeply trying, Leah began to clear the plates, which Charles and Anna immediately took over, as all good guests did, even if they were family.

This left Bran and Leah facing off each other at the table. Her husband was looking immeasurably pleased with himself, as if he’d won something. She stuck her tongue out at him, then put her napkin down. “I’m going to prepare dessert.” 

In the kitchen, Anna and Charles were clearly talking about them and stopped when she walked in. She took down bowls and got the red fruits she had prepared earlier out from the refrigerator as well as the cream. Charles grabbed another bottle of wine and escaped and Leah felt the press of Anna’s eyes on her.

She knew she was about to be interrogated.

“What’s the deal with Angus?” was Anna’s opening question.

“Bran has decided to develop an unlikely jealous streak,” Leah replied, spooning fruit into the cut glass bowls.

“That’s… interesting.” 

It was actually. Of all the men who had come and gone in their lives, she wondered what it was about Angus that bothered Bran more. Or at all. She didn’t think she had ever been attracted to Angus, had she? She couldn’t remember.

She took out another jug for the cream. “What else, Anna?” she asked, keen to get this part of the evening over with.

“Obviously I want to know how you are.”

“I – we – are fine. Good,” she amended. “I think.”

“So things with the…,” Anna lowered her voice as if Bran might be listening in, “… the box? They’re back to normal?”

“Not precisely,” Leah said thoughtfully. She supposed knowing that Bran was a nuclear bomb ready to go off was probably something his Second should know about. They hadn’t talked about sharing this information. Apparently, he just liked to drop ‘I love you’s on her at random moments now and walk away. 

She turned to face Anna. “Bran has decided to stop using the box. In fact, he’s in the process of laboriously emptying them.” She shook her head at Anna’s questioning frown. “Don’t ask; it’s very unpleasant. He says it’s pointless now.”

“What does that mean?”

Leah really wasn’t prepared to tell Anna that despite her husband’s very best attempts not to, he had now decided he loved her and that there were alarming repercussions because of this. Anna was, after all, one of the few still alive who had met the Berserker. “It means... that life is hard and then you die – but ideally for everyone in this scenario Bran goes before me.”

Anna’s face opened with shock. “I see.”

Leah’s smile was wide and easy. “Yes.” She handed two bowls of fruit to Anna. “Please take these through.”

*

Their evening ended the way it always did with music and some singing. Leah sat on the couch, a polite expression on her face but mostly occupied with writing a shopping list for the next day.

Bran had wanted them to stay indoors for a few days after the article had come out. The eyes and ears of Aspen Creek had been asked to keep a look out for any strange characters. He had been concerned that someone would piece together the ‘King of the werewolves’ rumor with the ‘secretive Aspen Creek werewolves’ rumor.

She figured that as the story was on the decline, she might be allowed to drive into Ennis for groceries. Getting groceries delivered wasn’t the same, in her book. She liked to touch her fruits and vegetables herself.

“Do you really think it’s the Waay Chivo, Bran?” Anna asked, dropping back onto the couch.

Unusually for her husband, Bran decided to come clean. “No, I think someone in San Antonio decided to take revenge into their own hands.”

“Oh?”

“The two men who have ‘disappeared’ were accused but never committed of murdering a young human woman a few years ago.”

As Charles and Anna scoffed, Leah rolled her eyes. “Oh, Bran, why did you make them read up on a fictional monster if that was the case?” As if she didn’t already know. Bran passed down knowledge like another parent might pass down money or jewelry. Nothing was more precious to him than knowledge.

“I didn’t want to taint the investigative process,” he told them, eyes twinkling. “Besides, the fact that Gerado also says there has been a sighting near them does make things a little less cut and dried.”

“Gerado is a trickster,” Leah pointed out.

“And he and Martín have always had each other’s backs,” his son followed-up. “What one says, the other corroborates.”

Bran stood up from the piano stool and lifted his palms. “What can I say. I just think you should have an open mind.” He came over to Leah, dropped himself down next to her and took the shopping list from her hand. “How’s Horace’s book going?”

“It’s finished,” she said, surprised to have the topic of conversation turn to her. “Or at least they’re making final edits. My role is done.”

“I saw your picture on his Instagram,” Anna said, smiling. “Very nice.”

“Oh, Instagram,” Leah said slowly, suddenly feeling very stupid. She had wondered what he was going to use the photo for.

“What’s this?”

“He asked me to take a photo of myself cooking one of his recipes so he could ‘thank me’ publicly. I didn’t realize that was what he meant,” she clarified, embarrassed with this very obvious error on her part.

“I think I would like to see this photograph of my wife on Instagram, please,” Bran said, looking at Anna expectantly.

Dutifully, Anna pulled her phone from her back pocket and made a few finger gestures on the screen. She turned the phone and Bran took it. His first reaction was a smile. His second was narrowed eyes. He scrolled. “There are a lot of comments on this photograph.”

Leah tried to get a look herself but he moved out of the way so she couldn’t see. “What kind of comments? Bad ones?”

“Flattering ones, Leah, don’t worry,” Anna said, laughing a little. She leaned back into Charles.  

Tempted as she was to wrestle the phone from Bran to look herself, Leah sat on her hands instead, waiting patiently for her turn. He eventually handed the phone to her, sitting back and watching her with his arms crossed. “Odd to think of strangers looking at you,” he said. “Perhaps a taste of what it would be like if we were public.”

Leah looked at the photograph. She had chosen her outfit very carefully so that she seemed at least semi-professional. Her blue-and-white striped apron, a sleeveless grey blouse and jeans. She had angled the picture in such a way that you could only see part of her face, the focus mainly on the dish she was serving up.

She read a few of the comments. They were by no means as bad as he had made it sound. Mostly they just said how pretty she was – frequently from women, if the names and tiny profile pictures were anything to go by. She was pleased. Even if they were humans, it was nice to be told you were attractive.

Horace’s comment that accompanied the picture was nice too. My good friend testing out recipes from my upcoming book. Couldn’t have done it without you, L. Then there was a little blue heart. “How lovely,” she said, delighted. It had been posted a few days ago, just before the article fiasco. She could see Anna had liked the post. She imagined Horace had written to let her know but she hadn’t had her phone on. Tomorrow she might risk a look.

Leah handed the phone back to Anna. “Thank you.” She looked at Bran, purposefully flirtatious. “Maybe I should have my own Instagram account.”

“No,” he said firmly, as she had anticipated.

*

They kissed lazily on their couch once Anna and Charles had gone because that was the sort of thing they did now. Bran twirled her braid around in his fingers and she unashamedly stuck her hands down the back of his jeans as their tongues tangled. She had never kissed Bran ‘lazily’ before. Never been able to take her time and enjoy the act, not as a prelude to sex but as something to be enjoyed for its own merits.

Bran pulled back from her with small presses of his mouth, almost as if he was weaning himself off of her. He smiled, eyes flicking from hers to her lips and back again. “Tomorrow is the first Monday of the month. The humans will be overrunning our house. What shall we do?”

“You want to make plans. Together.”

“Yes.”

This was new. “All right. What do you normally do?”

“Drive somewhere. Change. Go for a run.”

She tilted her head up so her nose brushed his. “Every time?”

He nodded and trailed the end of her braid along her cheek.

Leah supposed she hadn’t ever really thought, or asked, what he did. “During the day? Where do you go?”

“Yellowstone, mostly.”

She blinked at him. Of course, now that the wolves had been reintroduced, she supposed Bran could easily merge into an environment like that. “That might be fun,” Leah said and as soon as she said it, she longed to do it. Longed to run with her mate during the day, explore somewhere new.

Bran’s smile became ferocious. “I thought you’d like that. It’s past tourist season now, too, so it’ll be quieter.”

Leah kissed him, a quick press of her lips and then away again. She fizzed with anticipation. “I’m excited.”

“I can see that. Let’s take that excitement upstairs now,” he said, climbing off the couch and pulling her up, tugging her towards the stairs. She laughed at his enthusiasm.

In his bedroom, Bran undid his jeans and kicked them and his underwear off, then helped her with her sweater which she carefully laid over the back of a chair. 

As she folded her pants, her mind was racing. “What do you do about your tail? Surely that’s quite distinctive? Don’t they have humans monitoring the wolves in the park? There’s probably some kind of blog dedicated to you by now.”

He hummed and reached around her to unclip her bra. “I think you’re overthinking this, fy nghariad.”

“What does that mean?” she asked, distracted by more than his hands on her breasts. “I can’t spell it so I can’t look it up.”

Bran nuzzled the side of her throat. “What a delightful mystery for you to solve that I absolutely will not help you with.”

She growled at him, impatiently pulling at the hem of his T-shirt until he leaned back and held his arms up. She tossed it to where his jeans were. Or thereabouts. She ran her nails lightly down his chest and then leaned forward to nip his shoulder. “Is it something I can ask Tag?” Tag was pretty ‘flexible’ with his origins and seemed to understand Welsh as much as he did the various forms of Gaelic.

Her husband snorted, going back to her neck with enthusiasm. “Only if I can watch.”

“Is it dirty?” She narrowed her eyes, tilting her head to give him better access. She reached down, back of her hand brushing his stomach before she took hold of him, stroked him, hot and heavy in her hand. “Bran Cornick, are you saying something filthy to me?”

He slid her panties down, allowing her to kick them off when they dropped to her ankles. “I promise it’s not dirty.”

“I could ask Charles, then.” She would have to wait until he got back, though. And she wasn’t even certain she could pronounce it properly.

“Now he will be embarrassed.”

She squeezed him. “Bran!”

He laughed at her and walked her backwards towards the bed. “I’m now getting the feeling you’re going to be disappointed when you find out. I could probably conjure up some dirty things to say to you if you’d like?”

This Bran – this ebullient, flirtatious Bran - was so unspeakably charming it was leaving her faintly breathless. “Only if you promise to translate,” she said, crawling back onto his bed on her elbows. She bit her lip, looking at his erection, and felt her mouth water with want. Moving on instinct, she pulled him down, pushing him on his back so he was leaning against the pillows.

Now this, this they had done before, she thought, as she knelt between his legs and stroked her hands up his thighs, against the grain of the fine hairs that grew there. Bran watched her, watched her intently, just as he always had done. She bent to kiss his abdomen, nosed the trail of hair down from his bellybutton, feeling the muscles of his stomach quiver and tense.

“Can you—” He pulled at the tie around the end of her braid.

She sat back, making quick work of her braid, shaking out her hair. When she lowered her head again, it fell around her, over his thighs and his stomach and he stroked it back so he could see her face, so he could watch her as she took him into her mouth. She looked up, expecting to see his face suffused with twisted pleasure but it was nothing of the sort. His mouth was parted, his eyes were glazed and dark with sheer want.

She sucked him down further, taking him in as far as she could, then started moving her head up and down, her fingers circled around the base. Bran exhaled shakily and it sounded like her name, over and over again. She pulled up, circled the head with her tongue, and then she dove back down, swallowing.

After a minute or two, where he had increasingly started to pant, Bran grabbed hold of her hair to get her attention. “Can I come in your mouth?” he asked.

Leah hummed her agreement and he gasped. She felt the first burst of salt hit the inside of her mouth and she swallowed quickly, kept swallowing as his hips jerked in small, politely controlled movements as he came. When he was soft in her mouth, she gently let go of him and sat back on her haunches, licking her lips.

The Marrok, the King of the Werewolves, lay limply on his bed, arms out at his sides where they had fallen. “Hi,” he said, dopily, smiling like she had given him the best present ever. “Thank you.”

“You are more than welcome,” she said, smiling at him helplessly. She had always enjoyed this moment, when he was drained and replete.

“In just a moment,” he said, holding up a finger, “I will reciprocate.”

Leah chuckled and lay down next to him on her side, putting her arm around his chest. “That’s fine, you take your time.” She kissed his shoulder. “You’re cute like this.”

“I am, am I,” he said, turning his head so he could kiss her forehead.

“Very.” It pleased her, knowing that she was the only one who could see him like this. Who could do this for him. She cuddled close to him, closing her eyes.

Bran cupped the back of her head. “It means ‘my love’,” he told her. “That’s what it means.”

“Oh.” He’d never called her by an endearment before. She’d heard him call other women such things. Honey and sweetheart. He’d had plenty of affection to go around before. No wonder she had never heard this one, though, if that was what it meant. “Say it again,” she requested.

“Fy nghariad.”

She mouthed it to herself, then turned so the point of her chin was resting on him. A stray, bitter thought crossed her mind. Had he called Blue-Jay Woman, his first mate, that? Probably, she decided. And then she told herself not to think about it any more. “I’m not disappointed,” she whispered.

“Good.”

“I guess I’ll have to call you something, too.” She raised her eyebrows.

“Well, don’t force yourself.”

“Oh, no, I already know what it’s going to be.”

Bran was instantly suspicious. “What… oh, no.”

“That’s right. Your majesty.” She wasn’t surprised when he tumbled her over, when he smothered her and dug his hands into her sides. She shrieked, laughed, and fought him weakly. This, this, they had never done before. He was laugh-growling, fingers finding her tender, ticklish points. “Oh, oh, oh, Bran,” she laughed, scrabbling underneath him to escape his hands. “Your majesty, please stop.”

“I take it back. I’ll call you blodyn tatws.”

“Something… flower?” she giggled, breathless, attempting to trap his hands with hers. “Oh, please stop.”

“Potato flower. That’s what you’ll be called. And Tag and Charles and Sam will know it.”

She paused and he did too. “I don’t know. Seems a fair exch—” With a noise of frustration, her mate resumed his tickling and she almost couldn’t speak for laughter. “Okay, okay, I won’t call you that. I won’t. I’ll come up with something better.”

“My actual name is just fine,” Bran emphasized, blowing his hair out of his eyes. He rearranged her on the bed, spreading her legs. “I’m going to have you now.”

“That did it for you, did it?” she said, eying the evidence that, yes, it very much had.

He swooped down to kiss her, to dig his hands into her hair, knotted and tangled beyond belief. “It did, yes.” Bran touched their foreheads together. “I love you. Tell me you love me too, Leah.”

Leah grabbed him, squeezed him hard, almost furious with the fullness of her feelings. “I love you, too.”  

“Better,” he said, pleased. “It sounds like you almost believe me now. Progress.”

She laughed. “Almost.”