I hadn’t heard him leave.
I didn’t hear the others come in.
Mark had closed his eyes again, breathing deep and slow.
Elizabeth still watched me.
I ran my fingers over her ears.
She flicked them at me, huffing quietly.
“I don’t know what to do,” I said quietly, so as to not wake the others.
She blinked.
“I’m angry. And I don’t know how to let that go.”
She sneezed.
“Gross,” I said.
She nosed against my hand.
“Needy,” I said, rubbing the skin between her eyes.
She snorted.
“You’re here,” I said. “With me.”
She looked at me as if wondering how I could say something like that while sounding stupidly shocked. And she probably was. I’d had years to get used to the facial expressions of wolves.
“You should be with them.”
She bit my hand gently between her teeth, shaking her head back and forth.
All I got from her was PackSonLove.
I knew what she was doing. She, and the others, were showing where their loyalties lay. It made things better. And that much worse.
I didn’t want this. This divide. And as long as I felt this way, as long as I let my anger spiral out of control, my pack would suffer for it. Thomas had taught me that the pack was an extension of the Alpha, and that whatever he felt, they did too. More so when it came to a particularly strong emotion.
All I felt now were strong emotions.
She closed her eyes again and sighed, resting her head on my leg.
Soon, she slept again.
I didn’t move for a long time, surrounded by my pack.
like a wolf/they bled here
“LOOKS GOOD,” Gordo said, standing in the doorway to the office.
I froze because I hadn’t heard him approaching. It’d been three days since they’d come back, and I had done my damnedest to avoid, avoid, avoid, at least until I could sort out my own head. I stayed in the old house, Joe and the others stayed in the main house. Elizabeth and Mark went between, but when night fell, we stayed in our separate houses.
I didn’t know what was going to happen at the full moon, which was only a few days away.
Hopefully, I’d have made a decision on how to proceed by then.