ROMANCE: Mason (Bad Boy Alpha Male Stepbrother Romance Boxset) (New Adult Contemporary Stepbrother Romance Collection) (17 page)

When he walked out of the front door and jumped down the three steps that led down the porch onto the grass, I let go of the breath I’d been holding. The smell of alcohol had gone with him, but I imagined I could still smell it. It hung around me, pinching my nose, an ugly reminder of the past. The past that was very much looking like it had become the present again.

Please, God. No.

Chapter 3

Alcoholics are really good at what they do. They will do anything they can to get what they need, and they will lie through their teeth. At least, that was what I’d experienced with Argos once I understood, once I knew what he really was.

A wolf wasn’t that bad for me to deal with. An alcoholic was something else entirely. A lot of people would say I chose the lesser of two evils, but the fact was that I chose
him
and I would fight through this.

Except, the longer I worked through the house, the more I started to doubt my own strength and resolve to deal with it all again. I found alcohol bottles wedged in the toilet bowl, in the back of his side of the closet, on the ceiling next to the hatch where the plumber reached the geyser. I even found one taped to the wall under the kitchen sink, behind the metal bowl so that I wouldn’t see it when I opened the door to get detergents.

I didn’t know how long he’d been going at it. I found seven bottles. Grey Goose Vodka mostly, because they said that vodka smelled the least. But there was also a bottle of Cane Spirits and a bottle of KWV Brandy. It was the brandy that I’d smelled on him, but I didn’t know if he’d been drinking at home or out with his ‘friends’. All I knew that this was just a repeat of what had happened before.

Except that I couldn’t just walk out like I could when we’d just been dating. We were married now. And there was the pack. It was the ultimate stay-together-for-the-kids scenario, except the kids had teeth.

I closed my eyes and tried to focus on keeping calm. I was just a human, but I was starting to understand how they could lose control to their wolves. The panic inside of me was growing, thrashing like an animal. If I didn’t keep a lid on it, I was going to lose it.

I emptied all the contents in the sink so that just the empty bottles were left. I wasn’t going to get rid of the bottles. If I put them in the trash he would see it when it took the bag out – he would know that I knew. But it wouldn’t be a confrontation. He would take the bag out, be nice for a couple of weeks to make up for it, and then… nothing. It wouldn’t change.

And he would find new hiding places.

I didn’t know the alcoholic side, but I knew my husband. And as much as I hated confronting him, it had to be done. Confronting a werewolf wasn’t my first choice of action. It wasn’t even my tenth. But neither was being married to an alcoholic.

He phoned me at ten in the evening. I stood at the window, curtains still open, and looked at the moon. It was an oblong shape tonight, creeping slowly toward full moon. It was hard to think that the silver disk had come to rule my life.

I lifted the phone to my ear.

“I’m going to be late,” Argos said before I really had a chance to answer. His voice was clipped, demanding. It hurt me that I knew the person he was right now, because I’d met him before.

“I would prefer if you came home,” I said. There was a silence between us, and I could hear the dim connection that ran between my phone and his. I wasn’t in a position to make demands. I wasn’t qualified to give orders. I was the female, and I submitted. Werewolves and their traditions had been born long before women’s rights.

“We’ll talk tomorrow.”

“You can keep running away, Argos, but at some point you’re going to have to face me. Are you going to be a man and deal with me, or are you going to tuck your tail between your legs and run?”

They were hard words, and it was bound to make him angry. But it was the only way I was going to get a reaction out of him. When he was aggressive like this, the only thing that made him react was a reason to be more aggressive. Reason didn’t work through his thick skull. I knew that I was talking to his wolf, but at this point I was willing to put up with whichever one of them was willing to listen.

“I’ll be home in half an hour,” he said with a deep growl that didn’t sound like his voice at all. Either he was drunk, or he was very close to the change. Which was almost the same thing in our lives.

He was true to his word, and I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t surprised. With the aggression, the short, clipped commands and the closed off unaffectionate Argos that came with the alcohol, was also a liar and a traitor.

But the hair on my arms and the back of my neck stood up and magic prickled across my skin. When I glanced at the clock it was just before half-past ten. He was coming. I could feel him, and if I could feel him at this distance, being just a woman, there was hell to pay. I swallowed the fear that was rising in my throat like dough, and stood my ground.

Damned if I was going to let this go on. Argos loved the fire he said he saw in me – well he was going to feel what it was like to burn.

When he finally stormed into his house his anger crackled around us like an electric storm and the room was a shade darker for it. His eyes were a golden yellow, ugly and fierce, and unforgiving.

“Who the hell do you think you are, talking to me—“

His eyes fell on the empty alcohol bottles that I’d packed in a neat row on the floor in front of him, so he couldn’t come in through the front door without kicking them over. He looked at them like he wasn’t sure how they’d gotten there. A
what the hell are you guys doing here
look. It proved what I’d already known. They weren’t in this house by some accident.

“What’s this?” he asked but his voice was more brittle than angry, and the rage drained out of the air until it was cold and crisp around us. His eyes deepened, turned dark again. I wasn’t completely used to feeling his emotions so physically on my skin, but the monster world threw very few curve balls at me these days that I couldn’t handle.

“I was going ask you the same thing,” I said and crossed my arms over my chest. I was freezing. The air got colder and colder. When I glanced toward the window, curtains still open, I noticed frost flowering in the corners of the glass. I rubbed my arms with my hands, not wanting to leave the room to get a coat and give Argos the chance to wriggle out of this one.

Argos looked at me, and his face was a mix of guilt and anger. I saw conflict on his face, and a lot of it. Finally only the anger showed, as if he’d decided which one he was going to go with.

“So what?” he said, sounding like a teenager that was trying to defy the rules.

“So what?” I repeated, confusion in my voice. I had to admit that his response had caught me off guard. I had been ready for an excuses, not a challenge.

“I have it under control. It’s not a crime to drink.”

“That,” I said pointing at the empty bottles, “doesn’t look like it’s under control. You hid them from me. You had alcohol in the house, and you hid it from me. If it was under control, why?”

He rolled his eyes at me, climbed over the bottles and pushed passed me. The cold followed us.

“Because I knew you were going to freak out like this,” he said. I followed him into the kitchen. He poured himself a glass of water and took a sip. It was like he was trying to prove a point. But after the first sip he looked into the glass like the contents were offending, and put it down on the counter.

“What did you think I was going to do if I found the bottles?”

“Well, I didn’t think you were going to empty them,” he said bitterly. “That was a lot of money.”

“Because we’re struggling so much to make ends meet, right?” I retorted. I took a deep breath and blew it out with a shudder.

“Why are you lying to me?”

He looked at me, and everything was suddenly different. His eyes were amber again, like whisky, and he looked physically bigger. There was menace on his face, it was the kind of emotion I’d seen on him before a full moon, or when blood was involved. It had never been directed at me. Apparently being accused of lying was worse than being accused of being addicted to alcohol.

“I know what I’m doing,” Argos said in a soft, icy voice.

“That’s what you said before,” I challenged. And he lost it.

The cold in the room was immediately blasted away by the heat of his rage. It was suddenly scalding hot all around me, and there was fire in his eyes that burned a golden yellow.

“Don’t you dare assume you have power over me,” he growled in a throaty voice that didn’t belong to him at all. When he spoke I noticed his teeth were pointed, not Argos’s teeth.

He dropped to the floor and grabbed his head with his hands like it hurt. His face contorted. He curled into himself, a ball on the floor. His back pushed up and out, and it moved. His shirt was the first to rip as he grew in size. I could see shifting under the bare skin that showed through the tears in the shirt – bones moving and reshaping themselves. The skin along his spine split and for a moment I could see the bone. Clear thick liquid oozed out of the gash – at least it wasn’t blood – and then fur crept out and started spreading across his body.

His forearms elongated, the hands buried in his hair became claw-like and foreign. His lower body changed, too, and the pants ripped. The transformation was brutal, I could tell. Argos made sounds that were a mix between screaming and growling, and it was horrible.

I clamped my hand over my mouth and backed up until I touched the wall behind me. No matter how many times I saw the change, it was gruesome and terrifying. Unnatural. I closed my eyes, turned my head away, but a moment later I was staring at him again. Like an accident you don’t want to see, but you can’t help watching.

For a second Argos was deformed, his body a mix between man, wolf, and monster, and there was nothing I recognized about him. And then it was like the shape he was heading for suddenly figured itself out, and he slipped into wolf form.

His wolf was a beautiful creature. Majestic, and deadly. Its eyes were a bright yellow. It had chocolate brown fur that turned black toward its feet and muzzle.

It pulled its lips up at me in a snarl, a challenge, and I turned my eyes down and kneeled on the ground. As much as I was angry at Argos, as much as he was wrong, I wasn’t going to take on his wolf. He’d have me as a snack, and only wonder about where his wife had disappeared to long after he was human again. I didn’t always know how much of Argos was in the wolf that stayed behind after the change. I never knew how well he knew who I was, other than his mate, the female that submitted to him.

Argos’s wolf shook itself out like a dog. The wolf was huge, much larger than any dog would be. It was built for strength, not speed, with a muscle mass that suggested in water it would sink. It was almost twice the weight Argos was in human form. Don’t ask me how that works. I don’t know where the extra weight comes from that the dominant wolves carry around in animal form.

Argos walked toward me. His wolf had a fluid, graceful motion and he moved like no animal in the wild I’d ever seen. It was like the wolf had extra muscles in there, muscles that allowed it agility, flexibility, strength. It pushed its face right up against mine. I kept my eyes down and turned my head, offering it my neck. One bite and it could kill me. Without even thinking about it. But I had to take that chance. If I didn’t do it I was asking for a fight. My heart hammered in my chest and it was hard to fight the natural instinct to protect myself, or to run.

But I had to show submission now. I would fight with him again when he was human. I didn’t know if he had alcohol in his system, but if he did – and I was willing to bet he’d been drinking when I called him – then his wolf wasn’t reasonable or controlled. I swallowed my fear and fought the urge to get away. Wolves liked the chase. Running was the last thing anyone or anything should do.

The wolf sniffed me, and I felt is breath, searing on my skin. It snapped its jaw twice, then threw its head back and howled. The sound that ripped from his throat was loud and eerie, a pitch that no real animal could reach.

Somewhere in the distance I heard another howl, an answer to Argos’s call. A pack member was in wolf form. The sound reached us, and Argos bristled. The wolf turned from me, and left the kitchen, heading for the door.

I waited another couple of minutes before I finally got up.

My hands were trembling and I swallowed down tears. This was just the beginning. He’d lost control, changed into a wolf and challenged me. His animal was loose, not just right now, but in his life. And I didn’t know if I could stop him again. I’d done it with his help the first time. His help, and the pack’s. I leaned against the wall and hugged myself. I needed to speak to someone. Someone who would understand.

None of the females in the pack really liked me. I was their superior, but I was human. The werewolf food chain ran on pride, and I threw the system. But one of them had to help me. I had to get one of them to listen.

I took a deep breath to get myself under control, and went to find the book that had every pack wolf’s number in it. I wasn’t exactly pack, but something had to give.

Chapter 4