Hierarchy (10 page)

She was his! He didn’t give a bloody flying fuck what that old hag had said!

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However pleasant it was, Bronwyn reflected, captivity was still imprisonment.

She’d lost her job because of it, she didn’t doubt, not that it had been such a wonderful job, but she’d worked damned hard to get it. It had taken her nearly a month of searching before she’d found any sort of work at all.

She wasn’t blaming Luke for the fact that she’d lost her job. She hadn’t been in any state to really take in what had happened to her when she’d first arrived. She’d been so battered, shocked, and confused, she’d slept through most of the first few days and if she’d felt anything beyond scared to death, it was gratitude just to be alive. She’d hadn’t been afraid of Luke and his pack brothers by comparison or thought they were a threat to her.

But then again, she’d actually believed at that time that the situation she’d found herself in was only temporary. She’d been hurt, maybe nearly killed, and Luke had swept her off to rescue her. Of course, he knew about the mark, and the prophesy, but that hadn’t seemed like his motive for helping—not at the time—and she certainly hadn’t expected at any time that the mark might make her any sort of target.

Nanna, surely, would’ve warned her if she’d foreseen such a thing.

Now—well, she was just more confused. She didn’t think she’d really accepted that there were such things as vampires and lycans even though she’d had nightmares about the night in the cemetery ever since it had happened. And maybe that was why she’d begun to feel like a captive rather than a guest? The sense of threat had shifted?

Maybe she just didn’t want to believe? She’d seen enough, she supposed, that she should’ve been convinced. And it wasn’t as if she hadn’t grown up believing in some very strange things—things most people didn’t believe or thought of as ignorance and superstition. But then few people who’d actually met her grandmother went away disbelieving.

So, if that was a fact that she accepted—her own grandmother’s abilities—she supposed she should be able to accept what she’d seen with her own eyes and heard through first hand experience.

Maybe she did accept but she just didn’t feel threatened by it?

She realized that that was actually the heart of her restlessness.

She missed Constantine, and she didn’t believe he was a threat to her. Even if it was true and he was a vampire, she’d been completely vulnerable. He’d had every opportunity to do whatever he’d wanted to. Wouldn’t he have bitten her and sucked her blood if that was why he’d been interested in her? Or converted her to one of his slaves?

In a sense, she supposed she might’ve been close to being just that, but only in the sense that she’d been extremely attracted to him and she’d enjoyed his company—a lot.

She’d fallen under his spell, but only in the ‘natural’ way of a woman who’s met a man they desire.

It would’ve been all too easy to fall completely, totally, madly in love with him if she hadn’t been snatched away. She supposed she’d been well on her way, was still ripe
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for him, because she already cared.

Was Luke right? Was Constantine dangerous to her? Or was he just using that as an excuse to hold her because of the mark?

She wasn’t sorry that she’d yielded to the need she sensed in Luke—far from it.

She’d found him very attractive from the start and his desire for her had fed her own deep attraction. He was smart and sweet, handsome, very charming in his own way, and sexy as hell. He was a wonderful lover, surprisingly gentle.

Well, not exactly gentle. Truthfully, he was a little on the rough side at times, but she liked it. And she liked the fact that he always wanted to cuddle afterwards even better.

It had been all too easy to get used to sharing a bed with him.

It was a complication she hadn’t anticipated. She’d actually thought he just wanted sex. Now she wasn’t sure what it was that he wanted from her.

He thought he was protecting her. She was pretty sure of that, but she was equally certain that he didn’t believe she was the ‘promised one’ from his own prophesy—she didn’t, if it came to that—which made her wonder why he was determined to keep her.

She suspected, though, that it was ‘keep away’, the male territory thing. He’d decided that Constantine knew about the prophesy and was trying to keep him from having the ‘promised one’ so he’d decided to keep her. She’d caught enough of the conversations between him and his men to grasp that much.

It was annoying, actually, not just weird, to discover that her birthmark had significance to other people. She resented it. She’d been stuck with it her entire life and the only positive side of having it was the promise Nanna had made that it would eventually lead her to a man she would fall in love with, who would love her, and that she would bear his children.

That
was what had brought her to the scary city to start with, even though she was a small town girl who’d been more comfortable in her own familiar settings, regardless of how everyone viewed her back home. There was always a positive and a negative side to everything, as Nanna had pointed out—balance. The
people
in her hometown weren’t very pleasant, especially the men, and she hated the gossip that was so much a part of their lives, but she’d enjoyed running the boarding house. She’d enjoyed being her own boss and deciding when and how to do the chores that needed to be done. She liked her boarders, mostly, and she’d enjoyed meeting the occasional visitor who passed through and stopped at her place to spend the night, or a few nights, before they moved on.

Even after her grandmother had died, she’d almost felt as if she had family in the boarders. At least once a day, every day, she fixed a family meal and sat down with people that were familiar and
conversed
. Sure the conversations were frequently boring and hardly ever really interesting, but that was beside the point. She
shared
a meal and conversation. She wasn’t alone.

She’d not only lost all that was familiar to her once she’d sold the boarding house and moved to the city, she’d lost any sense of belonging. She’d felt completely alone in the world since she’d arrived in the city when she hadn’t even felt like that after her grandmother’s death.

She didn’t think her grandmother’s prediction had been wrong … per se, but she was beginning to think that it might be impossible to fulfill since it seemed to conflict
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with other predictions. Or maybe she’d just picked the wrong city? She’d assumed her grandmother had meant the
closest
city to her hometown, but maybe she hadn’t?

Why hadn’t Nanna at least given her a hint of where to go, she thought glumly?

She didn’t think either Luke or Constantine were the man her grandmother had foreseen, although she was sorry that she didn’t. Nanna had said he would be ‘special’

and he would be ‘different’, but she couldn’t
believe
Nanna wouldn’t have seen that these men weren’t just ‘special and different’, they weren’t even men! If she’d been destined to fall for a vampire or a lycan,
surely
her grandmother would’ve seen that and mentioned it?

To say nothing of the fact that she couldn’t envision either of them as being marriage minded!

Of course, Nanna hadn’t actually mentioned marriage as part of her destiny.

She’d just assumed because Nanna had said she would have his baby …. She’d assumed her grandmother meant she was going to have a happily-ever-after, she realized, but she hadn’t suggested that either.

What was she supposed to do? Climb in bed with every man that she thought was wonderfully handsome and special and see which ‘took’? Was it just the baby that was supposed to be her destiny?

Was she supposed to have her mother’s destiny? Fall desperately in love with some man that didn’t care two cents about her, got her pregnant, and then vanished from her life? And then die from delivery complications?

She shivered at the thought, but it began to make a sickening kind of sense. As badly as she hated to admit it there was nothing about the prediction of her future that contradicted that possibility. Maybe that was why Nanna had been so vague?

She could be pregnant now, might already have fulfilled her destiny, she realized, horrified.

Could vampires have babies, though? She didn’t think so—at least not if they were actually like the legends. She’d never been particularly interested in such things but even so it was hard not to pick up ‘information’ when there’d been so many stories and movies about them.

As far as that went, she was pretty sure she’d never seen anything to indicate that a werewolf, or lycan, which seemed to be pretty much the same thing, might get a human woman pregnant.

So, was she safe, at least for now?

Or did that have something to do with her not being around to raise her baby?

She shook that thought off. Just because she’d suddenly begun to wonder if history would repeat itself that didn’t make it a part of her grandmother’s prediction.

Of course, Nanna didn’t tell
that
to anyone. No one, she’d said, should know the day and hour of their death beforehand. Even if she had seen it, she wouldn’t have mentioned it.

Bronwyn pushed those thoughts to the back of her mind as best she could. She was scaring herself with her own imaginings and it made it impossible to address the issues that needed to be considered.

Like what she was going to do about Luke’s ideas of protection.

She couldn’t just accept captivity. As ‘gilded’ as her cage was, it was still a cage and as sweet as Luke was, he was still her jailor.

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And she was growing way too fond of him for her peace of mind.

Maybe he was right and she should stay away from Constantine, even though she didn’t really want to, but as far as she could see everything that went for Constantine also went for Luke Gray Wolf. She had no more business being with him than she did a vampire. She was supposed to be pursuing her destiny. That was the main reason, she supposed, that she hadn’t worried about having sex with either one of them, the absolute certainty that her path was already plotted and nothing was going to happen unless it was supposed to. But there was still a place for free will, even in fate. One made the choices and took the roads that led to it.

And if she made other choices, or rather the wrong ones, her destiny would be changed and possibly not for the better—very likely not considering she was playing with fire.

Maybe, she thought, she should just go to another city? One that wasn’t crawling with vampires, lycans, and god only knew what else?

Of course, to do that she’d have to escape Luke first and she didn’t know how she was going to do that when he had a small army guarding her night and day—and he moved her every day or every other day to a new place.

Reasoning with him hadn’t gotten her anywhere, although god knew she’d tried!

“What,” she’d asked him after the third move, “is going on, Luke? What are you doing?”

He’d looked irritated that she’d even asked. “I’m tryin’ to keep you safe, darlin’

… or didn’t you get that part?”

“I believe that’s what you think,” she said cautiously.

“But that I’m looney, right?”

“I can’t live like this.”

That, at least, had given him pause. He’d pulled her onto his lap and cuddled her.

She’d tried to resist at first, but it just felt so right when he held her, made her feel safe, and she’d ended by relaxing and snuggling more comfortably against him. “I know, baby. But that vamp wasn’t just blowing smoke. Constantine
is
looking for you. He killed Tommy Two Horses because he thought he had you.”

Bronwyn’s heart seemed to jerk to a halt in her chest and then began to run away with her. She pulled away to study his face, searching for the truth and realized that Luke was telling her the truth—at least as far as he knew. “He wouldn’t do that,” she said doubtfully.

His face hardened. “Baby, you’ve got a hell of a lot to learn about vampires!” he growled. “They wouldn’t think twice about doing just that—and Constantine certainly wouldn’t. He’s a progenitor. You know what that means?”

Bronwyn shook her head.

“He was
never
human, baby. That’s what that means. The others at least have some memory, and some empathy, with the human race because they were human once.

He’s a pure blood—meaning he was
born
what he is—and as far as I know one of the last of his kind if not
the
last. He wouldn’t think anymore about killing a human than you would about squashing a bug.”

Bronwyn felt a little sick to her stomach. “
I
wouldn’t just squash a bug and not think twice about it,” she said indignantly. “All right, well maybe a spider—because they’re scary and some of them are poisonous.”

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Amusement danced in his dark eyes. “Mental note—Bronwyn’s afraid of spiders,” he said teasingly, although he sobered almost at once. “You’re listening, but you aren’t hearing me, baby. I’ll be honest. I don’t know why he wants you. All I do know is that he’s tearing the city apart to find you. Tommy Two Horses was alpha of one of the biggest packs in the city—and he didn’t give a fuck that killing him could mean starting a war between the vampires and the lycans—and it just might.”