Alpha (34 page)

I cleaned up in the bathroom and changed into the tee and boyshorts I'd brought to sleep in, and when I came out, Jace sat in a chair at the table, fully dressed. Both of the beds had been turned down. His bag lay on the floor beside the one nearest the door, and he'd put my duffel in the middle of the rug between the beds. “Take your pick,” he said, and I wanted to cry all over again. Though I'd never thought it possible, I was tired of making choices.

When I just stared at both beds, he went into the bathroom and closed the door.

I turned out the light and climbed into the bed farthest from the door, turning to put the bathroom at my back. When Jace came out, he stood silent for a minute, and my heart ached for us both. I knew what he was doing. He was watching me not-sleep in the bed Marc had left cold and empty, instead of the one he'd be warming.

My eyes watered again, and I hated myself. I'd lost Marc, and it hurt
so much.
But turning away from Jace out of guilt wouldn't make any of us feel any better. Yet I couldn't make myself say his name.

Finally he sighed, and his footsteps headed for the other bed. Cloth rustled behind me as Jace got undressed. A moment later, the bedsprings creaked and the lamp clicked off.

I closed my eyes, and the tears ran over.

We lay there in the dark, but for the glow from the
alarm clock, together, yet alone. Suffering similar brands of misery. I could hear him breathe. I heard his mattress creak every time he moved, and I knew he was listening to me not-sleep, too. But I couldn't get his words out of my head.

Could he be right? Was Marc gone for good? It hardly seemed possible. I could still smell his scent on the duffel he'd left behind. Had he left it on purpose, because he was coming back? Or had he abandoned it, like he'd abandoned us? When I closed my eyes, I saw his face, so hurt, so angry. Would it be any easier to live without him, knowing he was still out there somewhere? Or was he as lost to me as my father was to my mother?

Would I lose Jace, too, if I shut him out? If I didn't give him what was left of my heart, now that no one else wanted it? Would I be betraying Marc again by taking the only option left to me? Or would I be saving us all from further misery by finally making my decision—even if I no longer had much of a choice?

Marc had made his decision. He'd left me with Jace. And I felt wretchedly cold and empty, lying in bed alone, when someone I loved—someone who loved me—was doing the same thing six feet away.

I rolled over and Jace blinked at me from his bed, lying on top of the covers like he was impervious to the cold. He wore black boxer briefs and a frown. I swallowed, then took a deep breath. “You said I wouldn't have to sleep alone—that you wouldn't ask for anything. Did you mean it?”

Something passed over his face. Something like relief, only deeper. Something that hurt but felt good at
the same time. “Yeah. I'm good for whatever you need me for, Faythe. Just don't push me away.”

“I need company.” Warmth. Consolation by touch—the human-form version of werecats sleeping in big piles for comfort.

He blinked again, and I barely saw him move. A second later, the mattress sank and Jace was warm beside me. The red glow from the alarm clock showed me half of his face and one deep blue eye. I kissed him, then turned over and snuggled into his chest. He draped one arm over my waist, his hand splayed across my stomach. His next breath was deep, and slow, and shaky, but true to his word, he just held me.

I stared into the near dark and tried not to think about the war, and the men that we'd lose. Marc, whom I'd already lost. Jace, whom I wanted so desperately to keep, but couldn't let touch me.

I'd lost Marc because I loved Jace, but I couldn't truly be with Jace, because I loved Marc. And it all hurt so deeply I could hardly breathe.

“Are you okay?” Jace asked, and his arm tightened around me, pulling me closer. His bare chest was warm against my back, even through my shirt. His foot slid between my ankles, an oddly intimate contact that somehow demanded nothing.

“He promised he'd stay,” I whispered, hating myself for letting Marc go, and for not being able to let go of him. “He promised my dying father that he'd stay and help me. He didn't just leave me, Jace. He left us all.”

“I'm so sorry,” Jace said, and I believed him. He knew what the loss meant to the Pride, as well as to me personally.

“I don't understand. He loves the Pride more than
anything in the world. More than he loves me. I wanted to skip out on our wedding and elope, but he wouldn't go, so I went without him. He chose you guys over me when I was eighteen. How could he leave us all now?”

Jace had no answer. At least, none he wanted to say out loud. But we both knew I'd broken Marc's heart.

Jace sighed and brushed my hair over my neck. “He's gone, and I can't replace him, Faythe. But I love you as much as he does. And I'm still here. Doesn't that mean anything?”

I closed my eyes, and more tears fell on the pillow. I rolled over and kissed him, and when I finally pulled away, I met his tortured gaze so he could see the truth in mine. “It means everything.”

That night, I fell asleep breathing Jace, still tasting him from our last kiss.

But I dreamed about Marc.

W
e got up early to make our flight and arrived at the gate with half an hour to spare. Marc wasn't there, and it took every bit of self-control I had to keep from looking devastated by his absence. He still had his ticket—it wasn't in the duffel he'd left behind, which I'd checked as my luggage—and we were headed back to his house. Where else would he go?

What kind of massive bitch must I have been to run a man out of his own life?

“He'll be fine,” Jace whispered, pulling me close to drop a kiss on my temple. “He always is.”

“I know.”

While Jace took one last trip to the restroom, I called Michael. I'd already given him the thunderbird update, so when he answered, my unprecedented lack of an opening line was a dead giveaway that something was wrong.

“Faythe?”

“Yeah.” I fidgeted in the plastic airport chair, but couldn't get comfortable.

“What's wrong? Did the thunderbirds back out?”

Yeah, right. “Um, I think they'd move forward even if
we
backed out.”

“Then what is it?” In the background, I heard pots clanging, though it was only five-thirty in the morning, their time. Obviously I wasn't the only one having trouble sleeping.

“Have you…?” I leaned back in my chair and covered my eyes with one hand, as if that would shield me from the questions he would surely follow mine with. “I don't suppose you've heard from Marc, have you?”

“Not since you left.” Michael hesitated, and I heard footsteps. Then a door closed, and the background noise disappeared. When he spoke again, his voice was soft.
Bless my oldest brother and his flawless sense of propriety….
“Why? What happened?”

“He left. I lost him.” And the admission hurt just as much aloud as it did rattling around in my hollow chest.

“Because of Jace?”

“Because I couldn't choose.”

Silence, except for my fellow travelers, chatting and sipping predawn coffee. Then my brother sighed. “I'm sorry Faythe.”

I sighed and let my hand fall into my lap. The light from the airport was bright after my self-imposed darkness. “I'm just glad there'll be plenty of ass to kick soon.”

“How soon were you thinking?”

“The day after tomorrow. That should give everyone time to converge. Could you call Uncle Rick for me? I'm about to get on a plane. If he's good with the timing, I'll call the thunderbirds when we land and tell them where to meet us.”

“No problem.” But he exhaled heavily, and I knew that if Marc didn't come back, his absence would be hard on more than just me.

“Hey, Michael?”

“Yeah?”

“Don't tell anyone else about Marc. I'll tell them when I get there. It'll be better coming from me.”

“You sure?”

I sighed, anything but. “Yeah.”

Jace returned about a minute after I hung up, and we boarded the plane five minutes after that. He dozed during the flight, his fingers intertwined with mine. I stared at the empty seat on my other side.

 

“Wait, he just
left?
” Kaci frowned at me from the couch and pulled her earbuds out of her ears, as if she may have heard me wrong. “He wouldn't do that. Marc would never just leave.”

My mother put one arm around her, but Kaci's accusing gaze never left me, and it grew colder with each second. “What did you do?”

“Kar—” Holly shook her head and started over, still trying to get used to the tabby's real name. “Kaci, I'm sure it was nothing Faythe did.” Obviously looking for support, she glanced across the breakfast table at Manx, who sat nursing her baby, then up at Michael, who stood behind his wife, sipping a steaming mug of coffee. Neither of them spoke.

“Yes, it was,” Kaci insisted, and no one argued with her. Except for Holly and Ryan, the rest of them knew about Jace and had no doubt already figured out the basics of how it went down. “The only reason he'd leave
us is if he had to leave
you
. You dumped him again, didn't you?”

“Kaci, that's none of our business,” my mother admonished softly, but her gaze held mine, equal parts sympathy and curiosity. She'd been in my shoes, and no doubt she hadn't tripped all over the place in them, like I had.

“It's okay. She has a right to know.” I crossed my arms over my chest and leaned against the wall by the door, wishing for some of Michael's coffee. “You all do.” Because Aaron Taylor was right—there was no such thing as privacy for an Alpha. Everything I did affected them all. “He dumped me.”

“Why?” Kaci didn't miss a heartbeat, and I wished I'd been half as perceptive at her age. “What did you do?”

I glanced at Jace, who mirrored my stance on the other side of the door, and I was suddenly glad we'd both showered before our flight. Otherwise, they would all have smelled us on each other—except for Holly.

Ryan followed my gaze to Jace, and his eyes widened. Kaci caught on a second later, and the hurt in her eyes ripped right through me. “Do you have to take
everything
for yourself?” Without waiting for an answer, she stood and ran for the hallway. An instant later, a door slammed.

I started to go after her—with no clue how to start that particular conversation—but my mother stood. “I'll talk to her.” I hesitated, then finally nodded. Kaci probably didn't want to hear from me, anyway. At least, not for a little while.

I headed for the kitchen and the lure of fresh coffee, but when I passed by Ryan, his mouth opened, his brows
high in what could only be amusement over my catastrophic personal life. I didn't even slow. “One word, and I'll rebreak your nose.”

Ryan's mouth snapped shut. Though his nose had been broken several days longer than mine, his looked much worse. He obviously hadn't Shifted as much as I had. I wasn't sure which one of us that said the most about, considering that my last Shifting binge nearly left me unconscious.

I drank two cups of coffee alone in the kitchen, trying to concentrate on the upcoming fight. Our allies had all RSVP'd, and I'd given the birds the pertinent details, including the fact that all the good guys—the ones they weren't allowed to slaughter—would be wearing a strip of bright orange construction tape tied somewhere on their bodies, be they human or cat.

But my thoughts kept wandering to Marc, and to my fervent wish that I'd thought to tell Kaci about Jace without an audience. I'd completely forgotten about her crush on him, with all the other life-and-death drama going on around me. But to her, that crush probably
was
life-or-death, and I'd just given her a double scoop of bad news.

My father would never have been so thoughtless.

“So…Faythe was with Marc, but then she slept with Jace?” Holly said, drawing my attention to the card table, where Michael and Owen had joined her and Manx. “And when Marc found out, he left you all high and dry without your major source of muscle?”

“Um, yeah, I guess that sums it up.” Michael shrugged at me in apology, but I could only roll my eyes. My life had become an open book. Evidently a very
adult
book.

“This place is like a scary, furry soap opera,” Holly opined, evidently oblivious to the fact that I could hear her. And see her.

“I could not agree more.” I set my empty mug on the counter and headed into the living room without waiting to watch Holly flush. But when I saw my mother on the couch with Ryan, I frowned.

“She didn't want to talk,” Mom explained, and I sighed. I didn't want to go to war with Kaci hating me.

In the hall, I started to open the door to the room she was sharing with Manx and my mother, but stopped when I heard Jace's voice from inside.

“Hey, kiddo, don't be mad at Faythe. She didn't mean to hurt your feelings, and neither did I.”

“I'm not a kid,” Kaci insisted, and I could tell from the nasal sound of her voice that she'd been crying.

“I know. Sorry. People called me ‘kid' until after I turned twenty. And now that I've said that, I remember how much I hated it, too.”

“I'm not mad at Faythe. I'm just… I knew you liked her—
everybody
knew that,” Kaci said, and the air mattress squeaked as Jace squirmed. “And I guess I kinda knew she liked you back. But…what about Marc?”

However, what she really meant—but wouldn't say—was:
What about me?

“Kaci, sometimes things just happen,” Jace said softly. “And it's nobody's fault. Or it's everybody's fault. Sometimes people connect when they don't mean to. When it isn't convenient, or even fair. Sometimes it doesn't mean anything, and they can both go their separate ways afterward. But sometimes it changes things for them both, and for a lot of other people.”

Kaci was silent for a minute, presumably thinking that over, and I held my breath in anticipation of her response. When it came, I nearly laughed out loud. “When you say ‘connect,' you're not talking about some sappy, deep eye gazing, are you? You mean you and Faythe hooked up, and things got messy—figuratively speaking—so Marc walked. Right?”

“Um, yeah. That's the short version.”

And suddenly I felt sorry for Jace. He wasn't prepared for Kaci's birds-and-bees routine, or her uncanny ability to boil down any complicated situation into two sentences or less. Nor was he prepared for her complete lack of a verbal filter.

“But she still loves Marc,” Kaci said, as if she weren't gutting us both and laying our dripping emotional innards on the floor for all to see.

“I know,” Jace admitted, and my heart ached for us both. For us
all.
“That's her business.”

“Is he coming back?”

“I don't know. I hope he will. He'll always have a place in the Pride. But he's really mad and hurt right now.”

“He might get over it. If you stay away from Faythe for a while.”

Oooh, clever girl, working her own angle!
I was almost proud.

Jace cleared his throat, and I knew he'd gotten serious. “I can't do that, Kaci.”

“I know.” She sighed, but no longer sounded like she was fighting tears. “But it was worth a shot.”

I snuck back into the living room before I could be caught eavesdropping, but the place was packed, and every gaze seemed to be trained on me. There was no
room to breathe. So I stomped out the front door and sank onto the top concrete step with my elbows on my knees, staring at the driveway, where Marc's car still sat, unclaimed. A minute later, the door squealed open, and Vic sat down next to me. “Well, you really fucked up this time.”

I choked on the absurdity of his understatement and probably would have been irritated by his delivery, coming from anyone but Vic. “Does the term ‘Alpha' mean nothing to you?”

“You know I'm right.”

“Doesn't matter now. He left.” And just saying the words made the bloody hole in my heart gape wider.

“Do you blame him?”

“No.” I turned on Vic, and the back of my throat burned with words I needed to say, but probably shouldn't. “I blame myself. It's all my fault—I've never denied that. But he just got up and walked out, in the middle of the night! Without even taking his stuff.”

“Maybe it hurts too bad for him to see you and know he can't truly have you. It's the same reason he never took a shift watching you at school, only it's worse now, because this isn't just physical betrayal—you let someone else into your heart, and until now, that's been Marc's exclusive territory. But he doesn't have that anymore.”

“But I can't help that!” I scrubbed my face with both frozen hands. “I can't help loving Jace.”

“Maybe not,” Vic conceded. “But you didn't even try. You didn't love Marc enough to even
try
living without Jace.”

I frowned, my head spinning, my stomach churning, my heart aching and empty. “This is the worse pep talk ever.”

“This isn't a pep talk. This is the truth.”

I had no answer for that. Vic was right—again. “But this is about more than our relationship. He broke a promise. He didn't just leave me. He left you guys, too, when we need him most. People are going to die—some of whom he's known half his life—and he's not going to be there to see it. To prevent it. How could he do that to…the Pride?” Because no matter how badly Jace and I had hurt him, the rest of them hadn't done a damn thing, and
they
didn't deserve to be deserted.

Vic frowned, but held my gaze, and my stomach pitched harder. “What?” I demanded, when he didn't say whatever he was thinking.

“He's not breaking his promise, Faythe. He'll be there for the fight.”

“You talked to him?” My heart thumped hard enough to bruise my chest. I'd tried calling him twice, and didn't even get his voice mail. “When did you talk to him?”

“This morning, before your flight landed.”

“And he's coming back?”

Vic nodded and met my gaze, and the truth shining in his burned. “He promised your dad he'd help you, even if you two didn't wind up together. And that's what's happened, Faythe. He's coming back for your father and for the Pride. Not to be with you.”

 

“Are you sure you want to do this?” I asked, watching Jace stare at his phone. Moonlight shone bright on his face, and his eyes seemed to glow. He was beautiful, without a doubt.

“Hell, no.” He gave me a nervous grin and leaned next to me against the trunk of a massive oak tree in Marc's backyard. “But we do what we have to do, right?”

“Whatever it takes.” That had become my mantra. I'd do whatever it took to get the Pride back, and I'd sort out the carnage later. And Jace was in it with me, one hundred percent.

“Can I get a kiss for luck?”