I'm Rhett, and I've got a chain in my hands and a bad feeling crawling down my neck.
Marn: Truck sat up on the ridge road ten minutes. Didn't come down. Then it went.
So I'm locking this gate myself tonight. A gate I don't lock is just a welcome mat with hinges.
Then Cobb comes up the track with his hat in his hands, and I already know.
Cobb: She's down the fence line again. Third time since dinner, Alpha.
My jaw aches before I even open my mouth.
Rhett: She's supposed to be up that ladder.
Then the wind turns and there she is, pine and soap and that hot little spark under it that gets me hard at the worst times.
Garnet comes up the track with her sleeves rolled and mud to her knees.
Hedda: Oh good. The stray came home.
Hedda: Go on, Rhett. Tell the truth. Is she your mate, or just a stray bitch you like watching bend over a pen?
The whole yard goes quiet, and I feel every one of them listening.
Rhett: She's not my mate. She's a problem.
Rhett: A problem I keep where I can see it. That's the whole of it.
Garnet heard every word. I know, because her face closes, one piece at a time, like a door with a bad hinge.
Hedda: Fuck. That's cold, even for you.
Cobb studies his boots. Marn finds something wrong with the lock. Nobody laughs but Hedda, and she laughs enough for the whole yard.
Garnet: Then send me down the road.
Her voice is flat as a dead radio, and I hate it more than if she'd screamed.
Rhett: Inside. Now.
Garnet: You just said I'm nothing. Let me be nothing somewhere else.
She turns for the gate, and my hand is on her arm before my brain catches up with it.
Her skin is cold from the wind and her pulse kicks under my thumb, and mine kicks right back at her.
Rhett: Gate's locked. You try it again and I'll chain you to the feed shed myself. Understand?
Garnet: Let go of me.
I don't. I walk her back into the gate and hold her there, and the whole pack is watching and I don't give one fuck.
Rhett: You want to be nothing? Be nothing inside my gate, where I can hear you.
Her chin comes up. She's shaking, and so am I.
Her mouth is right there. I kiss her hard and mean, like it's a punishment and I'm the one who bleeds.
She makes a sound into my mouth, and her hands fist in my jacket instead of shoving me off.
She kisses me back. God help me, she kisses me back, her teeth catching my lip, and my cock goes thick against her hip like a fool.
Then she shoves me hard enough that my boot slips in the mud.
Garnet: Don't you ever call me a problem and then kiss me like that again.
Rhett: Then stop tasting like mine.
It's out before I can catch it. I watch it hit her right in the chest.
Garnet: You don't get to say that. You don't get to keep me and deny me in the same breath.
She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, and something in me takes that like a boot to the ribs.
Hedda's still smiling with her arms crossed. Cobb won't look at either of us. Marn stares at the lock like it owes him money.
Garnet: Unlock it, or move.
I move. Half a step, and it feels like losing.
She walks through with her shoulders back and her mouth still red from me, and every wolf in that yard watches her do it.
Hedda: You're so full of shit, Rhett.
She's not wrong.
I stand at my own gate with the key in my hand until her boots quit knocking up the ladder.
I called her a problem out loud so I wouldn't have to call her mine, and now she's got a look in her eye like she knows it.
How long can a man call a thing a burden while he locks the gate to keep it close?