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Her Howling Harem 1: A reverse harem fantasy (Arianna's Story) by Savannah Skye (7)

Chapter 7

When I fully came to a few hours later, Anton was nowhere to be seen – I reached out to his side of the bed and found it empty, and my heart twisted up in my chest, the corners of my mouth turning down in an almost comical sadness.

I was reminded, once more, of just how alone I was in this place, and in my bleary state, didn’t even think for a moment that Anton had likely headed out to start planning the hunt with his brothers.

I pulled myself upright, still wearing that shirt that I had slept in, and looked around to see where I’d tossed my pants the night before. I found them on the floor, reached for them, and slipped them over my hips, yawning to myself.

The memory of his hands all over me was still fresh in my head, but I was having a hard time believing any of that had actually happened. It was just so…it wasn’t me. I didn’t do stuff like that, not ever – I knew we were both shifters, that this kind of thing was normal for us, but that didn’t make it feel any more profoundly strange to know that mere hours before, Anton had been inside me, making me come as the two of us hid from the cold underneath these heavy sheets.

I wondered where he was now.

Was he thinking about me?

I couldn’t shake the memory of him from my head, but it was plagued by fear that the rest of the brothers had heard us going at it and now they would judge me. Even more concerning was how sad the thought made me.

I sat up and rolled my shoulders back. Their judgment wouldn’t change the fact that it had happened or that I had enjoyed it more than any other sexual experience I’d had in my life so far. It was so damn satisfying, the way he touched me and moved inside me with some focused intensity, like this was what he had been thinking about from the moment he set eyes on me.

I bit my lip as I rolled out of bed and headed for the door, prepared to go out there and face the rest of the brothers once more. I wanted to hide out a little longer, get my bearings, but if I wanted to be well for the hunt, I would need something to eat – and would need to know exactly where and what we would be hunting.

I pushed the door open and found all four Robicheaux brothers crowded around that table once more, looking at the map that was laid out in front of them. They all glanced up when I entered the room – Anton offered me the briefest hint of a smile, as though he was going over what had happened the night before in his head as his eyes trailed down my body. The rest of them smiled and nodded in greeting, except Luke, who furrowed his brow slightly as he caught sight of me. I tried not to take it personally, as that seemed to be his MO, but I couldn’t deny a little bit of the light burning inside me dimmed at his continued dismissal.

I headed over to the table and looked down at the map they were staring at so intently.

“Where are we hunting today?” I asked brightly.

“So, you’re feeling better?” Rafe asked. I couldn’t tell if he was yanking my chain, teasing me a little with what he knew I had gotten up to last night, or if his question was genuine.

I cocked my head at him, cheeks burning.

“Yeah, I feel totally fine now,” I replied, trying my hardest to keep a straight face and fearing I was failing.

“Amazing what a good night’s sleep can do, huh?” Luke remarked. There was no question this time that he knew what had happened – the glint in his eye made me shift in my seat restlessly.

“Um, yeah. Wonders,” I mumbled, picking a piece of imaginary lint from my oversized pants.

“You want something to eat?” Ethan called through from the kitchen.

“Yeah, that sounds great,” I called back, glancing in his direction and noticing that he was standing over a heavy pan.

There was something about a man who could cook that really got me going, and Ethan had such a deft touch as he moved whatever he was cooking around the pan. He glanced over at me, and then back at his pan as though he hadn’t meant me to see him, but there was no denying that his shoulders were bunched with tension.

Was he angry at me, too, then?

I hated all the wondering, but at the same time, I couldn’t bring myself to regret what had happened the night before. The second I was alone again, away from all the male bodies and testosterone, I would be able to think more clearly and figure out how to handle this mess. For now, I had a hunt to prepare for.

A few minutes later, and Ethan was serving up breakfast for all five of us – homemade bread, torn off in chunks, along with bacon and eggs.

“So, do you have any plans about where we’re headed for game?” I asked, my mouth full of food. It was so good to eat something fresh cooked like this – back home, we’d be living on a lot of leftovers from the summer’s more successful hunts at this time of year and grocery sourced human food.

“Yeah, a herd of caribou passed through a day ago,” Luke explained, and his eyes seemed to light up as he explained the plan to me. This was obviously his passion, hunting – I couldn’t wait to see what he did when we were actually out there.

“We’re going to go after them, see if we can’t separate one from the pack,” he went on quickly. “Caribou has enough meat to last us a good long while, even with an extra mouth-”

He cut himself off with a sharp look from Anton, and I glanced between all four of the Robicheaux brothers. None of them met my gaze. I couldn’t tell whether Luke shouldn’t have said that because they didn’t want me sticking around any longer, or shouldn’t have said that because they didn’t want me to know that they wanted me to stay yet.

“Anyway, we’re leaving right after breakfast,” he replied. “If you think you can keep up with us.”

“I think I can manage.” He raised his eyebrows, but a smile glimmered on his lips, as though he was impressed.

We finished up breakfast and the guys vanished off for a little bit, presumably to get themselves into the shifting, hunting mindset; I waited out at the breakfast table, putting away the plates absent-mindedly. And then I remembered exactly what we were going to need to do to shift properly.

I flushed at once – how could I have forgotten? If we didn’t want our clothes to get ruined, we’d need to strip down naked.

All of us.

The thought sent a rush of blood to my cheeks and I felt a twinge deep down in my stomach, one that had come to life when Anton had slipped into bed next to me the night before.

No.

I couldn’t be into all of them. In fact, I shouldn’t be into any of them – they couldn’t keep me here forever. Running through this cabin full of men like a one-woman wrecking crew hardly seemed like a good idea in the mean time. Getting entrenched here with these guys would be an exercise in pain and confusion. Eventually, I would need to go find a pack of my own to call home.

Wouldn’t I?

Before I had a chance to linger on that thought any longer, they all emerged from their rooms at once, as though some symbiotic agreement had been made on a wavelength that I wasn’t tuned into quite yet.

I bit my lip and hugged the shirt around myself tightly. Did I really want to strip down in front of all these dudes? It didn’t look like I was going to have much of a choice, not if I wanted to actually get on board with their hunt.

“Are we ready?” Anton looked around, and the rest of the brothers nodded, and I could see that flash of hunger in their eyes, of a mutual shared desire. Without another word, they all began to strip down, and I quickly directed my eyes at the floor and began to do the same thing.

I tried not to look, I really did, but as soon as I realized that they weren’t offering me the same courtesy, I snuck a look at all of them. And I had to keep my jaw from dropping as soon as I saw what I was dealing with.

All of them looked as though they’d been hewn straight from wood. They weren’t shredded, like the vain guys who I saw hanging around in town the few times I’d been in, but they were all perfectly lean and toned, muscles clear through their skin whenever they moved. They were men hewn from shifting, wolves barely contained in human form. And, as I let my eyes travel downwards, there was something else that ran in the family, too – all four of them were hung like hell, and I fought the urge to smirk with satisfaction at what I was seeing. God, and to think I had had one of them the night before

I realized that they were all looking at me and not exactly keeping cool about it; the heat in the room was palpable, the tension full-on, and I wasn’t sure whether it was because we were about to shift or because they were eyeing my naked body for the first time. I closed my eyes and did the only thing I could think of to break the tension. I shifted.

That familiar tug behind my stomach told me it had worked and I dropped to the floor, on all fours, claws landing with a clatter before I sped for the door. They were all close behind me, and before I knew it, the five of us were out there in the snowy woods together, the world outside this hunt forgotten as they launched into the forest.

I had to move fast to keep up. They launched themselves off between the trees like they knew this place, moving quickly and as one cohesive unit. The blood was pumping in my ears as I tried to keep up, but I wanted this – I needed it. After everything that had happened, losing myself to the primal urge to hunt and kill and feast was the only thing in the world that felt natural to me now.

I followed their paw prints in the snow, keeping the scent of them fresh in my nose – until I caught the smell of something else in the wind, something bloody and raw.

They smelled it, too, Anton pausing to tilt his head up and locate the source of the smell. They fell behind him, into formation – I did my best to match them but was still on the outside looking in, trying to find my place on this hunt. Anton took off again and the three of them followed, and I followed my nose to the source they were hunting. The wind was whip-cold on my skin but it didn’t matter. Hell, I could barely feel it. All I cared about was that I was hunting again, finally lost to the power of this feeling. With a pack. Maybe not my own pack – well, not yet – but a pack all the same.

We ran for what must have been a good two or three miles, the scent growing thicker in the air with every step, until finally Anton came grinding to a halt when he saw what they had been after. He didn’t even look around at his brothers before he started forming the attack on the creature – it took me a moment to see what he was looking at, but as soon as I did, I felt a slick of saliva drip down my fangs and I watched closely to see how they would attack.

A caribou. Even in its injured state, this thing was equal parts magnificent and terrifying. With antlers that twisted at least two feet above its head and a thick torso that looked built to deflect bullets, it would have been formidable if it hadn’t been for the fact that it seemed to be painfully carrying its hind leg. It was weak, separated from the rest of the herd, just as they had intended, and I knew they were going to pounce on this opportunity to tear this poor thing apart. In my human form I might have felt a twinge of sympathy, but right then and there, all I could focus on were the heavy red drips its blood was leaving in the snow, blossoming out to pale pink.

I could do this.

We could do this.

They circled the beast at different angles, all four of them moving as one unit, without exchanging so much as a growl of indication as to what they should do next. The caribou lifted its head, apparently aware that it had company but too weak to do anything about it. I stuck next to Anton, letting the alpha lead the way, and waited for those long, painful beats as we held back on pouncing. Not yet – not yet – not yet – now!

They all launched themselves towards the beast at once, in such a flurry of teeth and claws that I could barely make out one wolf from the other. They attacked in a frenzy and I held back for an instant before I threw myself into the mix, latching myself to the flailing caribou’s bad leg in the hopes of bringing it down for good.

The memories of what happened next were blurry - they always were when it came to this part of the hunt, the adrenalin pumping too hard for me to remember anything other than the taste of flesh in my mouth, to feel the connection between the four brothers crackling in the air, and to wonder if I would ever get to feel anything like that again – if I would ever find this connection with a collection of shifters once more, or if I would be left to hunt rabbits alone as soon as the four of them abandoned me.

The caribou didn’t put up much of a fight, and soon enough it was felled, collapsing to the ground with a groan and a grunt as the five of us sprang back to avoid getting crushed beneath it.

Anton took the lead once more as soon as it was clear the beast was dead, latching his jaws around its throat and dragging it in the direction that we’d come in; the other three brothers pitched in to help, but I took a moment to recover from what had just happened before I could jump in and help out.

I wasn’t sure where we were going – surely we couldn’t drag it all the way back to the cabin? – but soon we came to a halt outside a small wooden shack. Anton shifted back into his human form, and the rest of the guys followed suit. I did the same and followed them inside, and found the small place crammed with clothes and tools for carving up the animal we’d just taken down. Pausing for a moment and watching as they all got dressed, I reached up and touched the spatter of blood still on my lips and smiled.

It was good to be back.