Chapter 6
WHAT WAS WRONG WITH her?
Ava followed the Alpha’s mate to one of two motels on the outskirts of town, pretty far removed from everything else with fields of distance between them and other buildings like the farms—except it made no sense to her. Why have motels so far removed from the tighter cluster of buildings she could see in the distance? There was probably a grocery store and a gas station there at least.
Whoa, okay, but that wasn’t the real problem here. She was following the Alpha’s mate to a motel to share a room with a male wolf who smelled like sex. Or… wanting sex. Yes, smelled. She hadn’t the faintest idea of what arousal smelled like before, but with her new… body situation, she learned the smell of a lot of things she never noticed before.
She tried to swallow the persistent dry clump in her throat, but all it did was make her throat drier.
The alpha she-wolf barged into one of the rooms without bothering to knock. Well, Ava knew no one was in at the moment, but why wasn’t the door locked? Did wolves not believe in privacy? Beatrice would have been spitting mad if Ava ever entered her room without permission. But they did have permission, didn’t they? He offered to let her stay with him in this room with two beds.
Max.
Thinking his name gave her shivers. The color of his wolf eyes did too. Were they orange?
Images of the White Wolf flashed in the back of her eyes.
She shuddered and gently pressed her hand to the burner phone hidden safely inside her coat pocket.
“You sure you’re fine with this?” Gwen asked as she set Ava’s meager bag, a bag she insisted on carrying for her, down on an untouched bed. Hers. Obviously. Why did she want the messy bed? Her cheeks heated when she wondered if it smelled like him, a subtle masculine scent that flooded her nose when she stood close to him and shook his hand.
Now her hand was tingling.
And her left inner thigh.
“Ava?” Gwen grabbed her attention as she plopped down on the bed, producing an almost silent squeak. Ava probably wouldn’t have been able to hear it before Beatrice’s experiment.
“Y-yes?” Ava asked.
“You okay?”
“Yes.”
“I asked you if you’re sure about this setup.” Gwen leaned back, resting one hand behind her as she stretched her back. Her other hand went to her belly, which had a small bulge. That was another thing Ava could smell now, the fertile dreamy scent of a pregnant woman.
Gwen stared at her, brown eyes expectant. Ava didn’t know what to say. She knew what she should say, but her body was revolting against her. It wasn’t the wolf inside her acting up. It was all her.
“Yeah. I’m good with this,” Ava replied. Those were the smoothest words to leave her lips since being surrounded by wolves. She shouldn’t have said that. She should have taken the Alpha and his mate up on the offer to stay in their mansion in a guest room. It would have been a better placement for everything. She would have been sleeping right next to the pack leader.
“Great,” Gwen said with a big smile on her pretty lips. Her brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail, she wasn’t wearing makeup, and she looked strong, not very womanly. She was beautiful, though. Her skin was flawless, too. Ava felt self-conscious of her scabbed fingers and carefully hid them behind her back.
“You don’t think it’s weird?” Ava asked quietly. She shouldn’t have said that either, but this wolf in front of her was… warm.
“Nope.” She cocked her head. “Relax, girl. You’re safe here. No one is going to hurt you. Definitely not Max. He’s the biggest sweetheart. He’s the type who wears his heart on his sleeve, you know? A real gentleman, too.”
“That other wolf… with the black hair—”
“Derek.”
“Yes. He said Max doesn’t have control over his wolf.”
“He’s been having a rough go of it, but we’ve just found the solution.” She eyed Ava like she should know exactly what this solution was. Of course, she had no idea.
Ava nodded her head in a jerky fashion, playing along. She should tell Gwen that she couldn’t go through with this after all. But she didn’t. She tried to blame the wolf clawing and biting at the depths of her soul. Ava was the one in complete control, but the animal inside her was ripped from the wolf shifter she and Beatrice had captured in Florida. She was angry and vengeful. She was nothing but a feral beast, frothing at the mouth. It was disconcerting, but this wasn’t because of the wolf. This was Ava’s fault. She wanted to be close to Max again. She wanted to touch him again. His warmth was something she only imagined being able to feel, but it was real, right there in him, when he touched her.
Her left inner thigh was hurting again, right where the White Wolf tore into her in her dreams. It was foreboding, a warning since she had landed herself in the middle of a wolf pack. She thought her visions would go out of control as soon as she was surrounded by wolf shifters, but he was being quiet. He hadn’t appeared anywhere in the waking world since she arrived. All she saw was a ghost image of him in her memories because she couldn’t stop thinking about him. Couldn’t stop worrying.
She was stuck between the worst fear imaginable and the highest form of pleasure. The White Wolf and Max. What did it mean? What was going to happen to her in Moonwatch?
“Max is a good pick,” Gwen informed. “Trust your wolf and the Moon. That attraction you feel for him is important for you and him.”
“A-attraction?” Of course. Every wolf there could smell the heat that pooled between her thighs. Nothing like that had happened to her before, but that was sexual attraction. That was her body reacting to Max. And no one was mad.
She wasn’t used to this. Beatrice was good to her, but it was Beatrice alone. No one else gave her an ounce of positive attention or a purpose to be. But, in the short time since she arrived in Moonwatch, every wolf she met was paying her a lot of attention. They were inviting, talking to her, wanting her to talk back, giving her free smiles, a place to stay… The life of a wolf was warm. The life of a witch was cold.
Her life would return to coldness soon enough.
Beatrice praised Ava for her accomplishment, because Ava was powerful enough to steal a shifter’s animal and use that animal and shifting power for herself. She praised her because she was her little weapon. She hugged her, combed her fingers through her hair—but it wasn’t warm.
No. Beatrice has always been good to you. The only one. You have to capture these wolves. Tame them for her. That’s why you’re here. Besides, these wolves will happily kill you if they learn what you are.
She shouldn’t crave their warmth. Max’s warmth.
She would make this work. She would capture Max’s soul first and make her way up to the Alpha and his mate.
“You’re staring at the wall,” Gwen noted. “I don’t know what you’ve been through, Ava, but we all want to help. You can talk to me or anyone else. Whoever you’re comfortable with. You shouldn’t have to keep your fear locked away—”
“I’m fine,” Ava replied quickly. “Thank you for escorting me here. I think I need a minute to settle in.”
Gwen hesitated for a moment. “Sure.” She got off the bed, headed for the door, and looked back over her shoulder with a reassuring smile. Then she was gone.
Ava sighed. It was like a weight had been lifted off her shoulders. She could breathe again in this room. Alone. Alone was what she was used to. The cold was settling back in like the cold from outside was seeping through unseen cracks in the walls.
Her thigh burned. Ava stifled a cry as she dug her fingers into the denim covering her legs, scratching hard enough to hurt her skin. It wasn’t enough relief. She couldn’t reach the source of her discomfort like this. Sitting down on the untouched bed, Ava stripped off her boots, socks, and then went for her jeans. Her tender fingers were burning from how furiously she scratched at her jeans. She had reopened the wounds on her fingertips again. Blood stains were streaked on the denim fabric.
Ava pressed her fingers to her left inner thigh. As soon as her fingers made contact, she drew back in shock. It was like touching a hot stove. She gasped and held her hand to her chest as she looked back at her thigh.
The Moon?
She cautiously pressed her fingers to her thigh again, moving her skin around to catch the electric light above her. Part of her skin shone like a singular scale on a fish, and it was shaped exactly the same as the Gibbous Moon in the sky. It was a reflection of the Moon.
“No,” she hissed as tears stung her eyes.
She dug at the death brand with her jacked up fingers, making a mess of more blood as she succeeded in making angry red marks on her thigh. The White Wolf was going to find her here.
She gasped when she heard the crunch of snow outside of the door. She quickly crossed her legs, covering her bloody thigh, and hugged her hands to her chest, hiding her bloody fingers too. Wolf hearing warned her of someone’s presence, but she still squeaked in alarm when Max opened the door. He looked her over quickly with a latent shock. She didn’t miss the way his pupils dilated and the subtle smell of sex—the need for sex. It sent shivers down to her toes. Max cleared his throat, walked back out the door, and shut it behind him.
“Sorry,” he called, his voice slightly muffled. “I should have knocked.”
Ava’s face burned as she grabbed her jeans and put them back on. That strange heat was in her core again and on her left inner thigh. Her sex was tingling. “Y-you can come back in,” she told him once she was presentable enough. She kept her hands bunched up in her sweater.
When he came back in, he avoided her gaze. Her heart squeezed. The action hurt. What was she expecting? That he’d come back in and look at her like she was desirable, like he needed her? She smelled him still. Arousal. She shook her head of the thought, because she shouldn’t care. This wasn’t part of her mission. She needed to stay a safe distance from Max. If she didn’t, his warmth would thwart her mission. She could only imagine how angry Beatrice would have been right now if she could see the thoughts swirling around in Ava’s head.
Who would love an ugly girl like you?
She was a girl. She couldn’t be called a woman. Her heart was too fragile. She had great power, but she was also the easiest to shatter.
“What happened?” Max asked. “I smell blood.”
Ava glanced at him to see him staring at her fingers bunched up in her sweater. He saw them earlier when she shook his hand. He knew how ugly she was.
She hid her hands behind her back like that would solve everything.
“There’s an ointment in the bathroom that’ll make them feel better,” he said.
When Ava didn’t move or reply, he went to the bathroom and came back out with a small medicinal tube in his hand.
“I-I’m fine,” Ava insisted.
“C’mon. It’s not going to make anything worse.”
He walked right up to her and almost grabbed her arm, but she pulled away, crawling over to the head of the bed. Max raised an eyebrow at her, but he held his hands up in surrender.
“Okay. Just…” He placed the ointment at the foot of her bed. “It really will make them feel better. They should heal soon enough if you leave them alone and treat them nice.”
He must have known her bloody fingers were a chronic problem, self-inflicted. Her stomach turned, and she felt like vomiting.
Max went to his bed and grabbed a laptop from off the nightstand. He opened it up and started typing away within minutes. Ava glanced at the ointment and slowly crawled back over to the foot of her bed. She took the tube and squeezed out a generous amount of the stuff and slathered it on her fingertips. The burning was cooled almost instantly. It felt good.
She glanced over at Max. She wanted to thank him, but he wasn’t paying her any attention now. He was focused on whatever he was doing with that laptop. The smell of his arousal was an almost indecipherable scent in the air now. Whatever was happening between them was snuffed out. If she thanked him now, she’d bother him. He sure was handsome though. Golden blond hair, sky blue eyes, a body so powerful he looked like he could crush a boulder. His skin was a soft tan color, and it would have been flawless if not for the scars she saw on his neck and around his eyes.
Feeling dejected, Ava snatched her small bag from off the floor and looked through her stuff just to give herself something to do. She wanted to find some clothes to sleep in too. She was exhausted. She wondered about the burner phone in her coat pocket. She would probably put it under her pillow tonight even though Beatrice shouldn’t be calling her tonight. She couldn’t afford to miss a call. Hopefully, wolves respected boundaries when it came to other people’s phones, but just in case, she decided to keep it out of sight.
The back of Ava’s neck prickled. She felt eyes on her. She glanced at Max and caught him staring at her. He held her gaze for less than a second before looking away as if he was trying to hide the fact he had been watching her.
Max cleared his throat and glued his eyes back onto his laptop’s screen. “So, it’s late. We should probably turn in so you aren’t tired in the morning for Awakened Wolf lessons.”
Ava gave a stiff nod of her head. Max closed his laptop, grabbed some clothes from a small closet, and made his way to the bathroom. Ava brought her knees up to her chest and rested her chin as she listened to the sound of water running. It wasn’t enough to be from a shower. He was probably brushing his teeth.
A minute later, Max emerged. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder and said, “You can take a shower or whatever, but I’m going to turn in.” He was wearing a white t-shirt and sweats, but something told Ava this wasn’t his normal sleep attire. If wolves ran as warm as they seemed to, he’d probably get hot sleeping like that unless he slept on top of the covers.
“I’ll be quiet,” Ava replied.
Max grinned at her, and her heart dropped into her stomach.
“I’m a heavy sleeper,” he informed. “Don’t worry about me.”
He plopped down on his bed and turned his back to her.
Ava hurried to the bathroom with her own clothes and a toothbrush, shut the door, and immediately started splashing water on her face from the sink. The cold liquid helped sooth the burning in her cheeks. She wasn’t going to shower tonight. No matter what Max said, she didn’t want to be the reason for making him tired tomorrow. She was probably going to be the one tired tomorrow. She didn’t know if she would sleep tonight.
If she did sleep, she hoped she wouldn’t dream of the White Wolf. She didn’t need to wake up gasping in the middle of the night, or even screaming. It happened sometimes. Beatrice was used to it. She never asked Ava about her dreams. She was a witch, but she didn’t believe in foreseeing the future or dreams being omens. Ava told Beatrice about the White Wolf once, but her keeper dismissed it immediately. Since then, Ava kept him to herself.
The White Wolf was her secret, and he would kill her.
She was worried. The wild animal inside of her wasn’t making her feel any better. The snarling was ringing in her ears now. The wolf sensed when she was off balance, and her wildness grew worse in response. Ava didn’t think the wolf inside of her planned these attacks because she didn’t have a mind left. She was all instinct now. Nothing more. Nothing less. Her thinking mind no longer existed. When this job was over, Ava would release the mindless animal. Beatrice couldn’t sell a fragment of a shifter.
She shuddered when she remembered stripping this vital piece out of the shifter woman. It was the most agonizing process Ava had ever endured. It wasn’t claiming a shifter’s free will, basically leaving it untouched but putting it under a new command. It was slowly picking the shifter apart at the roots and dismantling her, making it so she would never function again because her human side had not survived the separation. It was much worse for the shifter, but the process took its toll on Ava as well. She felt weaker afterward, more broken even though she had succeeded in stealing a shifter’s ability to shift. That small girl’s heart inside of her chest was cracked like the plains of a land ravaged by earthquakes. Soon those rifts would swallow her into their depths. Once the White Wolf was through with her.
Her visions grew worse after she stripped the animal from that shifter. The White Wolf plagued her with a vengeance. That was why she was so relieved when he finally left her alone once arriving in Moonwatch. But it wasn’t a good thing. It was a sign, a warning. This was her last stop. That’s what it had to mean. Maybe she would accomplish what Beatrice sent her here to do or maybe she wouldn’t. Time would tell.
What did she want to do before she died?
Her mind drifted to Max lying in a bed in the room just outside. Maybe she wanted to revel in his warmth and not worry about the consequences. Maybe she wanted to hide the fact she was a witch, so she could continue to bathe in this warmth. She could embrace it instead of pushing it away because of what she had to do, because of what she was.
Ava had faint memories of an abstract concept called love. When she was a young child on the streets, unwanted and unclaimed, she saw people together. Men and women. Children too. They laughed and smiled. They hugged. They kissed. She longed for that, but none of them loved her. They scorned her. Until Beatrice. Beatrice smiled at her, took her in, even hugged her at times. She said she loved her, but she never looked at her the way people who loved or were in love looked at each other. Ava could see the difference. Beatrice loved Ava for what she could do for her, not because of who she was. She knew the difference, but it didn’t matter. Beatrice wanted her. That was enough.
But what would it be like to have Max look at her with love in his eyes? Her cheeks flushed at the thought. It would feel a lot like the warmth when he touched her, the warmth in his words, gestures, all of it combined. He tried to fix her fucked up fingers. Already, Max loved her more than Beatrice. However, that wasn’t true either. Everyone in Moonwatch thought she was a wolf shifter.
No one loved her, the fragile hearted girl, and no one ever would.
The White Wolf was coming.
Ava wondered if Beatrice would miss her when she was gone.